Winter's Heart

but he hardly needed them here. 'Talmanes must be somewhere close to Caemlyn by this time. You shouldn't have much trouble finding him.' When they were gone, he would be alone with Tylin. Light, he would rather face the gholam again!

Harnan and the other three Redarms exchanged looks, Fergin scratching his head as it he did not quite understand. He might not. The bony man was a good soldier—not the best, mind, but good enough—yet he was not very bright when it came to other things.

'That wouldn't be right,' Harnan allowed finally. 'One thing, Lord Talmanes'd have our hides if we came back without you.' The other three nodded. Fergin could understand that.

'And you, Vanin?' Mat asked.

The fat man shrugged. 'I take that boy away from Riselle, and he'll gut me like a trout the first time I go to sleep. I would myself, in his boots. Anyway, I got time to read, here. Don't get much chance for that working as a farrier.' That was one of the itinerant trades he claimed to follow. The other was stableman. In truth, he was a horsethief and poacher, the best in two countries and maybe more.

'You're all mad,' Mat said with a frown. 'Just because it wants me, doesn't mean it won't kill you if you get in the way. The offer stays open. Anyone who comes to his senses can go.'

'I have seen your like before,' Noal said suddenly. The stooped old man was the image of hard age and exhaustion, but his eyes were bright and sharp studying Mat. 'Some men have an air about them that makes other men follow where they lead. Some lead to devastation, others to glory. I think your name may go into the history books.'

Harnan looked as confused as Fergin. Vanin spat and lay back down, opening his book.

'If all my luck goes away, maybe,' Mat muttered. He knew what it took to get into the histories. A man could get killed, doing that sort of thing.

'Better clean up before she sees you,' Fergin piped up suddenly. 'All that mud will put a burr under her saddle for sure.'

Snatching his hat off angrily, Mat stalked out without a word. Well, he stalked as well as he could, hobbling on a walking staff. Before the door closed behind him, he heard Noal starting a story about one time he sailed on a Sea Folk ship and learned to bathe in cold salt water. At least, that was how it began.

He intended to get himself clean before Tylin saw him—he did—but as he limped through hallways hung with the flowered tapestries Ebou Dari called summer-hangings, for the season they evoked, four serving men in the Palace's green-and-white livery and no fewer than seven maids suggested he might want to bathe and change his clothes before the Queen saw him, offering to draw him a bath and fetch clean garments without her learning of it. They did not know everything about him and Tylin, thank the Light—no one but Tylin and himself knew the worst bits—but they knew too bloody much. Worse, they approved, every last flaming servant in the whole flaming Tarasin Palace. For one thing, Tylin was Queen and could do as she pleased, so far as they were concerned. For another, her temper had been on a razor's edge since the Seanchan captured the city, and if Mat Cauthon scrubbed and bright in lace kept her from snapping their noses off for trifles, then they would scrub behind his ears and wrap him in lace like a Sunday gift!

'Mud?' he said to a pretty, smiling maid spreading her skirts in a curtsy. There was a twinkle in her dark eyes, and the plunging neckline of her bodice displayed a fair amount of bosom to almost rival Riselle's. On another day he might have taken a little time to enjoy looking. 'What mud? I don't see any mud!' Her mouth dropped open, and she forgot to straighten, staring at him with her knees bent as he hobbled away.

Juilin Sandar, rounding a corner quickly, nearly walked into him. The Tairen thief-catcher leaped back with a muffled oath, his swarthy face turning gray until he realized who had almost run him over. Then he muttered an apology and started to hurry on by.

'Has Thom got you mixed into his foolishness, Juilin?' Mat said. Juilin and Thom shared a room deep in the servants' quarters, and there was no excuse for him to be up here. In that dark Tairen coat, flaring over his boot tops, Juilin would stand out among the servants like a duck in a chicken coop. Suroth was strict about things like that, stricter than Tylin. The only reason for it Mat could see was whatever Thom and Beslan were meddling with. 'No; don't bother telling me. I've made an offer to Harnan and the others, and it's open to you, too. If you want to leave, I'll give you the money for it.'

