Winter's Heart (55 page)

The days after the
gholam
tried to kill him settled into rhythms that irritated Mat no end. The gray sky never altered, except to give rain or not.

There was talk in the streets of a man being killed by a wolf not far outside the city, his throat ripped. No one was worried, just curious; wolves had not been seen close to Ebou Dar in years. Mat worried. City people might believe a wolf would come that close to city walls, but he knew better. The
gholam
had not gone away. Harnan and the other Redarms stubbornly refused to leave, claiming they could watch his back, and Vanin refused without reasons, unless a muttered comment that Mat had a good eye for fast horses was supposed to be one. He spat after he said it, though. Riselle, her olive face pretty enough to make a man swallow, her big dark eyes knowing enough to dry his tongue, inquired about Olver’s age, and when he said close on ten, she looked surprised and tapped her full lips thoughtfully, but if she changed anything in the boy’s lessons, he still came away from them bubbling equally over her bosom and the books she read him. Mat thought Olver would almost have given up his nightly games of Snakes and Foxes for Riselle and the books. And when the lad ran out of the rooms that once had been Mat’s, Thom often slipped in with his harp under his arm. By itself that was enough to make Mat grind his teeth, only that was not the half.

Thom and Beslan frequently went out together, not inviting him, and were gone for half the day, or half the night. Neither would say a word more about their schemes, though Thom had the grace to look embarrassed. Mat hoped they were not going to get people killed for nothing, but they showed little interest in his opinions. Beslan glared at the very sight of him. Juilin continued to slip abovestairs and was seen by Suroth, which earned him a strapping hung up by his wrists from a stallpost in the stables. Mat saw his welts tended by Vanin—the man claimed doctoring men was the same as doctoring horses—and warned him it could be worse next time, but the fool was back on the upper floors that very night, still wincing from the weight of his shirt on his back. It had to be a woman, though the thief-catcher refused to say. Mat suspected one of the Seanchan noblewomen. One of the Palace servants could have met him in his own room, with Thom out of it so much.

Not Suroth or Tuon, to be sure, but they were not the only Seanchan High Blood in the Palace. Most of the Seanchan nobles rented rooms, or more often whole houses, in the city, but several had come with Suroth and a handful with the girl, too. More than one of the women looked a pleasant armful in spite of their crested heads and their way of staring down their noses at everybody without shaved temples. If they noticed them more than they did the furniture, that was. If it seemed unlikely that one of those haughty women would look twice at a man who slept in the servant’s quarters, well, the Light knew women had peculiar tastes in men. He had no choice but to leave Juilin alone. Whoever the woman was, she might get the thief-catcher beheaded yet, but that sort of fever had to burn itself out before a man could think straight. Women did strange things to a man’s head.

The newly arrived ships disgorged people and animals and cargo for days on end, enough that the city’s massive walls would have burst from the inside had they all stayed, but they flowed through the city and out into the countryside with their families and their crafts and their livestock, prepared to put down roots. Soldiers passed through in thousands, too, well-ordered infantry and cavalry with the flair of veterans, moving north in bright-colored armor, and east across the river. Mat gave up trying to count them. Sometimes he saw strange creatures, though most of those were unloaded above the city to avoid the streets.
Torm
like three-eyed bronze-scaled cats the size of horses, sending most real horses around them into a frenzy just by their presence, and
corlm,
like hairy wingless birds as tall as a man, tall ears twitching constantly and long beaks seeming to
yearn for flesh to rend, and huge
s’redit
with their long noses and longer tusks.
Raken
and the larger
to’raken
flew from their landing site below the Rahad, huge lizards spreading wings like bats and carrying men on their backs. The names were easy enough to pick up; any Seanchan soldier was eager to discuss the necessity of scouts on
raken
and the abilities of
corlm
at tracking, whether
s’redit
were useful for more than moving heavy loads and
torm
too intelligent to trust. He learned a great deal of interest from men who wanted what most soldiers did, a drink and a woman and a bit of a gamble, not necessarily in any given order. Those soldiers were indeed veterans. Seanchan was an Empire larger than all the nations between the Aryth Ocean and the Spine of the World, all under one Empress, but with a history of almost constant rebellions and revolts that kept its soldiers’ skills keen. The farmers would be harder to dig out.

