“I came to bloody rescue you,” he said. “Burn me if I expected to be greeted as if I had come to steal a pie. You can tell me why you look as if you’d been fighting bears later, if you want. If Egwene cannot walk, I’ll carry her on my back. There are Aiel all over the Stone, or near enough, and either they are killing the bloody Defenders or the bloody Defenders are killing them, but whichever way it is, we had better get out of here while we bloody well can. If we can!”
“Mind your language,” Nynaeve told him, and Elayne gave him one of those disapproving stares women were so good at. Neither one seemed to have her full attention in it, though. They began shaking Egwene as if she were not covered with more bruises than he had ever seen in his life.
Egwene’s eyelids fluttered open, and she groaned. “Why did you wake me? I must understand it. If I loose the bonds on her, she will wake and I’ll never catch her again. But if I do not, she cannot go all the way to sleep, and—” Her eyes fell on him and widened. “Matrim Cauthon, what under the Light are you doing here?”
“You tell her,” he told Nynaeve. “I am too busy trying to rescue you to watch my langu—” They were all staring beyond him, glaring as if they wished they had knives in their hands.
He spun, but all he saw was Juilin Sandar, looking as if he had swallowed a rotten plum whole.
“They have cause,” he told Mat. “I. . . . I betrayed them. But I had to.” That was addressed past Mat to the women. “The one with many honey-colored braids spoke to me, and I. . . . I had to do it.” For a long moment the three continued to stare.
“Liandrin has vile tricks, Master Sandar,” Nynaeve said finally. “Perhaps you are not entirely to blame. We can apportion guilt later.”
“If that is all cleared up,” Mat said, “could we go now?” It was as clear as mud to him, but he was more interested in leaving right then.
The three women limped after him into the hall, but they stopped around the woman on the bench. She rolled her eyes at them and whimpered. “Please. I will come back to the Light. I will swear to obey you. With the Oath Rod in my hands I will swear. Please do not—”
Mat jumped as Nynaeve suddenly reared back and swung a fist, knocking the woman completely off the bench. She lay there, her eyes closed all the way finally, but even lying on her side she was still in exactly the same position she had been in on the bench.
“It is gone,” Elayne said excitedly.
Egwene bent to
rummage in the unconscious woman’s pouch, transferring something Mat could not make out to her own. “Yes. It feels wonderful. Something changed about her when you hit her, Nynaeve. I do not know what, but I felt it.”
Elayne nodded. “I felt it, too.”
“I would like to change every last thing about her,” Nynaeve said grimly. She took Egwene’s head in her hands; Egwene rose onto her toes, gasping. When Nynaeve took her hands away to put them on Elayne, Egwene’s bruises were gone. Elayne’s vanished as quickly.
“Blood and bloody ashes!” Mat growled. “What do you mean hitting a woman who was just sitting there? I don’t think she could even move!” They all three turned to look at him, and he made a strangled sound as the air seemed to turn to thick jelly around him. He lifted into the air, until his boots dangled a good pace above the floor. Oh, burn me, the Power! Here I was afraid that Aes Sedai would use the bloody Power on me, and now the bloody women I’m rescuing do it! Burn me!
“You do not understand anything, Matrim Cauthon,” Egwene said in a tight voice.
“Until you do understand,” Nynaeve said in an even tighter, “I suggest you keep your opinions to yourself.”
Elayne contented herself with a glare that made him think of his mother going out to cut a switch.
For some reason he found himself giving them the grin that had so often sent his mother after that switch. Burn me, if they can do this, I don’t see how anybody ever locked them in that cell in the first place! “What I understand is that I got you out of something you couldn’t get yourselves out of, and you all have as much gratitude as a bloody Taren Ferry man with a toothache!”
“You are right,” Nynaeve said, and his boots suddenly hit the floor so hard his teeth jarred. But he could move again. “As much as it pains me to say it, Mat, you are right.”
He was tempted to answer something sarcastic, but there was barely enough apology in her voice as it was. “Now can we go? With the fighting going on, Sandar thinks he and I can take you out by a small gate near the river.”
“I am not leaving just yet, Mat,” Nynaeve said.
“I mean to find Liandrin and skin her,” Egwene said, sounding almost as if she meant it literally.
“All I want to do,” Elayne said, “is pound Joiya Byir till she squeals, but I will settle for any of them.”
“Are you all deaf?” he growled. “There is a battle going on out there! I came here to rescue you, and I mean to rescue you.” Egwene patted his cheek as she walked by him, and so did Elayne. Nynaeve merely sniffed. He stared after them with his mouth hanging open. “Why didn’t you say something?” he growled at the thief-catcher.
“I saw what speaking earned you,” Sandar said simply. “I am no fool.”
“Well, I am not staying in the middle of a battle!” he shouted at the women. They were just disappearing through the small, barred door. “I am leaving, do you hear?” They did not even look back. Probably get themselves killed out there! Somebody will stick a sword in them while they’re looking the other way! With a snarl, he put his quarterstaff across his shoulder and started after. “Are you going to stand there?” he called to the thief-catcher. “I did not come this far to let them die now!”
Sandar caught up to him in the room with the whips. The three women were already gone, but Mat had a feeling they would not be too hard to find. Just find the men bloody hanging in midair! Bloody women! He quickened his pace to a trot.
Perrin strode down the halls of the Stone grimly, searching for some sign of Faile. He had rescued her twice more, now, breaking her out of an iron cage once, much like the one that had held the Aiel in Remen, and once breaking open a steel chest with a falcon worked on its side. Both times she had melted into air after saying his name. Hopper trotted by his side, sniffing the air. As sharp as Perrin’s nose was, the wolf’s was sharper; it had been Hopper who led them to the chest.