Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time 6)

two sources in Altara — reliable sources, my Lord — that the witches in Salidar claim the Red Ajah encouraged Logain to become a false Dragon. All but created him, in fact. They have Logain in Salidar — or a man they say is Logain — and are showing him to nobles they bring there. I have no proof, but I suspect they are telling the same tale to any ruler they can reach.”

Frowning, Niall studied the banners overhead. Those represented enemies from nearly every land; no one had ever defeated him twice, and few once. The banners were all faded with age, now. Like him. Yet he was not too faded to see an end to what he had begun. Every banner taken in bloody battle, where you never really knew what was happening beyond sight of your own eyes, where certain victory and certain defeat could be equally ephemeral. The worst battle he had ever fought, armies blundering into one another in the night near Moisen, during the Troubles, had been clear as a bright summer’s day compared to the one he fought now.

Could he have been wrong? Could the Tower really be broken? A struggle of some sort between the Ajahs? Over what? Al’Thor? If the witches were fighting among themselves, there would be many in the Children ready to advocate Carridin’s solution, a strike to destroy Salidar and as many of the witches as possible. Men who believed thinking of tomorrow was thinking ahead but never considered next week or next month, let alone next year. Valda, for one; perhaps it was just as well he had not reached Amador yet. For another, Rhadam Asunawa, the High Inquisitor of the Questioners. Valda always wanted to use an axe even when a poniard was best for the task at hand. Asunawa just wanted every woman who had ever spent a night in the Tower hanged as of yesterday, every book that mentioned Aes Sedai or the One Power burned, and the words themselves banned. Asunawa never had a thought beyond those goals, nor a care for costs. Niall had worked too hard, risked too much, to allow this to become a struggle between the Children and the Tower in the eyes of the world.

In truth, it did not matter whether he was wrong. If he was, it still could be very much to his advantage. Perhaps more than if he was right. With a little luck, he could shatter the White Tower past repairing, splinter the witches into shards easily ground to dust. Al’Thor would surely falter then, while remaining enough of a threat to be used as a goad. And he could hold closely to the truth. Fairly closely.

Without taking his eyes from the banners, he said, “The split in the Tower is real. The Black Ajah rose up, the victors hold the Tower and the losers were driven out to lick their wounds in Salidar.” He looked at Balwer, and nearly smiled. One of the Children would have been protesting that there was no Black Ajah, or rather that all the witches were Darkfriends; the newest recruit would have. Balwer merely looked at him, not at all as if he had just blasphemed against all the Children stood for. “The only decision to make is whether the Black Ajah won or lost. I think they won. Most people will think of whoever holds the Tower as the real Aes Sedai. Let them associate real Aes Sedai with Black Ajah. Al’Thor is a creature of the Tower, a vassal of the Black Ajah.” Lifting his winecup from the table, he took a sip; it did not help the heat. “Perhaps I can fit it in with why I haven’t moved against Salidar yet.” Through his emissaries, he had been using the failure to move as proof of how dire he saw the threat from al’Thor; he was willing to let the witches congregate on Amadicia’s doorstep rather than be diverted from the danger of the false Dragon. “The women there, appalled after all these years at how pervasive the Black Ajah is, repelled at last by the evil they’ve been immersed in . . . ” His inventiveness ran out — they were all servants of the Dark One; what evil could repel them? — but after a moment Balwer took it up.

“Perhaps they’ve decided to throw themselves on my Lord’s mercy, even ask my Lord’s protection. Losers in a rebellion, weaker than their enemies, fearing to be crushed; a man falling off a cliff to certain death will stretch out a hand even to his worst enemy. Perhaps . . . ” Balwer tapped bony fingers against his lips in thought. “Perhaps they are ready to repent their sins and renounce being Aes Sedai?”

Niall stared at him. He suspected the Tar Valon witches’ sins were among the things Balwer did not believe in. “That is absurd,” he said flatly. “It’s the sort of thing I might expect from Omerna.”

