The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time #5) 75

The knife brushed Nynaeve's hair as it thunked into the board she was leaning against, and she flinched behind her blindfold. She wished she had a decent braid instead of locks hanging loose about her shoulders. If that blade had cut even one strand... Fool woman, she thought bitterly. Fool, fool woman. With the scarf folded over her eyes she could just see a narrow line of light at the bottom. It seemed bright, from the darkness behind the thick folds. There had to be enough light yet, even if it was late afternoon. Surely the man would not throw when he could not see properly. The next blade struck on the other side of her head; she could feel it vibrating. She thought it almost touched her ear. She was going to kill Thom Merrilin and Valan Luca. And maybe any other man she could get her hands on, on sheer principle.

“The pears,” Luca shouted, as if he were not just thirty paces from her. He must think the blindfold made her deaf as well as blind.

Fumbling in the pouch at her belt, she brought out a pear and carefully balanced it atop her head. She was blind. A pure blind fool! Two more pears, and she gingerly extended her arms to either side between the knives that outlined her, holding one in either hand by the stems. There was a pause. She opened her mouth to tell Thom Merrilin that if he so much as nicked her, she would —

Tchunktchunktchunk! The blades came so fast she would have yelped if her throat had not contracted like a fist. She held only the stem in her left hand, the other pear trembled faintly with the knife through it, and the pear on her head leaked juice into her hair.

Snatching the scarf off, she stalked toward Thom and Luca, both of them grinning like maniacs. Before she could speak one of the words boiling up in her, Luca said admiringly, “You are magnificent, Nana. Your bravery is magnificent, but you are more so.” He swirled that ridiculous red silk cloak in a bow, one hand over his heart. “I shall call this 'Rose Among Thorns.' Though truly, you are more beautiful than any mere rose.”

“It doesn't take much bravery to stand like a stump.” A rose, was she? She would show him thorns. She would show both of them. “You listen to me, Valan Luca —”

“Such courage. You never even flinch. I tell you, I would not have the stomach to do what you are doing.”

That was the simple truth, she told herself. “I am no braver than I have to be,” she said in a milder tone. It was hard to shout at a man who insisted on telling you how brave you were. Certainly better to hear than all that blather about roses. Thom knuckled his long white mustaches as if he saw something funny.

“The dress,” Luca said, showing all of his teeth in a smile. “You will look wonderful in —”

“No!” she snapped. Whatever he had gained, he had just lost by bringing this up again. Clarine had made the dress Luca wanted her to wear, in silk more crimson than his cloak. It was her opinion that the color was to hide blood if Thom's hand slipped.

“But, Nana, beauty in danger is a great draw.” Luca's voice crooned as if whispering sweetness in her ear. “You will have every eye on you, every heart pounding for your beauty and courage.”

“If you like it so much,” she said firmly, “you wear it.” Aside from the color, she was not about to show that much bosom in public, whether or not Clarine thought it was proper. She had seen Latelle's performing dress, all black spangles, with a high neck to her chin. She could wear something like... What was she thinking? She had no intention of actually going through with this. She had only agreed to this practice to stop Luca scratching at the wagon door every night to try convincing her.

The man was nothing if not deft at knowing when to change the subject. “What happened here?” he asked, suddenly all smooth solicitude.

She flinched as he touched her puffy eye. It was his bad luck to choose that. He would have done better to continue trying to stuff her into that red dress. “I did not like the way it looked at me in the mirror this morning, so I bit it.”

Her flat tone and bared teeth made Luca snatch his hand back. From the wary gleam in his dark eyes, he suspected she might bite again. Thom was stroking his mustaches furiously, red in the face from the effort of not laughing. He knew what had happened, of course. He would. And as soon as she left, he would no doubt regale Luca with his version of events. Men could not avoid gossiping; it was in them at birth, and nothing women could do ever got it out of them.

The daylight was dimmer than she had thought. The sun sat red on the treetops to the west. “If you ever try this again without better light...” she growled, shaking a fist at Thom. “It's almost dusk!”

“I suppose,” the man said, bushy eyebrow lifting, “this means you want to leave out the bit where I am blindfolded?” He was joking, of course. He had to be joking. “As you wish, Nana. From now on, only in the most perfect light.”

It was not until she stalked away, swishing her skirts angrily, that she realized that she had agreed to actually do this fool thing. By implication, at least. They would try to hold her to it, as surely as the sun would set tonight. Fool, fool, fool woman!

The clearing where they — or Thom, at least, burn him and Luca both! — had been practicing stood some little distance from the camp over beside the road north. Doubtless Luca had not wanted to upset the animals should Thom put one of his knives through her heart. The man would likely have fed her corpse to the lions. The only reason he wanted her to wear that dress was so he could ogle what she had no intention of showing to anyone but Lan, and burn him, too, for a stubborn fool man. She wished she had him there so she could tell him so. She wished she had him there so she could be sure he was safe. She broke a dead dogfennel and used its feathery brown length like a whip to snap the heads off weeds that poked through the leaves on the ground.

Last night, Elayne had said, Egwene reported fighting in Cairhien, skirmishes with brigands, with Cairhienin who saw any Aiel as an enemy, with Andoran soldiers trying to claim the Sun Throne for Morgase. Lan had been involved in them; whenever Moiraine let him out of her sight, he apparently managed to take himself to the fighting, as if he could sense where it would be. Nynaeve had never thought that she would want the Aes Sedai to keep Lan on a short leash at her side.

This morning Elayne had still been disturbed about her mother's soldiers being in Cairhien, fighting Rand's Aiel, but what worried Nynaeve was the brigands. According to Egwene, if anyone could identify stolen property in a brigand's possession, if anyone could swear to seeing him kill anyone or burn so much as a shed, Rand was hanging him. He did not put his hands on the rope, but it was the same thing, and Egwene said he watched every execution with a face cold and hard as the mountains. That was not like him. He had been a gentle boy. Whatever had happened to him in the Waste had bee