Ba'alzamon. Yet you have as much choice as the young men. You could remain here, proceed to Tar Valon once the rest of us have gone.'
'Stay behind!' Egwene exclaimed. 'Let the rest of you go off into danger while we hide under the covers? I won't do it!' She caught the Aes Sedai's eye and drew back a little, but not all of her defiance vanished. 'I won't do it,' she muttered stubbornly.
'I suppose that means both of us will accompany you.' Nynaeve sounded resigned, but her eyes flashed when she added, 'You still need my herbs, Aes Sedai, unless you've suddenly gained some ability I don't know about.' Her voice held a challenge Rand did not understand, but Moiraine merely nodded and turned to the Ogier.
'Well, Loial, son of Arent son of Halan?'
Loial opened his mouth twice, his tufted ears twitching, before he spoke. 'Yes, well. The Green Man. The Eye of the World. They're mentioned in the books, of course, but I don't think any Ogier has actually seen them in, oh, quite a long time. I suppose ... But must it be the Ways?' Moiraine nodded, and his long eyebrows sagged till the ends brushed his cheeks. 'Very well, then. I suppose I must guide you. Elder Haman would say it's no less than I deserve for being so hasty all the time.'
'Our choices are made, then,' Moiraine said. 'And now that they are made, we must decide what to do about them, and how.'
Long into the night they planned. Moiraine did most of it, with Loial's advice concerning the Ways, but she listened to questions and suggestions from everyone. Once dark fell Lan joined them, adding his comments in that iron-cored drawl. Nynaeve made a list of what supplies they needed, dipping her pen in the inkwell with a steady hand despite the way she kept muttering under her breath.
Rand wished he could be as matter-of-fact as the Wisdom. He could not stop pacing up and down, as if he had energy to burn or burst from it. He knew his decision was made, knew it was the only one he could make with the knowledge he had, but that did not make him like it. The Blight. Shayol Ghul was somewhere in the Blight, beyond the Blasted Lands.
He could see the same worry in Mat's eyes, the same fear he knew was in his own. Mat sat with his hands clasped, knuckles white. If he let go, Rand thought, he would be clutching the dagger from Shadar Logoth instead.
There was no worry on Perrin's face at all, but what was there was worse: a mask of weary resignation. Perrin looked as though he had fought something until he could fight it no longer and was waiting for it to finish him. Yet sometimes...
'We do what we must, Rand,' he said. 'The Blight ...' For an instant those yellow eyes lit with eagerness, flashing in the fixed tiredness of his face, as if they had a life of their own apart from the big blacksmith's apprentice. 'There's good hunting along the Blight,' he whispered. Then he shuddered, as if he had just heard what he had said, and once more his face was resigned.
And Egwene. Rand drew her apart at one point, over by the fireplace where those planning around the table could not hear. 'Egwene, I ...' Her eyes, like big dark pools drawing him in, made him stop and swallow. 'It's me the Dark One's after, Egwene. Me, and Mat, and Perrin. I don't care what Moiraine Sedai says. In the morning you and Nynaeve could start for home, or Tar Valon, or anywhere you want to go, and nobody will try to stop you. Not the Trollocs, not the Fades, not anybody. As long as you aren't with us. Go home, Egwene. Or go to Tar Valon. But go.'
He waited for her to tell him she had as much right to go where she wanted as he did, that he had no right to tell her what to do. To his surprise, she smiled and touched his cheek.
'Thank you, Rand,' she said softly. He blinked, and closed his mouth as he went on. 'You know I can't, though. Moiraine Sedai told us what Min saw, in Baerlon. You should have told me who Min was. I thought ... Well, Min says I am part of this, too. And Nynaeve. Maybe I'm not ta'veren,' she stumbled over the word, 'but the Pattern sends me to the Eye of the World, too, it seems. Whatever involves you, involves me.'
'But, Egwene – '
'Who is Elayne?'