His secretary’s face remained as prim as ever, but he began dry-washing his hands the way he did when he felt insulted. “What my Lord might expect to hear from him, but just the sort of thing that will be repeated where he does most of his listening, in the streets and where nobles gossip over wine. Absurdities are never laughed at there; only listened to. What is too absurd to believe is believed because it is too absurd to be a lie.”

“How would you present it? I will start no rumor of the Children dealing with witches.”

“It would only be rumor, my Lord.” Niall’s gaze hardened, and Balwer spread his hands. “As my Lord wishes. Each retelling always adds embellishment, so a simple tale has the best chance of the core surviving. I suggest four rumors, my lord, not one. The first, that the division in the Tower was caused by a Black Ajah uprising. The second, that the Black Ajah won, and control the Tower. Third, the Aes Sedai in Salidar, repelled and horrified, are renouncing being Aes Sedai. And fourth, they have approached you, seeking mercy and protection. For most people, each will be a confirmation of the others.” Tugging on his lapels, Balwer gave a narrow self-satisfied smile.

“Very good, Balwer. Let it be so.” Niall took a deeper drink of wine. The heat was making him feel his age. His bones seemed brittle. But he would last long enough to see the false Dragon put down and the world united to face Tarmon Gai’don. Even if he did not live to lead in the Last Battle, the Light would surely grant him that much. “And I want Elayne Trakand and her brother Gawyn found, Balwer, and brought to Amador. See to it. You may leave me now.”

Instead of going, Balwer hesitated. “My Lord knows I never suggest any course of action.”

“But you mean to suggest one now? What is it?”

“Press Morgase, my Lord. More than a month has passed, and she still considers my Lord’s proposal. She — ”

“Enough, Balwer.” Niall sighed. Sometimes he wished Balwer were not an Amadician, but a Cairhienin who had taken in the Game of Houses with his mother’s milk. “Morgase is more committed to me every day, whatever she believes. I would like it better had she accepted immediately — I could have Andor raised against al’Thor today, with a thick leavening of Children to stiffen it — but every day that she remains my guest ties her to me more tightly. Eventually she will discover she is allied to me because the world believes she is, tangled so tightly she can never escape: And no one will ever be able to say I coerced her, Balwer. That is important. It is always harder to abandon an alliance the world thinks you entered freely than one you can prove you were forced into. Reckless haste leads to ruin, Balwer.”

“As my Lord says.”

Niall gestured a dismissal, and the man bowed his way out. Balwer did not understand. Morgase was a rugged opponent. Pressed too hard, she would turn and fight whatever the odds. Yet pressed just hard enough, she would fight the enemy she thought she saw and never see the trap building around her until it was too late. Time pressed down on him, all the years he had lived, all the months he desperately needed, but he would not let haste ruin his plans.

The stooping falcon struck the large duck in an explosion of feathers, and the two birds separated, the duck tumbling toward the ground. Banking sharply in the cloudless sky, the falcon swooped back onto her falling prey, clutched it in her talons. The weight of the duck burdened her, but she struggled back toward the people waiting below.

Morgase wondered whether she was like the falcon, too proud and too determined to realize when she had latched on to a prize too heavy for her wings to support. She tried to make her gloved hands loosen their grip on her reins. Her wide-brimmed white hat, with its long white plumes, provided a little protection from the unrelenting sun, but sweat beaded on her face. In a riding dress of green silk embroidered in gold, she did not

look a prisoner.

Figures mounted and afoot filled the long pasture of dried brown grass, though they did not crowd it. A cluster of musicians in white-embroidered blue tabards, with flutes and bitterns and tambours, produced a light tune suitable for an afternoon over chilled wine. A dozen handlers in long, elaborately worked leather vests over billowing white shirts stroked hooded falcons perched on their gauntleted arms, or puffed short pipes and blew streams of blue smoke at their birds. Twice as many brightly liveried servants moved about with fruits and wine in golden goblets on golden trays, and a band of men clad in bright mail encircled the pasture just short of the largely bare-branched trees. All in aid of Morgase and her retinue, to insure their hawking went safely.

