“I cannot leave yet, Zera.” He hesitated, then tenderly drew a blanket over Dena, covering her face. “I have another man to kill, first.”
The innkeeper gave herself a shake and pulled her eyes away from the bed. Her voice was more than a little breathy. “If you mean Barthanes, you’re too late. Everybody’s talking about it already. He is dead. His servants found him this morning, torn to pieces in his bedchamber. The only way they knew it was him was his head stuck on a spike over the fireplace.” She laid a hand on his arm. “Thom, you can’t hide that you were there last night, not from anybody who wants to know. Add these two in, and there’s nobody in Cairhien who won’t believe you were involved.” There was a slight questioning note in her last words, as if she, too, were wondering.
“It doesn’t matter, I suppose,” he said dully. He could not stop looking down at the blanket-covered shape on the bed. “Perhaps I will go back to Andor. To Caemlyn.”
She took his shoulders, turning him away from the bed. “You men,” she sighed, “always thinking with either your muscles or your hearts, and never your heads. Caemlyn is as bad as Cairhien, for you. Either place, you’ll end up dead, or in prison. Do you think she’d want that? If you want to honor her memory, stay alive.”
“Will you take care of. . . .” He could not say it. Growing old, he thought. Going soft. He pulled the heavy purse from his pocket and folded her hands around it. “This should take care of . . . everything. And help when they start asking questions about me, too.”
“I will see to everything,” she said gently. “You must go, Thom. Now.”
He nodded reluctantly, and slowly began stuffing a few things in a set of saddlebags. While he worked, Zera got her first close look at the fat man sprawled partway in the wardrobe, and she gave a loud gasp. He looked at her inquiringly; as long as he had known her, she had never been one to go faint over blood.
“These aren’t Barthanes’s men, Thom. At least, that one isn’t.” She nodded toward the fat man. “It’s the worst kept secret in Cairhien that he works for House Riatin. For Galldrian.”
“Galldrian,” he said flatly. What has that bloody shepherd gotten me into? What have the Aes Sedai gotten us both into? But it was Galldrian’s men murdered her.
There must have been something of his thoughts on his face. Zera said sharply, “Dena wants you alive, you fool! You try to kill the King, and you’ll be dead before you get within a hundred spans of him, if you come that close!”
A roar came from the city walls, as if half of Cairhien were shouting. Frowning, Thom peered from his window. Beyond the top of the gray walls above the rooftops of the Foregate, a thick column of smoke was rising into the sky. Far beyond the walls. Beside the first black pillar, a few gray tendrils quickly grew into another, and more wisps appeared further on. He estimated the distance and took a deep breath.
“Perhaps you had better think about leaving, too. It looks as if someone is firing the granaries.”
“I have lived through riots before. Go now, Thom.” With a last look at Dena’s shrouded form, he gathered his things, but as he started to leave, Zera spoke again. “You have a dangerous look in your eyes, Thom Merrilin. Imagine Dena sitting here, alive and hale. Think what she would say. Would she let you go off and get yourself killed to no purpose?”
“I’m only an old gleeman,” he said from the door. And Rand al’Thor is only a shepherd, but we both do what we must. “Who could I possibly be dangerous to?”
As he pulled the door to, hiding her, hiding Dena, a mirthless, wolfish grin came onto his face. His leg hurt, but he barely felt it as he hurried purposefully down the stairs and out of the inn.
Padan Fain reined in his horse atop a hill above Falme, in one of the few sparse thickets remaining on the hills outside the town. The pack horse bearing his precious burden bumped his leg, and he kicked it in the ribs without looking; the animal snorted and jerked back to the end of the lead he had tied to his saddle. The woman had not wanted to give up her horse, no more than any of the Darkfriends who had followed him had wanted to be left alone in the hills with the Trollocs, without Fain’s protecting presence. He had solved both problems easily. Meat in a Trolloc cookpot had no need of a horse. The woman’s companions had been shaken by the journey along the Ways, to a Waygate outside a long-abandoned stedding on Toman Head, and watching the Trollocs prepare their dinner had made the surviving Darkfriends extremely biddable.
