Winter's Heart (The Wheel of Time 9)

Light, she was tired! Sometimes Rand behaved as if he were the King of the World, but surely he would not . . . Would not . . . What it was he would not do seemed to slide away from her.

She covered another yawn, and suddenly her eyes widened above her hand, staring at her teacup. A cool, minty taste. Carefully, she put the cup down, or tried to. She nearly missed the saucer altogether, and the cup toppled over, spilling tea onto the tabletop. Tea laced with forkroot. Even knowing there was no use, she reached out to the Source, tried to fill herself with the life and joy of saidar, but she might as well have tried to catch the wind in a net. Birgitte’s irritation, less hot than before, was still lodged in a corner of her mind. Frantically she tried to pull up fear, or panic. Her head seemed stuffed with wool, everything in it dulled. Help me, Birgitte! she thought. Help me!

“What is it?” Dyelin demanded, leaning forward sharply. “You’ve thought of something, and by your face, it is horrific.”

Elayne blinked at her. She had forgotten the other woman was there. “Go!” she said thickly, then swallowed heavily to try clearing her throat. Her tongue still felt twice its size. “Get help! I’ve . . . been poisoned!” Explaining would take too much time. “Go!”

Dyelin gaped at her, frozen, then lurched to her feet gripping the hilt of her belt knife.

The door opened, and a servant hesitantly put his head in. Elayne felt a flood of relief. Dyelin would not stab her before a witness. The man wet his lips, eye darting between the two women. Then he came in. Drawing a long-bladed knife from his belt. Two more men in red-and-white livery followed, each unsheathing a long knife.

I will not die like a kitten in a sack, Elayne thought bitterly. With an effort, she pushed herself to her feet. Her knees wobbled, and she had to support herself on the table with one hand, but she used the other to draw her own dagger. The pattern-etched blade was barely as long as her hand, but it would suffice. It would have, had her fingers not felt wooden gripping the hilt. A child could take it away. Not without fighting back, she thought. It was like pushing through syrup, but determined even so. Not without fighting!

Strangely little time seemed to have passed. Dyelin was just turning to her henchmen, the last of them just closing the door behind him.

“Murder!” Dyelin howled. Picking up her chair, she hurled it at the men, “Guards! Murder! Guards!”

The three tried to dodge the chair, but one was too slow, and it caught him on the legs. With a yell, he fell into the man next to him, and they both went down. The other, a slender, towheaded young man with bright blue eyes, skipped by with his knife advanced.

Dyelin met him with her own, slashing, stabbing, but he moved like a ferret, avoiding her attack with ease. His own long blade slashed, and Dyelin stumbled back with a shriek, one hand clutching at her middle. He danced forward nimbly, stabbing, and she screamed and fell like a rag doll. He stepped over her, walking toward Elayne.

Nothing else existed for her except him, and the knife in his hand. He did not rush at her. Those big blue eyes studied her cautiously as he advanced at a steady pace. Of course. He knew she was Aes Sedai. He had to be wondering whether the potion had done its work. She tried to stand straight, to glare at him, to win a few moments by bluff, but he nodded to himself, hefting his knife. If she could have done anything, it would have happened by now. There was no pleasure on his face. He was just a man with a job to do.

Abruptly, he stopped, staring down at himself in astonishment. Elayne stared, too. At the foot of steel sticking out from his chest. Blood bubbled in his mouth as he toppled into the table, shoving it hard.

Staggering, Elayne fell to her knees, and barely caught the edge of the table again to stop herself falling further. Amazed, she stared at the man bleeding onto the carpets. There was a sword hilt sticking out of his back. Her leaden thoughts were wandering. Those carpets might never come clean, with all that blood. Slowly she raised her eyes, past the motionless form of Dyelin. She did not appear to be breathing. To the door. The open door. One of the remaining two assassins lay in front of it, his head at an odd angle, only half attached to his neck. The other was struggling with another red-coated man, the pair of them grunting and rolling on the floor, both striving for the same dagger. The would-be killer was trying to pry the other’s fist from his throat with his free hand. The other. A man with a face like an axe. In the white-collared coat of a Guardsman.

Hurry, Birgitte, she thought dully. Please hurry.

Darkness consumed her.

