At that point Nynaeve would not have cared whether Birgitte actually carried out the threat. Pokeleaf might have left a slight reddish cast to her own hair, yet it was close enough to its natural color almost to make her cry for joy. Unless everyone aboard came down with sore gums and toothaches, she had more than enough pokeleaf remaining. And sufficient red fennel to keep her stomach in its place. She could not help sighing in satisfaction once her hair was dry and in a proper braid again.
Of course, with Elayne channeling good winds and Neres running light or dark, thatch-roofed villages and farms sped past on either bank, marked by people waving in the day and lit windows in the night, showing no sign of the turmoil farther upriver. Broad as the misnamed craft was, it made good time, rolling along downriver.
Neres seemed torn between pleasure at his good luck at such winds and worry at moving in daylight. More than once he gazed longingly at a backwater, a tree-shrouded stream or a pool cut deep into the bank where Riverserpent might have been moored and hidden. Occasionally Nynaeve remarked where he could hear about how glad he must be that the people from Samara would soon be off his ship, with a comment thrown in about how well this woman was looking now that she was rested or how energetic that woman’s children were. That was enough to put ideas of stopping right out of his head. It might have been easier to threaten him with the Shienarans, or Thom and Juilin, but those fellows were getting entirely too bigheaded as it was. And she certainly had no intention of arguing with a man who still would neither look at her nor talk to her.
Gray dawning of the third day saw the crew manning the sweeps again to draw them in to a dock at Boannda. It was a considerable town, larger than Samara, on a point of land where the swift River Boern, coming down from Jehannah, ran into the slower Eldar. There were even three towers inside the tall gray walls, and a building shining white beneath a red tile roof that could certainly pass for a palace, if a small one. As Riverserpent was lashed fast to the heavy pilings at the end of one dock—half their length across dried mud—Nynaeve wondered aloud why Neres had gone all the way to Samara when he could have unloaded his goods here.
Elayne nodded toward a stout man on the dock who wore a chain with some sort of seal hanging across his chest. There were several others like him, all with the chain and a blue coat, intently watching two other broad vessels unload at other docks. “Queen Alliandre’s excisemen, I should say.” Drumming his fingers on the rail, Neres was not looking at the men just as intently as they were at the other vessels. “Perhaps he had an arrangement with those in Samara. I don’t think he wants to talk to these.”
The men and women from Samara marched reluctantly up the gangplank, ignored by the excisemen. There was no custom duty on people. For the Samarans, it was the beginning of uncertainty. They had their lives ahead of them, and to begin anew, what they stood up in and what Nynaeve and Elayne had given them. Before they were halfway down the dock, still huddling together, some of the women were beginning to look as disheartened as the men. Some even began to cry. Vexation painted Elayne’s face. She always wanted to take care of everyone. Nynaeve hoped Elayne did not discover that she had slipped a few more silvers to some of the women.
Not all left the ship. Areina remained, and Nicola, and Marigan, tightly clutching her sons, who gazed in anxious silence after the other children vanishing toward the town. The two lads had not said a word since Samara that Nynaeve had heard.
“I want to go with you,” Nicola told Nynaeve, unconsciously wringing her hands. “I feel safe near you.” Marigan nodded emphatically. Areina said nothing, but she stepped closer to the other two women, making herself part of the group even as she looked levelly at Nynaeve, defying her to send her away.
Thom shook his head slightly, and Juilin grimaced, but it was to Elayne and Birgitte that Nynaeve looked. Elayne did not hesitate in nodding, and the other woman was only a second behind. Gathering her skirts, Nynaeve marched to Neres, standing in the stern.
“I suppose I will have my ship back now,” he told the air somewhere between the ship and the dock. “Not beforetime. This voyage has been the worst I ever undertook.”
Nynaeve smiled broadly. For once, he did look at her before she was done. Well, he almost did.
It was not as if Neres had much choice. He could hardly appeal to the authorities in Boannda. And if he did not like the fares she offered, well, he had to sail downriver anyway. So Riverserpent cast off again, heading for Ebou Dar, with one stop to be made that he was not informed of until Boannda began falling astern.
“Salidar!” he growled, staring over Nynaeve’s head. “Salidar’s been abandoned since the Whitecloak War. It would take a fool woman to want to be ashore at Salidar.”
Even smiling, Nynaeve was angry enough to embrace the Source. Neres roared, slapping at his neck and his hip at the same time. “The horseflies are very bad this time of year,” she said sympathetically. Birgitte roared with laughter before they were halfway down the deck.
