One last shiver wracked Mat, and then he was still. “Lightning, Rand. I was looking right at the window when it hit the bars. Lightning. I can’t see worth—” He broke off, squinting at the aslant door, and his voice went sharp. “Where’s Gode?”
Nothing moved in the dark corridor beyond the door. Of Gode and his companions there was neither sign nor sound, though anything could have lain in the blackness. Rand found himself hoping they were dead, but he would not have put his head into the hall to find out for sure if he had been offered a crown. Nothing moved out in the night beyond where the wall had been, either, but others were up and about. Confused shouts came from abovestairs in the inn, and the pounding of running feet.
“Let’s go while we can,” Rand said.
Hastily helping separate their belongings from the rubble, he grabbed Mat’s arm and half pulled, half guided his fri
end through the gaping hole into the night. Mat clutched his arm, stumbling beside him with his head pushed forward in an effort to see.
As the first rain hit Rand’s face, lightning forked above the inn, and he came to a convulsive stop. Gode’s men were still there, lying with their feet toward the opening. Pelted by the rain, their open eyes stared at the sky.
“What is it?” Mat asked. “Blood and ashes! I can hardly see my own bloody hand!”
“Nothing,” Rand said. Luck. The Light’s own. . . . Is it? Shivering, he carefully guided Mat around the bodies. “Just the lightning.”
There was no light save the lightning, and he stumbled in the ruts as they ran staggering away from the inn. With Mat almost hanging on him, every stumble almost pulled them both down, but tottering, panting, they ran.
Once he looked back. Once, before the rain thickened to a deafening curtain that blotted The Dancing Cartman from sight. Lightning silhouetted the figure of a man at the back of the inn, a man shaking his fist at them, or at the sky. Gode or Hake, he did not know, but either one was as bad as the other. The rain came in a deluge, isolating them in a wall of water. He hurried through the night, listening through the roar of the storm for the sound of pursuit.
CHAPTER
33
The Dark Waits
Under a leaden sky the high-wheeled cart bumped east along the Caemlyn Road. Rand pulled himself out of the straw in back to look over the side. It was easier than it had been an hour earlier. His arms felt as if they might stretch instead of drawing him up, and for a minute his head wanted to keep on going and float away, but it was easier. He hooked his elbows over the low slats and watched the land roll past. The sun, still hidden by dull clouds, yet stood high overhead, but the cart was clattering into another village of vine-covered, red brick houses. Towns had been getting closer together since Four Kings.
Some of the people waved or called a greeting to Hyam Kinch, the farmer whose cart it was. Master Kinch, leathery-faced and taciturn, shouted back a few words each time, around the pipe in his teeth. The clenched teeth made what he said all but unintelligible, but it sounded jovial and seemed to satisfy; they went back to what they were doing without another glance at the cart. No one appeared to pay any mind to the farmer’s two passengers.
The village inn moved through Rand’s field of vision. It was whitewashed, with a gray slate roof. People bustled in and out, nodding casually and waving to one another. Some of them stopped to speak. They knew one another. Villagers, mostly, by their clothes—boots and trousers and coats not much different from what he wore himself, though with an inordinate fondness for colorful stripes. The women wore deep bonnets that hid their faces and white aprons with stripes. Maybe they were all townsmen and local farmfolk. Does that make any difference?
He dropped back on the straw, watching the village dwindle between his feet. Fenced fields and trimmed hedges lined the road, and small farmhouses with smoke rising from red brick chimneys. The only woods near the road were coppices, well tended for firewood, tame as a farmyard. But the branches stood leafless against the sky, as stark as in the wild woods to the west.
A line of wagons heading the other way rumbled down the center of the road, crowding the cart over onto the verge. Master Kinch shifted his pipe to the corner of his mouth and spat between his teeth. With one eye on his off-side wheel, to make sure it did not tangle in the hedge, he kept the cart moving. His mouth tightened as he glanced at the merchants’ train.
None of the wagon drivers cracking their long whips in the air above eight-horse teams, none of the hard-faced guards slouching in their saddles alongside the wagons, looked at the cart. Rand watched them go, his chest tight. His hand was under his cloak, gripping his sword hilt, until the last wagon lurched by.
As that final wagon rattled away toward the village they had just left, Mat turned on the seat beside the farmer and leaned back until he found Rand’s eyes. The scarf that did duty for dust, when need be, shaded his own eyes, folded over thickly and tied low around his forehead. Even so he squinted in the gray daylight. “You see anything back there?” he asked quietly. “What about the wagons?”
Rand shook his head, and Mat nodded. He had seen nothing either.
Master Kinch glanced at them out of the corner of his eye, then shifted his pipe again, and flapped the reins. That was all, but he had noticed. The horse picked up the pace a step.
“Your eyes still hurt?” Rand asked.
Mat touched the scarf around his head. “No. Not much. Not unless I look almost right at the sun, anyway. What about you? Are you feeling any better?”
“Some.” He really was feeling better, he realized. It was a wonder to get over being sick so fast. More than that, it was a gift of the Light. It has to be the Light. It has to be.
Suddenly a body of horsemen was passing the cart, heading west like the merchants’ wagons. Long white collars hung down over their mail and plate, and their cloaks and undercoats were red, like the gatetenders’ uniforms in Whitebridge, but better made and better fitting. Each man’s conical helmet shone like silver. They sat their horses with straight backs. Thin red streamers fluttered beneath the heads of their lances, every lance held at the same angle.
Some of them glanced into the cart as they passed in two columns. A cage of steel bars masked each face. Rand was glad his cloak covered his sword. A few nodded to Master Kinch, not as if they knew him, but in a neutral greeting. Master Kinch nodded back in much the same way, but despite his unchanging expression there was a hint of approval in his nod.
Their horses were at a walk, but with the speed of the cart added, they went by quickly. With a part of his mind Rand counted them. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . thirty-two. He raised his head to watch the columns move on down the Caemlyn Road.
“Who were they?” Mat asked, half wondering, half suspicious.
“Queen’s Guards,” Master Kinch said around his pipe. He kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Won’t go much further than Breen’s Spring, ’less they’re called for. Not like the old days.” He sucked on his pipe, then added, “I suppose, these days, there’s parts of the Realm don’t see the Guards in a year or more. Not like the old days.”