CHAPTER

10

A Plan Succeeds

Elayne’s eyes opened in darkness, staring at dim shadows dancing on misty paleness. Her face was cold, the rest of her hot and sweaty, and something confined her arms and legs. For an instant panic flared. Then she sensed Aviendha’s presence in the room, a simple, comforting awareness, and Birgitte’s, a fist of calm, controlled anger in her head. They soothed her by being there. She was in her own bedchamber, lying beneath blankets in her own bed and staring up at the taut linen canopy with hot-water bottles packed along her sides. The heavy winter bedcurtains were tied back against the carved posts, and the only light in the room came from tiny flickering flames in the fireplace, just enough to make shadows shift, not dispel them.

Without thought she reached out for the Source and found it. Touched saidar, wondrously, without drawing on it. The desire to draw deeply welled up strong in her, but reluctantly she retreated. Oh, so reluctantly, and not just because her wanting to be filled with the deeper life of saidar was often a bottomless need that must be controlled. Her greatest fear during those endless minutes of terror had not been death, but that she would never touch the Source again. Once, she would have thought that strange.

Abruptly, memory returned, and she sat up unsteadily, the blankets sliding to her waist. Immediately, she pulled them back up. The air was cold against her bare skin slick with sweat. They had not even left her a shift, and try as she would to copy Aviendha’s ease about being unclothed in front of others, she could not manage it. “Dyelin,” she said anxiously, twisting to drape the blankets around herself better. It was an awkward operation; she felt wrung out and more than a little wobbly. “And the Guardsman. Are they . . . ?”

“The man didn’t suffer a scratch,” Nynaeve said, stepping out of the shifting shadows, a shadow herself. She rested her hand on Elayne’s forehead and grunted in satisfaction at finding it cool. “I Healed Dyelin. She will need time to recover her strength fully, though. She lost a great deal of blood. You are doing well, too. For a time, I thought you were taking a fever. That can come on suddenly when you’re weakened.”

“She gave you herbs instead of Healing,” Birgitte said sourly from a chair at the foot of the bed. In the near darkness, she was just a squat, ominous shape.

“Nynaeve al’Meara is wise enough to know what she cannot do,” Aviendha said in level tones. Only her white blouse and a flash of polished silver were really visible, low against the wall. As usual, she had chosen the floor over a chair. “She recognized the taste of this forkroot in the tea and did not know how to work her weaves against it, so she did not take foolish chances.”

Nynaeve sniffed sharply. No doubt as much at Aviendha’s defense of her as Birgitte’s acidity. Perhaps more so. Nynaeve being Nynaeve, she probably would have preferred to let slide what she did not know and could not do. And she was more prickly than usual about Healing, of late. Ever since it became clear that several of the Kin were already outstripping her skill. “You should have recognized it yourself, Elayne,” she said in a brusque voice. “At any rate, greenwort and goatstongue might make you sleep, but they’re sovereign for stomach cramps. I thought you would prefer the sleep.”

Fishing leather hot-water bottles from under the covers and dropping them onto the carpets so she did not start roasting again, Elayne shuddered. The days right after Ronde Macura dosed her and Nynaeve with forkroot had been a misery she had tried to forget. Whatever the herbs were that Nynaeve had given her, she felt no weaker than the forkroot would have made her. She thought she could walk, so long as she did not have to walk far or stand long. And she could think clearly. The casements showed only thin moonlight. How deeply into the night was it?

Embracing the Source again, she channeled four threads of Fire to light first one stand-lamp, then a second. The small, mirrored flames brightened the room greatly after the darkness, and Birgitte put a hand up to shield her eyes, at first. The Captain-General’s coat truly did suit her; she would have impressed the merchants no end.

“You should not be channeling yet,” Nynaeve fussed, squinting at the sudden light. She still wore the same low-cut blue dress Elayne had seen her in earlier, with her yellow-fringed shawl caught in her elbows. “A few days to regain strength would be best, with plenty of sleep.” She frowned at the hot-water bottles tumbled on the floor. “And you need to be kept warm. Better to avoid a fever than need to Heal it.”

/> “I think Dyelin proved her loyalty today,” Elayne said, shifting her pillows so she could lean back against the headboard, and Nynaeve threw up her hands in disgust. A small silver tray on one of the side tables flanking the bed held a single silver cup filled with dark wine that Elayne gave a brief, mistrusting look. “A hard way to prove it. I think I have toh toward her, Aviendha.”