For a minute he stared at her, then told the simple truth. 'She's the
Daughter-Heir to the throne of Andor.'
Her eyes seemed to catch fire. 'If you can't be serious for more than a minute, Rand al'Thor, I do not want to talk to you.'
Incredulous, he watched her stiff back return to the table, where she leaned on her elbows next to Moiraine to listen to what the Warder was saying. I need to talk to Perrin, he thought. He knows how to deal with women.
Master Gill entered several times, first to light the lamps, then to bring food with his own hands, and later to report on what was happening outside. Whitecloaks were watching the inn from down the street in both directions. There had been a riot at the gates to the Inner City, with the Queen's Guards arresting white cockades and red alike. Someone had tried to scratch the Dragon's Fang on the front door and been sent on his way by Lamgwin's boot.
If the innkeeper found it odd that Loial was with them, he gave no sign of it. He answered the few questions Moiraine put to him without trying to discover what they were planning, and each time he came he knocked at the door and waited till Lan opened it for him, just as if it were not his inn and his library. On his last visit, Moiraine gave him the sheet of parchment covered in Nynaeve's neat hand.
'It won't be easy this time of night,' he said, shaking his head as he perused the list, 'but I'll arrange it all.'
Moiraine added a small wash-leather bag that clinked as she handed it to him by the drawstrings. 'Good. And see that we are wakened before daybreak. The watchers will be at their least alert, then.'
'We'll leave them watching an empty box, Aes Sedai.' Master Gill grinned.
Rand was yawning by the time he shuffled out of the room with the rest in search of baths and beds. As he scrubbed himself, with a coarse cloth in one hand and a big yellow cake of soap in the other, his eyes drifted to the stool beside Mat's tub. The golden-sheathed tip of the dagger from Shadar Logoth peeked from under the edge of Mat's neatly folded coat. Lan glanced at it from time to time, too. Rand wondered if it was really as safe to have around as Moiraine claimed.
'Do you think my da'll ever believe it?' Mat laughed, scrubbing his back with a long-handled brush. 'Me, saving the world? My sisters won't know whether to laugh or cry.'
He sounded like the old Mat. Rand wished he could forget the dagger.
It was pitch-black when he and Mat finally got up to their room under the eaves, the stars obscured by clouds. For the first time in a long while Mat undressed before getting into bed, but he casually tucked the dagger under his pillow, too. Rand blew out the candle and crawled into his own bed. He could feel the wrongness from the other bed, not from Mat, but from beneath his pillow. He was still worrying about it when sleep came.
From the first he knew it was a dream, one of those dreams that was not entirely dream. He stood staring at the wooden door, its surface dark and cracked and rough with splinters. The air was cold and dank, thick with the smell of decay. In the distance water dripped, the splashes hollow echoes down stone corridors.
Deny it. Deny him, and his power fails.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on The Queen's Blessing, on his bed, on himself asleep in his bed. When he opened his eyes the door was still there. The echoing splashes came on his heartbeat, as if his pulse counted time for them. He sought the flame and the void, as Tam had taught him, and found inner calm, but nothing outside of him changed. Slowly he opened the door and went in.
Everything was as he remembered it in the room that seemed burned out of the living rock. Tall, arched windows led onto an unrailed balcony, and beyond it the layered clouds streamed like a river in flood. The black metal lamps, their flames too bright to look at, gleamed, black yet somehow as bright as silver. The fire roared but gave no heat in the fearsome fireplace, each stone still vaguely like a face in torment.
All was the same, but one thing was different. On the polished tabletop stood three small figures, the rough, featureless shapes of men, as if the sculptor had been hasty with his clay. Beside one stood a wolf, its clear detail emphasized by the crudeness of the man-shape, and another clutched a tiny dagger, a point of red on the hilt glittering in the light. The last held a sword. The hair stirring on the back of his neck, he moved close enough to see the heron in exquisite detail on that small blade.
His head jerked up in panic, and he stared directly into the lone mirror. His reflection was still a blur, but not
