Winter's Heart (89 page)

Min’s lips twitched, and she avoided looking at him so hard that he knew he caused the smile. Her amusement trickled through the bond. “Thank you, Mistress Keene. Verin is a friend.”

That sharp chin rose higher. “If you ask me, Mistress Farshaw, when you have a pretty husband, you need to watch your friends, too.”

Watching the woman march back to the red arch, Min’s eyes sparkled with the mirth that flowed along the bond, and her mouth struggled against laughing. Instead of handing the message to Rand, she broke the seal with her thumb and unfolded the letter herself, for all the world as if she were a native of this mad city.

She frowned slightly as she read, but a brief flare in the bond was the only warning he had. Crumpling the letter, she turned toward the fireplace;
he bounded from the bench to snatch it from her hand just before she could toss it into the flames.

“Don’t be a fool,” she said, catching his wrist. She stared up at him, her large dark eyes deadly serious. All that came to him through the bond was a grim intensity. “Please don’t be a fool.”

“I promised Verin I’d try not,” he said, but Min did not smile.

He smoothed out the page on his chest. The writing was in a spidery hand he did not recognize, and there was no signature.

I know who you are, and I wish you well, but I also wish you gone from Far Madding. The Dragon Reborn leaves death and destruction where he steps. I now know why you are here, too. You killed Rochaid, and Kisman also is dead. Torval and Gedwyn have taken the top floor above a bootmaker named Zeram on Blue Carp Street, just above the Illian Gate. Kill them and go, and leave Far Madding in peace.

The clock in the Women’s Room rang the hour. Hours of daylight remained before he had to meet Cadsuane.

Min sat cross-legged on the bed, not as comfortable a position in a riding dress as it was in breeches, and rolled one of her knives across the backs of her fingers. It was an absolutely useless skill, Thom had told her, but sometimes it caught peoples’ eyes and made them pay attention without need to do more. In the middle of their room Rand was holding his scabbarded sword up to study the cuts he had made in the peace-bond, and paid her no attention at all. The Dragon’s heads on the backs of his hands glittered, metallic red and gold.

“You admit this has to be a trap,” she growled at him. “Lan admits it. A half-blind goat in Seleisin has more brains than to walk into a trap! ‘Only fools kiss hornets or bite fire!’ ” she quoted.

“A trap isn’t really a trap if you know it’s there,” he said absently, bending the end of one of the severed wires a little to line up better with its mate. “If you know it’s there, maybe you can see a way to walk in so it isn’t a trap at all.”

She threw the knife as hard as she could. It flew in front of his face to stick quivering in the door, and she gave a little jump recalling the last time she had done that. Well, she was not lying on top of him, now, and Cadsuane was not going to walk in, worse luck. Burn the man, that frozen knot of emotions in her head had not even quivered when the knife streaked by, not by so much as a flicker of surprise! “Even if you just see
Gedwyn and Torval, you know the others will be there, hiding. Light, they could have fifty sell-swords waiting!”

“In Far Madding?” He stopped looking at the knife sticking in the door, but only to shake his head and go back to examining the peace-bond. “I doubt there are two mercenaries in the whole city, Min. Believe me, I don’t intend to get myself killed here. Unless I can see how to spring the trap without getting caught, I won’t go near it.” There was no more fear in him than in a stone! And about as much sense! He did not intend to get killed, as if anyone ever intended to!

Scrambling off the bed, she opened the front of the bedside table long enough to take out the strap that Mistress Keene made sure was in every room, even if she did rent to outlanders. The thing was as long as her arm and as wide as her hand, with a wooden handle at one end and the other end split into three tails. “Maybe if I took this to you, it would clear your nose enough to smell what’s in front of you!” she cried.

That was when Nynaeve and Lan and Alivia walked in. Nynaeve and Lan were cloaked, and Lan had his sword at his hip. Nynaeve had removed all of the jewelry except for one gemmed bracelet and the jeweled belt, the Well. Lan closed the door quietly. Nynaeve and Alivia stood staring at Min with the strap raised over her head.

Hastily she dropped the thing to the flowered carpet and kicked it underneath the bed with the side of her foot. “I don’t understand why you’re letting Lan do this, Nynaeve,” she said as firmly as she could. At the moment, that was not particularly firm. Why did people
always
walk in at the worst time?

“A sister has to trust her Warder’s judgment sometimes,” Nynaeve said coolly, drawing on her gloves. Her face belonged on a porcelain doll for all the emotion it displayed. Oh, she was being Aes Sedai to her toenails.

He isn’t your Warder, he’s your husband,
Min wanted to say,
and at least you can go along to look after him. I don’t know if my Warder will
ever
marry me, and he threatened to tie me up if
I
tried to go with him!
Not that she had argued very hard on that point. If he was going to be a bull-goose fool, there were better ways to save him than trying to stick a knife in somebody.

“If we are going to do this, sheepherder,” Lan said grimly, “best we be about it while there’s still light to see.” His blue eyes seemed colder than ever, and hard as polished stones. Nynaeve gave him a worried look that almost made Min feel sorry for her. Almost.

Rand belted his sword over his coat, then settled his cloak with the hood hanging down his back and turned toward her. His face was as hard
as Lan’s, his blue-gray eyes almost as cold, but in her head that frozen stone blazed with veins of fiery gold. She wanted to tangle her hands in the black-dyed hair that almost brushed his shoulders and kiss him no matter how many people were watching. Instead, she folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin, making her disapproval clear. She did not intend for him to die here, either, and she was not about to let him start thinking she would give in just because he was stubborn.