Not all the soldiers left, of course. A strong garrison remained, not only Seanchan, but steel-veiled Taraboner lancers and Amadician pikemen with their breastplates painted to resemble Seanchan armor. And Altarans, too, besides Tylin’s House armsmen. According to the Seanchan, the Altarans from inland, with red slashes crisscrossing their breastplates, were Tylin’s as much as the fellows guarding the Tarasin Palace, which, strangely, did not seem to best please her. It did not please the fellows from inland very much, either. They and the men in Mitsobar’s green-and-white eyed each other like strange tomcats in a small room. There was plenty of glaring going on, Taraboners at Amadicians, Amadicians at Altarans, and the other way round, well-aged, long-standing animosities bubbling to the surface, but no one went further than shaken fists and a few curses. Five hundred men of the Deathwatch Guards had come off the ships and remained in Ebou Dar for some reason. The ordinary sort of crime expected in any large city had fallen off dramatically under the Seanchan, but the Guards took to patrolling the streets as if they expected cutpurses, bullyboys and maybe fully armed bands of brigands to spring out of the pavement. The Altarans and the Amadicians and the Taraboners kept their tempers reined in. No one but a fool argued with the Deathwatch Guards, not more than once. And another contingent of the Guards had taken up residence in the city, too, a hundred Ogier, of all things, in the red-and-black. Sometimes they patrolled with the others, and sometimes they wandered about with their long-handled axes on their shoulders. They were not at all like Mat’s friend Loial. Oh, they had the same wide noses and tufted ears and long eyebrows that drooped to their cheeks beside eyes the size of teacups, but the Gardeners looked at a man as though wondering whether he needed
pruning of a few limbs. Nobody at all was fool enough to argue even once with the Gardeners.

Seanchan flowed out from Ebou Dar, and news flowed in. Even when they had to sleep in the attic, merchants preened in the common rooms of inns, smoking their pipes and telling what they knew that no one else did. So long as the telling did not affect their profits. The merchants’ guards cared little for profits they would not share and told everything, some of it true. Seamen spread tales for anyone who would buy a mug of ale, or better, hot spiced wine, and when they had drunk enough, they talked even more, of ports they had visited, and events they had witnessed, and likely dreams they had had after the last time their heads were full of fumes. Still, it was clear the world outside Ebou Dar was seething like the Sea of Storms. Tales of Aiel looting and burning came from everywhere, and armies were on the move other than the Seanchan, armies in Tear and Murandy, in Arad Doman and Andor, in Amadicia, which was not yet entirely under Seanchan control, and dozens of armed gatherings too small to be called armies in the heartland of Altara itself. Except for the men in Altara and Amadicia, no one really seemed sure who intended to fight whom, and there was some doubt about Altara. Altarans had a way of taking advantage of troubles to try paying off grievances against their neighbors.

The news that shook the city most, though, was of Rand. Mat tried his best not to think of him, or Perrin, but avoiding those odd swirls of color in his head was difficult when the Dragon Reborn was on everyone’s lips. The Dragon Reborn was dead, some claimed, murdered by Aes Sedai, by the whole White Tower descending on him at once in Cairhien, or maybe it was in Illian, or Tear. No, they had kidnapped him, and he was held prisoner in the White Tower. No, he had gone to the White Tower on his own and sworn fealty to the Amyrlin Seat. The last gained great credence because a number of men claimed to have seen a proclamation, signed by Elaida herself, that announced as much. Mat had his doubts, about Rand being dead or swearing fealty, at least. For some odd reason, he felt sure he would know if Rand died, and as for the other, he did not believe the man would put himself within a hundred miles of the White Tower voluntarily. Dragon Reborn or no Dragon Reborn, he had to have more sense than that.

