A Crown of Swords (The Wheel of Time 7)

Tallanvor and Lamgwin and even stout Master Gill scrambled to their feet, placing themselves between her and her peculiar visitors. She had to push a way through.

The hook-nosed man’s eyes went straight to her before she could demand an explanation. “You are Morgase, Queen of Andor?” His voice was harsh, and he drawled his words so badly she barely understood.

He stepped on her reply. “You will come with me. Alone,” he added as Tallanvor, and Lamgwin, and Master Gill all moved forward. The crossbowmen presented their weapons; the heavy quarrels looked made to punch holes in armor; a man would hardly slow one down.

“I have no objection to my people remaining here until I return,” she said a good more calmly than she felt. Who were these people? She was familiar with the accents of every nation, familiar with their armor. “I am sure you will see to my safety very well, Captain . . .?”

He did not supply a name, only motioned curtly for her to follow. To her vast relief, Tallanvor made no fuss despite his hot gaze. To her vast irritation, Master Gill and Lamgwin looked to him before stepping back.

In the hallway, the soldiers formed around her, the hook-nosed officer and the two crossbowmen in

the lead. A guard of honor, she tried to tell herself. This soon after a battle, wandering around unprotected was worse than foolish; there might be holdouts who would seize a hostage, or kill any who saw them. She wished she believed that.

She tried questioning the officer, but he never spoke a word, never slackened his stride or turned his head, and she stopped trying. None of the soldiers so much as glanced .at her; they were hard-eyed men of the kind she knew from her own Queen’s Guards, men who had seen fighting before, more than once. But who were they? Their boots struck the floorstones as one in an ominous drumbeat emphasized by the stark Fortress corridors. There was little color, nothing for beauty except scattered tapestries showing Whitecloaks in bloody battle.

She realized they were taking her toward the Lord Captain Commander’s quarters, and a queasiness settled in the pit of her stomach. She had grown almost pleasantly accustomed to the way while Pedron Niall lived; she had come to dread it in the few days since he died — but as they rounded a corner, she started at the sight of some two dozen archers marching behind their own officer, men in baggy trousers and boiled leather breastplates painted in horizontal stripes of blue and black. Each man wore a conical steel cap, with a veil of gray steel mail covering his face to the eyes; here and there the ends of mustaches dangled below the veils. The archers’ officer bowed to the one leading her guard, who merely raised his hand in reply.

Taraboners. She had not seen a Taraboner soldier in a good many years, but those men were Taraboners in spite of those stripes, or she would eat her slippers. Yet that made no sense. Tarabon was chaos come to life, a hundred-sided civil war between pretenders to the throne and Dragonsworn. Tarabon could never have launched this attack on Amador itself. Unless, incredibly, one claimant had won out over the rest, and over the Dragonsworn, and . . . It was impossible, and it did not explain these strangely armored soldiers, or that winged beast, or . . .

She thought she had seen strangeness. She thought she had known queasiness. Then she and her guard turned another corner and encountered two women.

One was slender, short as any Cairhienin and darker than any Tairen, in a blue dress that stopped well short of her ankles; silver lightning forked across red panels on her breast and the sides of her wide, divided skirts. The other woman, in drab dark gray, stood taller than most men, with golden hair to her shoulders that had been brushed till it glistened and frightened green eyes. A silver leash connected a silver bracelet on the shorter woman’s wrist to a necklace worn by the taller.

They stood aside for Morgase’s guard, and when the hook-nosed officer murmured “Der’sul’dam” — Morgase thought that was it; his slurred accent made understanding difficult — when he murmured in tones nearly but not quite to an equal, the dark woman bowed her head slightly, twitched at the leash, and the golden-haired woman sank to the floor, folding herself with her head on her knees and her palms flat on the floorstones. As Morgase and her guards passed by, the dark woman bent to pat the other fondly on the head, as she might a dog, and worse, the kneeling woman looked up with pleasure and gratitude.

Morgase made the necessary effort to keep walking, to keep her knees from folding, to keep her stomach from emptying itself. The sheer servility was bad enough, but she was certain the woman being patted on the head could channel. Impossible! She walked in a daze, wondering whether this could be a dream, a nightmare. Praying that it was. She had a vague awareness of stopping for more soldiers, these in red-and-black armor, then . . .

Pedron Nail’s audience chamber — Valda’s now, or rather whoever had taken the fortress — was changed. The great golden sunburst remained, set in the floor, but all Niall’s captured banners, which Valda had kept as if they were his, were gone, and so were the furnishings, except for the plainly carved high-backed chair Niall and then Valda had used, flanked now by two tall, luridly painted screens. One showed a white-crested black bird of prey with a cruel beak, its white-tipped wings spread wide, the other a black-spotted yellow cat with one paw on a dead, deerlike creature half its size, with long, straight horns and white stripes.

