“Of course, she would not,” Loial said in a slightly stronger voice, and his ears perked up. “I am very useful, after all. She may need to travel the Ways again, and she could not without me.” Zarine shifted against Perrin’s back, and he shook his head, trying to catch Loial’s eye. But Loial was not looking. He seemed to have just heard what he had said, and the tufts on his ears had fallen a little. “I do hope it’s not that, Perrin.” The Ogier looked at the city around them, and his ears went all the way back down. “I do not like this place, Perrin.”
Moiraine rode closer to Lan and spoke softly, but Perrin managed to catch her words. “Something is wrong in this city.” The Warder nodded.
Perrin felt an itch between his shoulders. The Aes Sedai had sounded grim. First Loial, and now her. What don’t I see? The sun shone down on the sparkling roof tiles, made reflections from pale stone wa
lls. Those buildings looked as if they might be cool, inside. The buildings were clean and bright, and so were the people. The people.
At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Men and women moving about their business, purposeful, but slower than he was used to further north. He thought it might be the heat, and the bright sun. Then he spotted a baker’s lad trotting down the street with a big tray of fresh loaves balanced on his head; the young fellow wore a grimace on his face that was nearly a snarl. A woman in front of a weaver’s shop looked as if she might bite the man holding up the bright-colored bolts for her inspection. A juggler on a corner ground his teeth and stared at the folk who tossed coins into the cap lying in front of him as if he hated them. Not everyone looked so, but it seemed to him that at least one face in five wore anger and hatred. And he did not think they were even aware of it.
“What is the matter?” Zarine asked. “You are tensing. It is like holding on to a rock.”
“Something is wrong,” he told her. “I do not know what, but something is wrong.” Loial nodded sadly, and murmured about how they would make him go back.
The buildings around them began to change as they rode, crossing more bridges as they crossed Illian to its other side. The pale stone was as often undressed as polished, now. The towers and palaces vanished, to be replaced by inns and warehouses. Many of the men in the streets, and some of the women, had an oddly rolling gait; they all had the bare feet he associated with sailors. The smells of pitch and hemp were strong in the air, and the scent of wood, both freshly cut and cured, with sour mud overlying both. The canals’ odors changed, too, making his nose wrinkle. Chamber pots, he thought. Chamber pots and old privies. It made him feel queasy.
“The Bridge of Flowers,” Lan announced as they crossed yet another low bridge. He inhaled deeply. “And now we are in the Perfumed Quarter. The Illianers are a poetic people.”
Zarine stifled a laugh against Perrin’s back.
As if he were suddenly impatient with the slow pace of Illian, the Warder led them quickly through the streets to an inn, two stories of rough, green-veined stone topped with pale green tiles. Evening was coming on, the light growing softer as the sun settled. It gave a little relief from the heat, but not much. Boys seated on mounting blocks in front of the inn hopped up to take their horses. One black-haired lad about ten asked Loial if he were an Ogier, and when Loial said he was, the boy said, “I did think you did be,” with a self-satisfied nod. He led Loial’s big horse away, tossing the copper Loial had given him into the air and catching it.
Perrin frowned up at the inn sign for a moment before following the others in. A white-striped badger danced on its hind legs with a man carrying what seemed to be a silver shovel. Easing the Badger, it read. It must be some story I never heard.
The common room had sawdust on the floor, and tabac smoke filled the air. It also smelled of wine, and fish cooking in the kitchen, and a heavy, flowered perfume. The exposed beams of the high ceiling were rough-hewn and age-dark. This early in the evening, no more than a quarter of the stools and benches were filled, by men in workmen’s plain coats and vests, some with the bare feet of sailors. All of them sat clustered as close as they could manage around one table where a pretty, dark-eyed girl, the wearer of the perfume, sang to the strumming of a twelve-string bittern and danced on the tabletop with swirls of her skirt. Her loose, white blouse had an extremely low neck. Perrin recognized the tune—“The Dancing Lass”—but the words the girl sang were different from what he knew.
“A Lugard girl, she came to town, to see what she could see.
With a wink of her eye, and a smile on her lip,
she snagged a boy or three, or three.
With an ankle slim, and skin so pale,
she caught the owner of a ship, a ship.
With a soft little sigh, and a gay little laugh,
she made her way so free. So free.”
She launched into another verse, and when Perrin realized what she was singing, his face grew hot. He had thought nothing could shock him after seeing Tinker girls dance, but that had only hinted at things. This girl was singing them right out.
Zarine was nodding in time to the music and grinning. Her grin widened when she looked at him. “Why, farmboy, I do not think I ever knew a man your age who could still blush.”
He glared at her and barely stopped himself from saying something he knew would be stupid. This bloody woman has me jumping before I can think. Light, I’ll wager she thinks I never even kissed a girl! He tried not to listen to any more of what the girl was singing. If he could not get the red out of his face, Zarine was sure to make more of it.
A flash of startlement had passed across the face of the proprietress when they entered. A large, round woman with her hair in a thick roll at the back of her neck and a smell of strong soap about her, she suppressed her surprise quickly, though, and hurried to Moiraine.
“Mistress Mari,” she said, “I did never think to see you here today.” She hesitated, eyeing Perrin and Zarine, glanced once at Loial, but not in the searching way she looked at them. Her eyes actually brightened at the sight of the Ogier, but her real attention was all on “Mistress Mari.” She lowered her voice, “Have my pigeons no arrived safely?” Lan, she seemed to accept as a part of Moiraine.
“I am sure they have, Nieda,” Moiraine said. “I have been away, but I am sure Adine has noted down everything you reported.” She eyed the girl singing on the table with no outward disapproval, nor any other expression. “The Badger was considerably quieter when last I was here.”
“Aye, Mistress Mari, it did be that. But the louts have no gotten over the winter yet, it does seem. I have no had a fight in the Badger in ten years, till the tail of this winter gone.” She nodded toward the one man not sitting near the singer, a fellow even bigger than Perrin, standing against the wall with his thick arms folded, tapping his foot to the music. “Even Bili did have a hard time keeping them down, so I did hire the girl to take their minds from anger. From some place in Altara, she does come.” She tilted her head, listening for a moment. “A fair voice, but I did sing it better—aye, and dance better, too—when I did be her age.”
Perrin gaped at the thought of this huge woman capering on a table, singing that song—a bit of it came through; “I’ll wear no shift at all. At all”—until Zarine fisted him hard in the short ribs. He grunted.
Nieda looked his way. “I’ll mix you some honey and sulphur, lad, for that throat. You’ll no want to take a chill before the weather warms, no with a pretty girl like that one on your arm.”
Moiraine gave him a look that said he was interfering with her. “Strange that you should suffer fights,” she said. “I well remember how your nephew stops such. Has something occurred to make people more irritable?”