Seated cross-legged on the ground and unmindful of the dampness, Noal was playing Snakes and Foxes with Olver and spinning wild tales about the lands beyond the Aiel Waste, about some great coastal city that foreigners were not allowed to leave except by ship and the inhabitants were not allowed to leave at all. Mat wished they would find another game to play. Every time they brought out that piece of red cloth with its spiderweb of black lines, it reminded him of his promise to Thom, reminded him the bloody Eelfinn were inside his head somehow, and maybe the flaming Aelfinn, too. The Aes Sedai came up from the stream, and Joline stopped to talk with Blaeric and Fen. Bethamin and Seta, trailing along behind, hesitated until a gesture from the Green sent them to stand behind the log where Teslyn and Edesina sat, as far apart as they could manage, with uncut branches between, and began reading small leather-bound books taken from their belt pouches. Both Bethamin and Seta stood behind Edesina.
The yellow-haired former sul’dam had come round in spectacular, and painful, fashion. Painful for her and for the sisters. When she first hesitantly asked them to teach her, too, at supper the night before, they refused. They were only teaching Bethamin because she had already channeled. Seta was too old to become a novice, she had not channeled, and that was that. So she duplicated whatever it was that Bethamin had done and had all three leaping about the cookfire and squealing in showers of dancing sparks for as long as she could hold onto the Power. They agreed to teach her then. At least, Joline and Edesina did. Teslyn still was having none of any sul’dam, former or not. All three of them took a hand in switching her, though, and she had spent the morning continually easing herself in her saddle. She still looked afraid, of the One Power and maybe of the Aes Sedai, but strangely, her face somehow seemed . . . content, too. How to understand that was beyond Mat.
He should have felt content himself. He had avoided a charge of murder, avoided riding blindly into a Seanchan trap that would have killed Tuon, and left the gholam behind for good this time. It would be following Luca’s show, and Luca had been warned, for whatever good that would do. In well under two weeks he would be over the mountains into Murandy. The need to figure out how to get Tuon back to Ebou Dar safely, no easy task at all now, especially since he would have to guard against Aes Sedai trying to spirit her away, would mean that much longer to look at her face. And to try puzzling out what went on behind those big beautiful eyes. He should have been as happy as a goat in a corn crib. He was far from it.
For one thing, all those sword-cuts he had received in Maderin hurt. Some of them were inflamed, though he had managed to keep that from anyone so far. He hated being fussed over nearly as much as he hated anyone using the Power on him. Lopin and Nerim had sewed him up as well as they could, and he had refused Healing despite attempted bullying by all three Aes Sedai. He had been surprised that Joline, of all people, tried to insist, but she did, and flung up her hands in disgust when he failed to relent. Another surprise had been Tuon.
“Don’t be foolish, Toy,” she had drawled in his tent, standing over him, arms folded beneath her breasts, while Lopin and Nerim plied their needles and he gritted his teeth. Her proprietary air, very much a woman making sure her property was repaired properly, had been enough to make him grind his teeth, never mind the needles. Or that he was down to his smallclothes! She had just walked in and refused to leave short of manhandling, and he had felt in no condition to manhandle a woman he suspected might be able to break his arm. “This Healing is a wonderful thing. My Mylen knows it, and I taught it to my others, too. Of course, many people are foolish about having the Power touch them. Half my servants would faint at the suggestion, and most of the Blood, too, I shouldn’t be surprised. But I wouldn’t have expected it of you.” If she had a quarter his experience of Aes Sedai, she would have.
They had ridden off up the road from Maderin as if setting out for Lugard, then taken to the forest as soon as the last farms were out of sight. The moment they entered the trees, the dice started up in his head again. That was the other thing that soured his mood, those bloody dice drumming inside his head for two days. There hardly seemed any way they could stop here in the forest. What kind of momentous event could happen in the woods? Still, he had stayed well clear of the small villages they had passed. Sooner or later the dice would stop, though, and he could only wait for it.
Tuon and Selucia headed for the stream to wash, wiggling their fingers at one another rapidly. Talking about him, he was sure. When women started putting their heads together, you could be sure—
Amathera screamed, and every head whipped around toward her. Mat spotted the cause as quickly as Juilin did, a black-scaled snake a good seven feet long wriggling quickly away from the log Juilin was seated on. Leilwin cursed and leaped to her feet drawing her sword, but no faster than Juilin, who tugged his shortsword free of its scabbard and started after the snake so swiftly that his conical red cap fell off.
“Let it go, Juilin,” Mat said. “It’s heading away from us. Let it go.” The thing probably had a den under that log and had been surprised to come out and find people. Luckily, blacklances were solitary snakes.
Juilin hesitated before deciding that comforting a shivering Amathera was more important than chasing a snake. “What kind is it, anyway?” he said, folding her in his arms. He was a city man, after all. Mat told him, and for a moment, he looked as though he meant to go after it again. Wisely, he decided against. Blacklances were quick as lightning, and with a shortsword, he would have needed to get close. Anyway, Amathera was clinging to him so hard he would have had a time getting free of her.
Taking his hat from the butt of his ashandarei, which was driven point-down into the ground, Mat settled it on his head. “Daylight’s wasting,” he said around his pipestem. “Time we were moving on. Don’t dawdle over there, Tuon. Your hands are clean enough.” He had tried calling her Precious, but since her claim of victory back in Maderin, she refused to acknowledge that he had even spoken when he did.
She did not hurry in the slightest, of course. By the time she returned, drying her small hands on a small piece of toweling that Selucia would drape across the pommel of her saddle to dry, Nerim and Lopin had filled in the refuse pit, wrapped the remains of the meal and tucked them into Nerim’s saddlebags, and doused the fire with water brought from the stream in folding leather buckets. Ashandarei in hand, Ma