From the edge of the trees, Fain studied the unwalled town and sneered. One short merchant train was rumbling in among the stables and horse lots and wagon yards that bordered the town, while another rumbled out, raising little dust from dirt packed by many years of such traffic. The men driving the wagons and the few riding beside them were all local men by their clothing, yet the mounted men, at least, had swords on baldrics, and even a few spears and bows. The soldiers he saw, and there were few, did not seem to be watching the armed men they had supposedly conquered.
He had learned something of these people, these Seanchan, in his day and a night on Toman Head. At least, as much as the defeated folk knew. It was never hard to find someone alone, and they always answered questions properly put. Men gathered more information on the invaders, as if they actually believed they would eventually do something with what they knew, but they sometimes tried to hold back. Women, by and large, seemed interested in going on with their lives whoever their rulers were, yet they noted details men did not, and they talked more quickly once they stopped screaming. Children talked the quickest of all, but they seldom said much that was worthwhile.
He had discarded three quarters of what he had heard as nonsense and rumors growing into fables, but he took some of those conclusions back, now. Anyone at all could enter Falm
e, it appeared. With a start, he saw the truth of a little more “nonsense” as twenty soldiers rode out of the town. He could not make out their mounts clearly, but they were certainly not horses. They ran with a fluid grace, and their dark skins seemed to have a glint in the morning sun, as of scales. He craned his neck to watch them disappear inland, then booted his horse toward the town.
The local folk among the stables and parked wagons and fenced horse lots gave him no more than a glance or two. He had no interest in them, either; he rode on into the town, onto its cobblestone streets sloping down to the harbor. He could see the harbor clearly, and the large, oddly shaped Seanchan ships anchored there. No one bothered him as he searched streets that were neither crowded nor empty. There were more Seanchan soldiers here. The people hurried about their business with eyes down, bowing whenever soldiers passed, but the Seanchan paid them no mind. It all seemed peaceful on the surface, despite the armored Seanchan in the streets and the ships in the harbor, but Fain could sense the tension underneath. He always did well where men were tense and afraid.
He came to a large house with more than a dozen soldiers standing guard before it. Fain stopped and dismounted. Except for one obvious officer, most wore armor of unrelieved black, and their helmets made him think of locusts’ heads. Two leathery-skinned beasts with three eyes and horny beaks instead of mouths flanked the front door, squatting like crouching frogs; the soldier standing by each of the creatures had three eyes painted on the breast of his armor. Fain eyed the blue-bordered banner flapping above the roof, the spread-winged hawk clutching lightning bolts, and chortled inside himself.
Women went in and out of a house across the street, women linked by silver leashes, but he ignored them. He knew about damane from the villagers. They might be of some use later, but not now.
The soldiers were looking at him, especially the officer, whose armor was all gold and red and green.
Forcing an ingratiating smile onto his face, Fain made himself bow deeply. “My lords, I have something here that will interest your Great Lord. I assure you, he will want to see it, and me, personally.” He gestured to the squarish shape on his pack horse, still wrapped in the huge, striped blanket in which his people had found it.
The officer stared him up and down. “You sound a foreigner to this land. Have you taken the oaths?”
“I obey, await, and will serve,” Fain replied smoothly. Everyone he had questioned spoke of the oaths, though none had understood what they meant. If these people wanted oaths, he was prepared to swear anything. He had long since lost count of the oaths he had taken.
The officer motioned two of his men to see what was under the blanket. Surprised grunts at the weight as they lifted it down from the packsaddle turned to gasps when they stripped the blanket away. The officer stared with no expression on his face at the silver-worked golden chest resting on the cobblestones, then looked at Fain. “A gift fit for the Empress herself. You will come with me.”
One of the soldiers searched Fain roughly, but he endured it in silence, noting that the officer and the two soldiers who took up the chest surrendered their swords and daggers before going inside. Anything he could learn of these people, however small, might help, though he was confident of his plan already. He was always confident, but never more than where lords feared an assassin’s knife from their own followers.
As they went through the door, the officer frowned at him, and for a moment Fain wondered why. Of course. The beasts. Whatever they were, they were certainly no worse than Trollocs, nothing at all beside a Myrddraal, and he had not given them a second look. It was too late to pretend to be afraid of them now. But the Seanchan said nothing, only led him deeper into the house.