He did not try to take her in his arms. Nodding as if he actually understood, he picked up his gloves from the small table by the door. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, Min. Then we’ll go to Cadsuane.” Those golden veins continued to glow even after he left the room, followed by Lan.

Nynaeve paused, holding the door. “I will look after them both, Min. Alivia, please stay with her and see she doesn’t do anything foolish.” She was all cool, dignified Aes Sedai composure. Until she glanced into the hallway. “Burn them!” she yelped. “They’re leaving!” And she ran, leaving the door standing half open.

Alivia closed it. “Shall we play games to pass the time, Min?” Crossing the carpet, she sat down on the stool in front of the fireplace and took a piece of string from her beltpouch. “Cat’s cradle?”

“No, thank you, Alivia,” Min said, almost shaking her head at the eagerness in the woman’s voice. Rand might be complacent about what Alivia was going to do, but Min had set herself to get to know her, and what she had found was startling. On the surface, the former
damane
was a mature woman who appeared well into her middle years, stern and fierce and even intimidating. She certainly managed to intimidate Nynaeve. Nynaeve seldom said please to anyone except Alivia. But she had been made
damane
at fourteen, and her love of playing children’s games was not the only oddity about her.

Min wished there was a clock in the room, though the only inn she could imagine with a clock in every room would be an inn for queens and kings. Pacing back and forth under Alivia’s watchful gaze, she counted seconds in her head, trying to judge how long it would take Rand and the others to go beyond sight of the inn. When she decided enough time had passed, she took her cloak from the wardrobe.

Alivia darted to block the door, hands on her hips, and there was nothing childlike in her expression. “You aren’t going after them,” she drawled in a firm voice. “It would only cause trouble, now, and I can’t allow that.” With those blue eyes and that golden hair, her coloring was all wrong, but she reminded Min of her Aunt Rana, who always seemed to know when
you had done something wrong and always saw to it that you did not want to do it again.

“Do you remember those talks we had about men, Alivia?” The other woman turned bright red, and Min hurriedly added, “I mean the one about how they don’t always think with their brains.” She had often heard women sneer that some other woman knew nothing about men, but she had never actually met one of those until she encountered Alivia. She really did know nothing! “Rand will get himself in more than enough trouble without me.
I
am going to find Cadsuane, and if you try to stop me . . .” She held up a clenched fist.

For a long moment, Alivia frowned at her. Finally she said, “Let me get my cloak, and I’ll go with you.”

There were no sedan chairs or liveried servants to be seen on Blue Carp Street, and carriages would never have fit along the narrow, twisting passage. Slate-roofed stone shops and houses lined the street, most of two stories, sometimes jammed one hard against the next and sometimes with a little alleyway between. The pavement was still slick from the rain, and the cold wind tried to carry Rand’s cloak away, but people were back out and bustling about. Three Street Guards, one with a catchpole on his shoulder, paused to glance at Rand’s sword, then went on their way. Not far along on the other side of the street, the building housing the shop of the bootmaker Zeram rose a full three stories, not counting the attic under the peaked roof.

A skinny man with very little chin dropped Rand’s coin into his purse and used a thin strip of wood to lift a brown-crusted meatpie from the charcoal grill on his barrow. His face was lined, his dark coat shabby, and his long graying hair was tied with a leather cord. His eyes flickered to Rand’s sword, and looked away quickly. “Why do you ask about the bootmaker? That’s the best mutton, there.” A toothy grin made his chin almost vanish, and his eyes suddenly looked very shifty. “First Counsel herself don’t eat better.”

There were meat pies called pasties when I was a boy,
Lews Therin murmured.
We would buy them in the country and
 . . .

Juggling the pie from hand to hand, the heat soaking through his gloves, Rand suppressed the voice. “I like to know what kind of man makes my boots. Is he suspicious of strangers, for instance? A man doesn’t do his best work if he’s suspicious of you.”

“Yes, Mistress,” the chinless fellow said, ducking his head to a stout gray-haired woman with a squint. Wrapping four meat pies in coarse paper, he handed her the package before taking her coins. “A pleasure, Mistress. The Light shine on you.” She tottered away without a word, clutching the wrapped pies under her cloak, and he grimaced sourly at her back before returning his attention to Rand. “Zeram never had a suspicious bone, and if he did, Milsa wouldn’t let him keep it. That’s his wife. Since the last of the children married, Milsa’s been renting out the top floor. Whenever she finds somebody don’t mind being locked in at night, anyway,” he laughed. “Milsa had stairs put in right up to the third floor, so it’s private, but she wouldn’t pay for having a new door cut as well, so the stairs come out in the shop, and she’s not trusting enough to leave that unlocked at night. You going to eat that pie, or just look at it?”

Taking a quick bite, Rand wiped hot juice from his chin and walked over to shelter beneath the eaves of a small cutler’s shop. Along the street others were snatching a quick meal from the food-peddlers, meat pies or fried fish or twisted paper cones heaped with roasted peas. Three or four men as tall as he, and two or three women as tall as most of the other men in the street, might have been Aiel. Maybe the chinless fellow was not as shifty as he seemed, or maybe it was just that Rand had eaten nothing since breakfast, but Rand found himself wanting to gobble the pie down and buy another. Instead, he made himself eat slowly. Zeram seemed to be doing a good business. A steady if not constant flow of men went into his shop, most carrying a pair of boots to be mended. Even if he let visitors go up without sending word ahead, he would be able to identify them later, and maybe so would two or three others.