Well, that was the reason given, though the Prophet’s people were a good two hundred miles north and brigands seemed unlikely this close to Amador. And despite the women clustered around her on their mares and geldings, in bright silk riding dresses and wide-brimmed hats resplendent with colored plumes, their hair in the long ringlets currently in fashion in the Amadician court, Morgase’s retinue in truth consisted of Basel Gill, awkward on his horse off to one side, with his jerkin of metal discs straining around his girth over the red silk coat she had procured him so he would not be outshone by the servants, and Paitr Conel, even more awkward in a page’s red-and-white coat and displaying the nervousness he had shown since she added him to her party. The women were nobles from Ailron’s court, “volunteers” to be Morgase’s ladies-in-waiting. Poor Master Gill fingered his sword and eyed the Whitecloak guards disconsolately. That was what they were, though, as usual when escorting her out of the Fortress of Light, not wearing their white cloaks. And they were guards. If she tried to ride too far or remain out too long, their commander, a hard-eyed young man named Norowhin who hated pretending to be other than a Whitecloak, would “suggest” that she return to Amador because the heat was growing too great, or because of a sudden rumor of bandits in the area. There was no arguing with fifty armored men, not with any dignity. Norowhin had come within a hair of taking her reins from her the first time. That was the reason she never let Tallanvor accompany her on these rides. That young fool might insist on her honor and rights if there were a hundred men against him. He spent his spare hours practicing the sword as though he expected to carve a way to freedom for her.

Startlingly a sudden breeze brushed her face, and she realized that Laurain had leaned from her saddle to fan her with a white lace fan. A slender young woman with dark eyes set slightly too close together, Laurain wore a permanent simper. “It must be so gratifying for Your Majesty to learn that her son has joined the Children of the Light. And to have attained rank so quickly.”

“That should be no surprise,” Altalin said, fanning her own plump face. “Her Majesty’s son would of course rise quickly, as the sun in splendor does.” She basked in the appreciative murmurs from some of the other women for her pitiful pun.

Morgase kept her face smooth with difficulty. Niall’s news last evening, during one of his surprise visits, had come as a shock. Galad a Whitecloak! At least he was safe, so Niall said. But unable to visit her; the duties of a Child of the Light kept him away. But assuredly he would be part of her escort when she returned to Andor at the head of an army of the Children.

No, Galad was no more safe than Elayne or Gawyn. Perhaps less. The Light send that Elayne was secure in the White Tower. The Light send that Gawyn was alive; Niall claimed not to know where he was, except that he was not in Tar Valon. Galad was a knife to her throat. Niall would never be so crude as to even suggest it, but one simple order from him could send Galad where he would surely die. The one protection he had was that Niall might think she did not care as much for him as for Elayne and Gawyn.

“I am pleased for him if it is what he seeks,” she told them in an indifferent tone. “But he is Taringail’s son, not mine. Taringail was a marriage of state, you understand. Strange, but he has been dead so long, I can hardly recall his face. Galad is free to do as he will. It is Gawyn who will be First Prince of the Sword when Elayne follows me on the Lion Throne.” She waved away a servant with a goblet on a tray. “Niall could at least have provided us with decent wine.” A wave of anxious titters answered her. She had had some success in drawing them closer to her, yet none could be easy about offending Pedron Niall, not where it might get back to him. Morgase took every opportunity to do so in their hearing. It convinced them of her bravery, important if she was to gain even partial allegiance. Perhaps more importantly, for her own mind at least, it helped maintain the illusion that she was not Niall’s prisoner.

“I hear that Rand al’Thor displays the Lion Throne like a trophy from the hunt.” That was Marande, a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face, somewhat older than the others. The sister of the High Seat of House Algoran, she was powerful in her own right, perhaps powerful enough to have resisted Ailron, but not Niall. The others reined their mounts aside for her to heel her bay gelding closer to Morgase. There was no question of gaining any sort of allegiance or friendship from Marande.

“I have heard as much,” Morgase replied blithely. “The lion is a dangerous animal to hunt, and the Lion Throne more so. Especially for a man. It always kills men who seek it.”

Marande smiled. “I also hear he gives high places to men who can channel.”