There were a number of people in the room, but that was all she had time to notice before a sharp-faced woman in blue robes stepped forward, one side of her head shaved and the remaining hair in a long brown braid that hung in front of her right shoulder. Her blue eyes, full of contempt, could have done for the eagle’s or the cat’s. “You are in the presence of the High Lady Suroth, who leads Those Who Come Before, and succors The Return,” she intoned in that same slurring accent.

Without warning, the hook-nosed officer seized the back of Morgase’s neck and bore her down prostrate beside him. Stunned, not least because the breath was knocked out of her, she saw him kiss the floor.

“Release her, Elbar,” another woman drawled angrily. “The Queen of Andor is not to be treated so.”

The man, Elbar, rose as far as his knees, head bent. “I abase myself, High Lady. I beg forgiveness.” His voice was as cold and flat as that accent allowed.

“I have small forgiveness for this, Elbar.” Morgase looked up. Suroth took her aback. The sides of her head were shaved, leaving a glossy black crest across the top of her head and a mane that flowed down her back. “Perhaps when you are punished. Report yourself now. Leave me! Go!” A sweeping gesture flashed fingernails at least an inch long, the first two on each hand a glistening blue.

Elbar bowed on his knees, then rose smoothly, backing away through the door. For the first time Morgase realized none of the other soldiers had followed them in. She realized something else, as well. He gave her one final glance before he vanished, and instead of flickering resentment for the one who had caused his punishment, he . . . considered. There would be no punishment; the entire exchange had been arranged beforehand.

Suroth swept toward Morgase, carefully holding her pale blue robe to keep her skirts exposed, snow-white, with hundreds of tiny pleats. Embroidered vines and lush red and yellow flowers spread across the robe. For all her sweeping, Morgase noticed the woman did not reach her until she had regained her feet on her own.

“You are unharmed?” Suroth asked. “If you are harmed, I will double his punishment.”

Morgase brushed at her dress so she would not have to look at the false smile that never touched the woman’s eyes. She took the opportunity to look around the room. Four men and four women knelt against one wall, all young and more than good-looking, all wearing . . . She jerked her eyes away. Those long white robes were very nearly transparent! At the far sides of the screens two more pairs of women knelt, one of each in the gray dress, one in the blue embroidered with lightning, bound by the silvery leash from wrist to neck. Morgase was not close enough to say for sure, but she had the sick-making certainty that the gray-clad women could channel. “I am quite all right, thank — ”A huge reddish brown shape lay sprawled on the floor — a heap of tanned cowskins, perhaps. Then it heaved. “What is that?” She managed not to gape, but the question popped from her tongue before she could stop it.

“You admire my lopar?” Suroth swept away a good deal quicker than she had come. The enormous shape raised a great round head for her to stroke it under the chin with a knuckle. The creature put Morgase in mind of a bear, though it was easily half again as big as the largest bear she had ever heard tell of, and hairless to boot, with no muzzle to speak of and heavy ridges surrounding its eyes. “Almandaragal was given to me as a pup, for my first true-name day; he foiled the first attempt to kill me that same year, when he was only a quarter grown.” There was real affection in the woman’s voice. The . . . lopar’s . . . lips peeled back to reveal thick pointed teeth as she stroked; its forepaws flexed, claws sheathing and unsheathing from six long toes on each. And it began to purr, a bass rumble fit for a hundred cats.

“Remarkable,” Morgase said faintly. True-name day? How many attempts had there been to kill this woman that she could speak of “the first” so casually?

The lopar whined briefly when Suroth left it, but quickly settled with its head on its paws. Disconcertingly, its eyes did not follow her, but settled mainly on Morgase, now and then flicking toward the door or the narrow, arrow-slit windows.

“Of course, however loyal a lopar, it cannot match damane.” No affection touched Suroth’s voice now. “Pura and Jinjin could slay a hundred assassins before Almandaragal blinked his eye.” At the mention of each name, one of the blue-clad women twitched her silvery leash, and the woman at the other end doubled herself as the one in the corridor had. “We have many more damane since returning than before. This is a rich hunting ground for marath’damane. Pura,” she added casually, “was once a . . . woman of the White Tower.”

Morgase’s knees wobbled. Aes Sedai? She studied the bent back of the woman called Pura, refusing to believe. No Aes Sedai could be made to cringe like that. But any woman who could channel, not just an Aes Sedai, should be able to take that leash and strangle her tormentor. Anyone at all should be able to. No, this Pura could not be. Morgase wondered if she dared ask for a chair. “That is very . . . interesting.” At least her voice was steady. “But I do not think you asked me here to speak of Aes Sedai.” Of course, she had not been asked. Suroth stared at her, not a muscle moving except that the long-nailed fingers of her left hand twitched.

“Thera!” the sharp-faced woman with half her head shaved barked suddenly. “Kaf for the High Lady and her guest!”