Lord of Chaos (The Wheel of Time 6)

“Now you stare at one another,” Cassin said idly. “One day I must learn this handtalk of yours.”

Liah glanced at him, her laugh silvery. “You will look pretty in skirts, Red Shield, the day you come to ask to become a Maiden.”

Aviendha drew a relieved breath when Liah’s eyes left hers; under the circumstances, she could not have looked away first honorably. Automatically her fingers moved in acknowledgment, the first handtalk a Maiden learned, since the phrase a new Maiden used most often. I have toh.

Liah signed back without pause. Very small, spear-sister.

Aviendha smiled gratefully for the missing hooked little finger that would have made the term mocking, used to women who gave up the spear and then tried to behave as if they had not.

A wetlander servant was running up the hall. Keeping her face clear of the disgust she felt for someone who spent his life serving others, Aviendha strode off the other way, so she would not have to pass the fellow. Killing Rand al’Thor would meet one toh, killing herself the second, but each toh blocked that solution to the other. Whatever the Wise Ones said, she had to find some way to meet both.

Chapter 20

From the Stedding

* * *

Rand had just begun thumbing tabac into his short pipe when Liah put her head in at the door. Before she could speak, a panting round-faced man in red-and-white livery pushed past her, and fell to his knees before Rand while she stared in amazement.

“My Lord Dragon,” the fellow burst out in a breathless squeak, “Ogier have come to the Palace. Three of them! They have been given wine, and offered more, but they insist only on seeing the Lord Dragon.”

Rand made his voice easy; he did not want to frighten the man. “How long have you been in the Palace . . .?” The fellow’s livery coat fit him, and he was not young. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

The kneeling man goggled. “My name? Bari, my Lord Dragon. Uh, twenty-two years, my Lord Dragon, come Winternight. My Lord Dragon, the Ogier?”

Rand had visited an Ogier stedding twice, but he was not sure of the proper etiquette. Ogier had built most of the great cities, the oldest parts of them, and still came out of their stedding occasionally to make repairs, yet he doubted Bari would have been this excited for anyone else less than king or Aes Sedai. Maybe not for them. Rand stuffed pipe and tabac pouch back into his pocket. “Take me to them.”

Bari leaped to his feet, all but bouncing on his toes. Rand suspected he had made the right choice; the man showed no surprise that the Lord Dragon was going to the Ogier instead of having them brought to him. He left his sword and the scepter behind; Ogier would not be impressed by either. Liah and Cassin came, of course, and it was plain Bari would have run back as well if not for the necessity of keeping his pace to Rand’s.

The Ogier waited in a courtyard with a fountain, its basin filled with lily pads and red and gold fish, a white-haired man in a long coat that flared above high boots with their tops turned down, and two women, one noticeably much younger than the other, their skirts embroidered in vines and leaves, the elder’s considerably more elaborate that the younger’s. Golden goblets made for humans seemed tiny in their hands. Several trees retained some of their leaves, and the Palace itself gave shade. The Ogier were not alone; when Rand appeared, Sulin and a good three dozen Maidens were crowded around them, and Urien, plus fifty or more Aielmen. The Aiel had the grace to fall silent when they saw Rand.

The Ogier man said, “Your name sings in my ears, Rand al’Thor,” in a voice like rumbling thunder and gravely made introductions. He was Haman, son of Dal son of Morel. The older woman was Covril, daughter of Ella daughter of Soong, and the younger was Erith, daughter of Iva daughter of Alar. Rand remembered seeing Erith once, in Stedding Tsofu, a hard two-day ride from the city of Cairhien. He could not imagine what she was doing in Caemlyn.

