“I think not,” he told the back of her head. “We have business in Chachin that cannot wait. Perhaps your search will go more quickly if we help you find this Avene Sahera.”
She turned very quickly and peered up at him, straining for height. He thought she might be up on her toes. No, she was no Aes Sedai, despite the icy look of command on her face. He had seen shorter Aes Sedai dominate rooms full of men who had no idea who they were, and without any straining.
“Better for you to forget hearing that name,” she said coldly. “It is unwise to meddle in the affairs of Aes Sedai. You may leave me, now. But I expect to find you ready to go on when I am done. If, that is, Malkieri keep their word as I have been told they do.” With that insult, she stalked off in the direction the lean woman had pointed. Light, the woman had a tongue like a knife!
When he returned to The Plowman’s Blade and told Bukama what he had learned, the older man brightened. Well, his scowl lessened a little. For him, that was as good as a grin from anyone else. “Maybe all she wants from us is protection until she finds this woman.”
“That doesn’t explain why she followed us for a whole day,” Lan said, dropping onto the bench in front of his breakfast bowl. He might as well finish the porridge. “And don’t suggest she was afraid to approach us. I think that woman frightens as easily as you do.” Bukama had no answer for that.
Chapter
21
Some Tricks of the Power
Lan knew the ride to Chachin would be one he would rather forget, and the journey met his expectations. They rode hard, passing merchants’ trains of wagons, never stopping long in a village and sleeping under the stars most nights, since no one had the coin for inns, not for four people with horses. Barns and haylofts had to do, when there was a barn or hayloft to be found come nightfall. Many of the hills along the road bore neither village nor farm, only towering oak and leatherleaf, pine and fir, with smaller beech and sourgum scattered through. In the Borderlands, there were no such things as isolated farms; sooner or later, a farm set off by itself became a graveyard.
Alys continued her search for the Sahera woman in every village they passed, though she fell silent whenever Lan or one of the others approached, and eyed them frostily until they went away. The woman had a ready way with a frosty eye. For him, anyway. Ryne twitched and peered wide-eyed at her, fetched and trotted and offered up compliments like a courtier on a leash, still bouncing between enraptured and fearful, and she accepted his subservience and his praise alike as her due while laughing at his witticisms.
Not that she focused only on him. She seldom let an hour go by without probing questions directed at each of them in turn, till it seemed she wanted to know the entire story of their lives. The woman was like a swarm of blackflies; no matter how many you swatted, there were always more to bite. Even Ryne knew enough to deflect that sort of interrogation. A man’s past belonged to himself and the people who had lived it with him; it was not a matter for gossip with an inquisitive woman. Despite her questions, Bukama continued his carping. Day and night, it seemed every second comment out of his mouth regarded the pledge. Lan began to think the only way to silence the man would be to take oath not to give her the pledge.
Twice thick black clouds rolled down out of the Blight to unleash driving downpours of freezing rain mixed with hail large enough to crack a man’s head. The worst storms in spring came from the Blight. When the first of those clouds darkened the sky to the north, he began looking for a place where the trees’ branches might be thick enough to afford some shelter, maybe with the aid of blankets stretched overhead, but when Alys realized what he was doing, she said coolly, “There is no need to stop, Master Lan. You are under my protection.”
Doubtful of that, he was still looking when the storm struck. Lightning flashed in blue-white streaks across a sky that seemed suddenly night and thunder crashed like monstrous kettledrums overhead, but the driving rain sheeted down an invisible dome that moved with their horses, and the hailstones bounced off it in an eerie silence, as though they had struck nothing at all. She performed the same service for the second storm, and both times, she seemed surprised at their offered thanks. Her face hardly altered in its smoothness, a very good imitation of an Aes Sedai’s serene expression, but something flickered about her eyes. A strange woman.
They saw bandits, as rumored, usually a pack of ten or twelve roughly dressed men who counted the odds against three with arrows nocked and melted back into the trees before Lan and the rest reached them. He or Bukama always went after them, just far enough to make sure they really had gone, while the other two guarded Alys. It would have been foolish to ride into an ambush they knew might be waiting.