Standing in the bows, Nynaeve inhaled deeply as Elayne channeled to bring the wind up again and Riverserpent lumbered into the strong current flowing out of the Boern. She was all but eating red fennel for meals, but even if she ran out before Salidar, she would not care. Their journey was almost over. Everything she had been through was worth it, for that. Of course, she had not always thought so, and Elayne and Birgitte’s rasping tongues had not been the only cause.
That first night, lying on the captain’s bed in her shift while a yawning Elayne occupied the chair and Birgitte leaned against the door with her head brushing the beams, Nynaeve had used the twisted stone ring. A single rusty gimbal-mounted lamp gave light, and surprisingly, a scent of spice from the oil; maybe Neres had not liked the stench of must and mold, either. If she was ostentatious about nestling the ring between her breasts—and making sure the others knew it touched skin—well, she had cause. A few hours of superficially reasonable behavior on their parts had not made her less wary.
The Heart of the Stone was exactly as it had been every time before, pale light coming from everywhere and nowhere, the glittering crystal sword Callandor thrust into the floorstones beneath the great dome, rows of huge polished redstone columns running off into shadow. And that sensation of being watched that was so common in Tel’aran’rhiod. It was all Nynaeve could do not to flee, or set off on a frantic search through the columns. She forced herself to stand in one place beside Callandor, counting slowly to one thousand and pausing every hundred to call Egwene’s name.
Truly, it was all she could do. The control she was so proud of vanished. Her clothes flickered with her worries about herself and Moghedien, Egwene and Rand and Lan. Between one minute and the next stout Two Rivers woolens became a muffling cloak and deep hood which bec
ame a suit of Whitecloak mail which became the red silk dress—only transparent!— which became an ever thicker cloak which became . . . She thought her face changed, too. Once she saw her hands, with skin darker than Juilin’s. Perhaps if Moghedien could not recognize her . . .
“Egwene!” The last hoarse call echoed among the columns, and Nynaeve made herself stand there shivering for one more count of one hundred. The great chamber remained empty except for her. Wishing she could feel more regret than haste, she stepped out of the dream . . .
. . . and lay fingering the stone ring on its thong, staring at the thick beams above the bed and listening to the thousand creaks of the ship rushing downriver through the darkness.
“Was she there?” Elayne demanded. “You were not gone very long, but—”
“I am tired of being afraid,” Nynaeve said without taking her gaze from the beams. “I am s-so tired of being a c-coward.” The last words dissolved into tears she could neither stop nor hide, no matter how she scrubbed at her eyes.
Elayne was there in an instant, holding her and smoothing her hair, and an instant later, Birgitte pressed a cloth dampened in cool water against the back of her neck. She cried herself out to the sound of them telling her she was not a coward.
“If I thought Moghedien was hunting me,” Birgitte said finally, “I would run. If there was no other place to hide than a badger’s hole, I would wriggle in and curl into a ball and sweat until she was gone. I would not stand in front of one of Cerandin’s s’redit if it charged, either; and neither is cowardice. You must choose your own time and your own ground, and come at her in the way she least expects. I will take my revenge on her if ever I can, but that is the only way I will. Anything else would be foolish.”
That was hardly what Nynaeve wanted to hear, but her tears and their comfort made another gap in the thorny hedges that had grown up between them.
“I will prove to you that you are no coward.” Taking the dark wooden box from the shelf where she had put it, Elayne removed the spiral-scribed iron disc. “We will go back together.”
That, Nynaeve wanted to hear even less. But there was no way to avoid it, not after they had told her she was not a coward. So back they went.
To the Stone of Tear, where they stared at Callandor— better than looking over your shoulder and wondering whether Moghedien was going to appear—then to the Royal Palace in Caemlyn with Elayne leading, and Emond’s Field under Nynaeve’s guidance. Nynaeve had seen palaces before, with their huge halls and great painted ceilings and marble floors, their gilding and fine carpets and elaborate hangings, but this was where Elayne had grown up. Seeing it, and knowing that, made her understand a little of Elayne. Of course the woman expected the world to bend itself to her; she had grown up being taught that it would, in a place where it did.
Elayne, a pale image of herself because of the ter’angreal she was using, was strangely quiet while they were there. But then, Nynaeve was quiet in Emond’s Field. For one thing, the village was larger than she remembered, with more thatch-roofed houses and others’ wooden frameworks going up. Someone was building a very big house just outside the village, three sprawling stories, and a stone plinth five paces high had been erected on the Green, carved all over with names. A good many she recognized; they were mostly Two Rivers names. A flagpole stood to either side of the plinth, one topped by a banner with a red wolf’s head, the other one with a red eagle. Everything looked prosperous and happy—as much as she could say, with no people there—but it made no sense. What on earth were those banners? And who would be building such a house?