That news—all the versions of it—stirred the Seanchan the way a stick stirs an antheap. High-ranking officers strode the halls of the Tarasin Palace at every hour of the day and night, their odd, plumed helmets beneath their arms, their boots ringing on the floor tiles, their faces set. Couriers raced
away from Ebou Dar, on horses and on
to’raken. Sul’dam
and
damane
began patrolling the streets instead of just standing guard at the gates, once more hunting for women who could channel. Mat kept out of the officers’ way and nodded politely to the
sul’dam
when he passed one in the streets. Whatever Rand’s situation was, he could do nothing about it in Ebou Dar. First, he had to get out of the city.

The morning after the
gholam
tried to kill him, Mat burned every last one of the long pink ribbons, the whole great wad of them, in the fireplace as soon as Tylin left her apartments. He also burned a pink coat she had had made for him, two pairs of pink breeches and a pink cloak. A stench of burning wool and silk filled the rooms, and he opened some windows to let it out, but he did not really care. He felt a great relief dressing himself in bright blue breeches and embroidered green coat, and a blue cloak with painfully ornate working. Even all the lace did not bother him. At least none of it was pink. He never wanted to
see
anything that particular color ever again!

Clapping his hat on his head, he stumped out of the Tarasin Palace with a renewed determination to find that cubbyhole to store what he needed for his escape, if he had to visit every tavern, inn and sailors’ dive in the city ten times over. Even those in the Rahad. A hundred times! Gray gulls and black-winged skimmers swirled in leaden sky that promised more rain, and an icy wind carrying the tang of salt whipped across the Mol Hara, flailing cloaks about. He thumped the paving stones as though intending to crack every one. Light, if need be, he would go with Luca in what he wore. Maybe Luca would let him work his way as a buffoon! The man would probably insist on it. At least that would keep him close to Aludra and her secrets.

He stalked the whole width of the square before he realized that he was in front of a wide white building he knew well. The sign over the arched door proclaimed The Wandering Woman. A tall fellow in red-and-black armor strode out, three thin black plumes on the front of the helmet under his arm, and stood waiting for his horse to be brought around. A bluff-faced man with gray at his temples, he did not look at Mat, and Mat avoided looking at him. No matter how pleasant the man might appear on the surface, he was a Deathwatch Guard, after all, and a banner-general to boot. The Wandering Woman, so near the Palace, had every room rented by high Seanchan officers, and for that reason he had not been back since he was able to walk again. Ordinary Seanchan soldiers were not such bad fellows, ready to gamble half the night and buy a round when it came their
turn, but high-ranking officers might as well be nobles. Still, he had to start somewhere.

The common room was almost as he remembered, high-ceilinged and well-lighted by lamps burning on all the walls despite the early hour. Solid shutters covered the tall arched windows now, for warmth, and fires crackled in both long fireplaces. A faint haze of pipesmoke filled the air, and the smell of good cooking from the kitchens. Two women with flutes and a fellow with a drum between his knees were playing a quick, shrill Ebou Dari tune that he nodded in time to. Not so different from when he had stayed there, so far as it went. But all of the chairs held Seanchan, now, some in armor, others in long, embroidered coats, drinking, talking, studying maps spread out on the tables. A graying woman with the flame of a
der’sul’dam
embroidered on her shoulder seemed to be making a report at one table, and at another a skinny
sul’dam
with a round-faced
damane
at her heels appeared to be getting orders. A number of the Seanchan had the sides and backs of their heads shaved so they seemed to be wearing bowls, with the hair remaining at the back left long in a sort of wide tail that hung to the shoulders on men and often to the waist on women. Those were simple lords and ladies, not High anything, but that hardly mattered. A lord was a lord, and besides, the men and women going to fetch a serving maid for more drinks had the smooth-cheeked disdainful look of officers themselves, which meant the folk they were fetching for had rank to cause a man trouble. Several noticed him and frowned, and he almost left.