A flash of embarrassment crossed the Warder’s face. “The Wise Ones managed to hide her going until nearly sunset,” he said stiffly. “Then they … convinced me following would serve no purpose. They said even if I did, I could not find her until she was already on her way out, and she would not need me, then. I am no longer certain I should have listened.”

“Listened!” Melaine snorted. Her gold and ivory bracelets clattered as she adjusted her shawl irritably. “Trust a man to make himself sound reasonable. Y

ou would almost certainly have died, and very likely killed her, too.”

“Melaine and I had to hold him down half the night before he would listen,” Amys said. Her small smile was a touch amused, a touch wry.

Lan’s face might as well have been carved from thunderclouds. Small wonder, if the Wise Ones had used the Power on him. What was Moiraine doing in there?

“Rhuarc,” Rand said, “how am I supposed to unite the Aiel? They don’t even want to look at me.” He raised his bare forearms for a moment; the Dragons’ scales glittered in the harsh sunlight. “These say I’m He Who Comes With the Dawn, but everybody practically melted away as soon as I showed the things.”

“It is one thing to know prophecy will be fulfilled, eventually,” the clan chief said slowly, “another to see that fulfillment begun before your eyes. It is said you will make the clans one people again, as long ago, but we have fought one another almost as long as we have fought the rest of the world. And there is more, for some of us.”

He will bind you together, and destroy you. Rhuarc must have heard that, too. And the other clan chiefs, and the Wise Ones, if they also had entered that forest of shining glass columns. If Moiraine had not arranged a special vision for him. “Does everyone see the same things inside those columns, Rhuarc?”

“No!” Melaine snapped, eyes like green steel. “Be silent, or send Aan’allein and Matrim away. You must go, too, Egwene.”

“It is not permitted,” Amys said in a just slightly softer voice, “to speak of what occurs within Rhuidean except with those who have been there.” A fraction softer, maybe. “Even then, few speak of it, and seldom.”

“I mean to change what is permitted and what isn’t,” Rand told them levelly. “Become used to it.” He caught Egwene muttering about him needing his ears boxed, and grinned at her. “Egwene can stay, too, since she asked so nicely.” She stuck her tongue out at him, then blushed when she realized what she had done.

“Change,” Rhuarc said. “You know he brings change, Amys. It is wondering what change, and how, that makes us like children alone in the dark. Since it must be, let it begin now. No two clan chiefs I have spoken with have seen through the exactly same eyes, Rand, or exactly the same things, until the sharing of water, and the meeting where the Agreement of Rhuidean was made. Whether it is the same for Wise Ones, I do not know, but I suspect it is. I think it is a matter of bloodlines. I believe I saw through the eyes of my ancestors, and you yours.”

Amys and the other Wise Ones glowered in grimly sullen silence. Mat and Egwene wore equally confused stares. Lan alone seemed not to be listening at all; his eyes looked inward, no doubt in worry over Moiraine.

Rand felt a little strange himself. Seeing through his ancestors’ eyes. He had known for some time that Tam al’Thor was not his real father, that he had been found as a newborn on the slopes of Dragonmount after the last major battle of the Aiel War. A newborn with his dead mother, a Maiden of the Spear. He had claimed Aiel blood in demanding admittance to Rhuidean, but the fact of it was just now being driven home. His ancestors. Aiel.

“Then you saw Rhuidean just begun building, too,” he said. “And the two Aes Sedai. You … heard what the one of them said.” He will destroy you.

“I heard.” Rhuarc looked resigned, like a man who had learned his leg had to be cut off. “I know.”

Rand changed the subject. “What was ‘the sharing of water’?”

The clan chief’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You did not recognize it? But then, I do not see why you should; you have not grown up with the histories. According the oldest stories, from the day the Breaking of the World began until the day we first entered the Three-fold Land, only one people did not attack us. One people allowed us water freely when it was needed. It took us long to discover who they were. That is done with, now. The pledge of peace was destroyed; the treekillers spat in our faces.”

“Cairhien,” Rand said. “You’re talking about Cairhien, and Avendoral-dera, and Laman cutting down the Tree.”

“Laman is dead for his punishment,” Rhuarc said in a flat voice. “The oathbreakers are done with.” He looked at Rand sideways. “Some, such as Couladin, take it for proof we can trust no one who is not Aiel. That is a part of why he hates you. A part of it. He will take your face and blood for lies. Or claim he does.”

Rand shook his head. Moiraine sometimes talked of the complexity of Age Lace, the Pattern of an Age, woven by the Wheel of Time from the thread of human lives. If the ancestors of the Cairhienin had not allowed the Aiel to have water three thousand years ago, then Cairhien would never have been given the right to use the Silk Path across the Waste, with a cutting from Avendesora for a pledge. No pledge, and King Laman would have had no Tree to cut down; there would have been no Aiel War; and he could not have been born on the side of Dragonmount to be carried off and raised in the Two Rivers. How many more points like that had there been, where a single decision one way or another affected the weave of the Pattern for thousands of years? A thousand times a thousand tiny branching points, a thousand times that many, all twitching the Pattern into a different design. He himself was a walking branching point, and maybe Mat and Perrin, too. What they did or did not do would send ripples ahead through the years, through the Ages.

He looked at Mat, hobbling up the slope with the aid of his spear, head down and eyes squinted in pain. The Creator could not have been thinking, to set the future on the shoulders of three farmboys. I can’t drop it. I have to carry the load, whatever the cost.

At the Wise Ones’ low, wall-less tents, the women ducked inside with murmurs about water and shade. They all but pulled Mat with them; as evidence of how his head and throat hurt, he not only obeyed, he did so silently.

Rand started to follow, but Lan laid a hand on his shoulder. “Did you see her in there?” the Warder asked.

“No, Lan. I’m sorry; I did not. She’ll come out safe if anyone can.”

Lan grunted and took his hand away. “Watch out for Couladin, Rand. I have seen his kind before. Ambition burns in his belly. He would sacrifice the world to achieve it.”

“Aan’allein speaks the truth,” Rhuarc said. “The Dragons on your arms will not matter if you are dead before the clan chiefs learn of them. I will make sure some of Heirn’s Jindo are always near you until we reach Cold Rocks. Even then, Couladin will probably try to make trouble, and the Shaido, at least, will follow him. Perhaps others, too. The Prophecy of Rhuidean said you would be raised by those not of the blood, yet Couladin may not be the only one to see only a wetlander.”

“I will try to watch my back,” Rand said dryly. In the stories, when somebody fulfilled a prophecy, everyone cried “Behold!” or some such, and that was that except for dealing with the villains. Real life did not seem to work that way.

When they entered the tent, Mat was already seated on a gold-tasseled red cushion with his coat and shirt off. A woman in a cowled white robe had finished washing the blood from his face and was just beginning on his chest. Amys gripped a stone mortar between her knees, blending some ointment with a pestle, while Bair and Seana had their heads together over herbs brewing in a pot of hot water.

Melaine grimaced at Lan and Rhuarc then fixed Rand with cool green eyes. “Strip to the waist,” she said curtly. “The cuts on your head do not seem too bad, but let me see what has you hunched over.” She struck a small brass gong, and another white-robed woman ducked in at the back of the tent, a steaming silver basin in her hands and cloths over her arm.

Tags: Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time Fantasy
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