Noon on the fourth day found them riding through the forested hills along a road that stretched empty as far as the eye could see in either direction. The sky was clear, with just a few scattered white clouds drifting high up, and the only sounds were their horses’ hooves and squirrels chittering on branches. Suddenly horsemen burst from the trees on both sides of the road some thirty paces ahead, twenty or so scruffy fellows who formed a line blocking the way, and the pounding of hooves told of more behind.
Dropping his reins on the pommel of his saddle, Lan snatched two more arrows and held them between his fingers as he drew the one already nocked. He doubted he would have time for even a second shot, but there was always a chance. Three of the men in front of him wore much-battered breastplates stained with rust over their dirty coats, and one had a rust-spotted helmet with a barred faceguard. None carried a bow, not that that made any great difference.
“Twenty-three behind at thirty paces,” Bukama called. “No bows. On your word.”
No difference at all, against a band large enough to attack most merchant trains. He did not loose, however. So long as the men only sat their horses, a chance remained. A small one. Life and death often turned on small chances.
“Let’s not be too hasty,” the helmeted man called, removing it to reveal a grizzled head of greasy hair and a narrow, dirty face that had last been touched by a razor a week gone. His wide smile showed two missing teeth. “You might be able to kill two or three of us before we cut you down, but there’s no need for that. Let us have your coin and the pretty lady’s jewelry, and you can go on your way. Pretty ladies in silk and fur always have lots of jewels, eh?” He leered past Lan at Alys. Maybe he thought it a friendly smile.
There was no temptation in the offer. These fellows wanted no casualties among themselves if they could manage it so, but surrender meant that he and Bukama and Ryne would have their throats slit. They probably intended to keep Alys alive until they decided she was a danger. If she had some trick of the Power up her sleeve, he wished she would—
“You dare impede the way of an Aes Sedai?” she thundered, and it was thunder, setting some of the brigands’ horses snorting and plunging. Cat Dancer, knowing what dropped reins meant, remained still beneath him, awaiting the pressures of knee and heel. “Surrender or face my wrath!” And red fire exploded with a roar above the bandits’ heads, sending more of their mounts into panicked bucking that tumbled two of the poorer riders to the road.
“I told you she was Aes Sedai, Coy,” whined a fat, balding fellow in a breastplate that was too small for him. “Didn’t I say that, Coy? A Green with her three Warders, I said.”
The lean man backhanded him across the face without taking his eyes from Lan. Or more likely, from Alys, behind him.
“No talk of surrender, now. There’s still fifty of us and four of you. Rather than face the noose, we’ll take our chances on how many you can kill before we take you.”
“Well and good,” Lan said. “But if I can see one of you at the count of ten, it begins.” With the last word, he started counting in a loud voice.
The bandits did not let him reach two before they were galloping back toward the trees; by four, the dismounted pair stopped trying to gain the saddles on their wild-eyed animals and took off afoot as fast as they could go. There was no need to follow. The pounding and crackle of horses being galloped through brush rather than around it was fast fading into the distance. In the circumstances, it was the best end that could be hoped for. Except that Alys did not see it so.
“You had no right to let them go,” she said indignantly, anger flashing in her eyes as she did her best to skewer each of them with her gaze. She reined her mare around to make certain they each received a dose. “Had they attacked, I could have used the One Power against them. How many people have they robbed and murdered, how many women ravished, how many children orphaned? We should have fought them and taken the survivors to the nearest magistrate.”
Lan, Bukama and Ryne took turns trying to convince her how unlikely it was that any of the four of them would have been among the survivors—the bandits would have fought hard to avoid the gallows, and sheer numbers did count—but she actually seemed to believe she could have defeated close on fifty men by herself. A very strange woman.
Had it been only storms and bandits, that would have been more than he expected on any journey. Ryne’s foolishness and Bukama’s complaints could have been taken as a matter of course, too. But Alys was blind about a great deal, and that made all the difference.
That first night he had sat in the wet to let her know he would accept what she had done. If they were to travel together