The Ogier made the Aiel seem small; they made the courtyard seem small. Haman stood over half again as tall as Rand and broad in proportion, Covril less than a head — an Ogier head — shorter than that, and even Erith topped Rand by nearly a foot and a half. Yet that was the smallest difference between Ogier and humans. Haman’s eyes were as large and round as teacups, his broad nose nearly covered his face, and his ears stood up through his hair, tipped with white tufts. He wore long drooping white mustaches and a narrow beard beneath his chin, and his eyebrows hung down to his cheeks. Rand could not have said precisely how Covril’s and Erith’s faces differed — except for lacking beards and mustaches, of course, and their eyebrows were not quite so long or thick — but they seemed somehow more delicate. Though Covril’s was quite stern at the moment — she looked familiar, too, for some reason — and Erith appeared worried, her ears sagging.

“If you will forgive me a moment,” Rand told them.

Sulin did not let him get another word out. “We came to talk with the Treebrothers, Rand al’Thor,” she said firmly. “You must know the Aiel have long been waterfriends to the Treebrothers. We go to trade in their stedding often.”

“That is quite true,” Haman murmured. For an Ogier, it was a murmur. An avalanche somewhere out of sight.

“I am sure the others did come to talk,” Rand told Sulin. He could pick out the members of her guard this morning by eye, every last one of them; Jalani blushed a deep red. On the other hand, aside from Urien, no more than three or four of the morning’s Red Shields were there. “I would not like to think I need to ask Enaila and Somara to take you in charge.” Sulin’s tanned face darkened with indignation, making the scar she had taken following him stand out more. “I would talk with them alone. Alone,” he emphasized, eyeing Liah and Cassin. “Unless you think I need protection from them?” If anything that made her more offended, and she gathered up the Maidens with quick flashes of handtalk in what for anyone but an Aiel would surely have been called a huff. Some of the Aiel men were chuckling as they left; Rand supposed he had made a joke of some kind.

As they went, Haman stroked his long beard. “Humans have not always thought us so safe, you know. Um. Um.” His musing sounded like a huge bumblebee. “It is in the old records. Very old. Only fragments, really, but dating from just after — ”

“Elder Haman,” Covril said politely, “if we may stick to the matter at hand?” This bumblebee rumbled at a higher pitch.

Elder Haman. Where had Rand heard that before? Each stedding had its Council of Elders.

Haman sighed deeply. “Very well, Covril, but you are showing unseemly haste. You barely gave us time to wash before coming here. I vow, you’ve begun to leap about like . . . ” Those big eyes flickered toward Rand, and he covered a cough with a hand the size of a large ham. Ogier considered humans hasty, always trying to do now what could not possibly matter until tomorrow. Or until next year; Ogier took a very long view. They also thought it insulting to remind humans of how they leaped about. “This has been a most exacting journey Outside,” Haman went on, explaining to Rand, “not the least of it discovering that the Shaido Aiel had besieged Al’cair’rahienallen — most extraordinary, that — and that you were actually there, but then you left before we could speak with you, and . . . I cannot help feeling we have been impetuous. No. No, you speak, Covril. It is for you I left my studies, and my teaching, to go running across the world. My classes will be in riot by now.” Rand almost grinned; the way Ogier normally did things, Haman’s classes would take half a year to decide he really was gone and a year more to discuss what to do about it.

“A mother has some right to be anxious,” Covril said, tufted ears quivering. She seemed to be battling between the respect due an Elder and a most un-Ogier-like impatience. When she turned to Rand, she drew herself up, ears standing straight and chin firm. “What have you done with my son?”

Rand gaped. “Your son?”

“Loial!” She stared as if he were mad. Erith was peering at him anxiously, hands clutched to her breast. “You told the Eldest of the Elders of Stedding Tsofu that you would

look after him,” Covril marched on. “They told me you did. You did not call yourself Dragon then, but it was you. Wasn’t it, Erith? Did Alar not say Rand al’Thor?” She did not give the younger woman time for more than a nod. As her voice picked up speed, Haman began to look pained. “My Loial is too young to be Outside, too young to be running across the world, doing the things you no doubt have him doing. Elder Alar told me about you. What has my Loial to do with the Ways and Trollocs and the Horn of Valere? You will hand him over to me now, please, so I can see him properly married to Erith. She will settle his itchy feet.”