Actually, Juilin did not look ready to tell him anything. The thief-catcher tucked his thumbs behind his belt and met Mat's gaze levelly. 'What did Harnan and the others say? And what is Thom doing that you call foolish? This is one set of rooftops he knows his way around better than you or I.'

'The gholam is still in Ebou Dar, Juilin.' Thom knew that the Game of Houses was what he knew, and he loved sticking his nose into politics. 'The thing tried to kill me, earlier this evening.'

Juilin grunted as if he had been hit in the pit of his belly, and scrubbed a hand through his short black hair. 'I have a reason to stay a while longer,' he said, 'even so.' His air changed slightly, to something stubborn and defensive and tinged with guilt. He had never shown a roving eye that Mat had seen, but when a man looked like that, it could only mean one thing.

'Take her with you,' Mat said. 'And if she won't go, well, you'll not be in Tear an hour before you have a woman on each knee. That's the thing about women, Juilin. If one says no, there's always another will say yes.'

A serving man hurrying by with an armload of linen towels stared at Mat's muddiness in amazement, but Juilin thought it was at him, and snatched his thumbs free of his belt and attempted to adopt a more humble stance. Without much success. Thom might sleep with the servants, yet from the beginning he had somehow made it seem to be his own choice, an eccentricity, and no one thought it odd to see him up here, perhaps slipping into Riselle's rooms that had once been Mat's. Juilin had gone on at length about being a thief-catcher—never a thief-taker—and stared so many prickly lordlings and complacent merchants in the eye to show he was as good as they that everyone in the Palace knew who and what he was. And where he was supposed to be, which was belowstairs.

'My Lord is wise,' he said, too loudly, and making a stiff, jerky bow. 'My Lord knows all about women. If my Lord will forgive a humble man, I must return to my place.' Turning to go, he spoke over his shoulder, still in a carrying voice. 'I heard today that if my Lord comes back one more time looking like he's been dragged in the street, the Queen intends taking a switch to my Lord's person.'

And that was the stone that broke the wagon clean in two.

Flinging open the doors of Tylin’s apartments, Mat strode in, sailed his hat across the width of the room… And stopped dead, his mouth hanging open and everything he had planned to say frozen on his tongue. His hat hit the carpets and rolled, he did not see where. A gust of wind rattled the tall triple-arched windows that let out onto a long, screened balcony overlooking the Mol Hara.

Tylin turned in a chair carved to look like gilded bamboo and stared at him over her golden winecup. Waves of glossy black hair touched with gray at the temples framed a beautiful face with the eyes of a bird of prey, and not one best pleased at the moment. Inconsequential things seemed to leap at him. She kicked her crossed leg slightly, rippling layered green and white petticoats. Pale green lace trimmed the oval opening in her gown that half exposed her full breasts, where the jeweled hilt of her marriage knife dangled. She was not alone. Suroth sat facing her, frowning into her winecup and tapping long fingernails on the arm of her chair, a pretty enough woman despite her hair being shaved to that long crest, except that she made Tylin seem a rabbit by comparison. Two of those fingernails on each hand were lacquered blue. Seated at her side was a little girl, of all things, also in an elaborately flowered robe over pleated white skirts, but with a sheer veil covering her entire head—it seemed to be shaved completely!—and wearing a fortune in rubies. Even in a state of shock, he noticed rubies and gold. A slender woman, nearly as dark as her stark black gown and tall even had she been Aiel, stood behind the girl's chair with her arms folded and ill-concealed impatience. Her wavy black hair was short, but not shaved at all, so she was neither of the Blood nor so'jhin. Imperiously beautiful, she put Tylin and Suroth both in the shade. He noticed beautiful women, too, even when he did feel hit in the head with a hammer.

It was not the presence of Suroth or the strangers that jerked him to a halt, though. The dice had stopped, landing with a thunder that made his skull ring. That had never happened before. He stood there waiting for one of the Forsaken to leap out of the flames in the marble fireplace, or the earth to swallow the Palace beneath him.

'You aren't listening to me, pigeon,' Tylin cooed in dangerous tones. 'I said, take yourself down to the kitchens and have a pastry until I have time for you. Have a bath while you're about it.' Her dark eyes glittered. 'We