Suddenly Hark's smile was back. "Of course, my Lady. I'm innocent, but I can see how things look dark against me, I can. I'll follow any man you want me to. I was your mother's man, I was, and I'm your man, too. Loyal is what I am, my Lady, loyal if I suffers for it." Birgitte snorted derisively.

"Arrange for Master Hark to see Mellar's face without being seen, Birgitte." The man was unmemorable, but there was no point in taking chances. "Then turn him loose." Hark looked ready to dance, iron chains or no iron chains. "But first. . . . You see this, Master Hark?" She held up her right hand so he could not miss the Great Serpent ring. "You may have heard that I am Aes Sedai." With the Power already in her, it was a simple matter to weave Spirit. "It is true." The weave she laid on Hark's belt buckle, his boots, his coat and breeches

, was somewhat akin to that for the Warder bond, though much less complex. It would fade from the clothing and boots in a few weeks, or months at best, but metal would hold a Finder forever. "I've laid a weave on you, Master Hark. Now you can be found wherever you are." In truth, only she would be able to find him—a Finder was attuned to the one who wove it—but there was no reason to tell him that. "Just to be sure that you are indeed loyal."

Hark's smile seemed frozen in place. Sweat beaded on his forehead. When Birgitte went to the door and called in Hansard, giving him instructions to take Hark away and keep him safe from prying eyes, Hark staggered and would have fallen if the husky Guardsman had not held him up on the way out of the room.

"I fear I may just have given Mellar a sixth victim," Elayne muttered. "He hardly seems capable of following his own shadow without tripping over his boots." It was not so much Hark's death she regretted. The man would have hanged for sure. "I want whoever put that bloody man in my palace. I want them so badly my teeth ache!" The palace was riddled with spies—Reene had uncovered above a dozen beyond Skellit, though she believed that was all of them—but whether Mellar had been set to spy or to facilitate kidnapping her, he was worse than the others. He had arranged for men to die, or he had killed them, in order to gain his place. That those men had thought they were to kill her made no difference. Murder was murder.

"Trust me, my Lady," Norry said, laying a finger alongside his long nose. "Cutpurses are . . . um . . . stealthy by nature, yet they seldom last long. Sooner or later they cut the purse of someone faster afoot than they, someone who doesn't wait for the Guards." He made a quick gesture as if stabbing someone. "Hark has lasted at least twenty years. A number of the purses in his . . . um . . . collection were embroidered with prayers of thanks for the end of the Aiel War. Those went out of fashion very quickly, as I recall."

Birgitte sat down on the arm of the next chair and folded her arms beneath her breasts. "I could arrest Mellar," she said quietly, "and have him put to the question. You'd have no need of Hark then."

"A poor joke, my Lady, if I may say so," Mistress Harfor said stiffly, at the same time that Master Norry said, "That would be . . . um . . . against the law, my Lady."

Birgitte bounded to her feet, outrage flooding the bond. "Blood and bloody ashes! We know the man's as rotten as last month's fish.''

"No." Elayne sighed, fighting not to feel outraged as well. "We have suspicions, not proof. Those five men might have fallen afoul of footpads. The law is quite clear on when someone may be put to the question, and suspicions are not reason enough. Solid evidence is needed. My mother often said, 'The Queen must obey the law she makes, or there is no law." I will not begin by breaking the law." The bond carried something . . . stubborn. She fixed Birgitte with a steady look. "Neither will you. Do you understand me, Birgitte Trahelion? Neither will you."

To her surprise, the stubbornness lasted only moments longer before dwindling away to be replaced by chagrin. "It was only a suggestion," Birgitte muttered weakly.

Elayne was wondering how she had done that and how to do it again—sometimes there seemed doubt in Birgitte's mind over which of them was in charge—when Deni Colford slipped into the room and cleared her throat to draw attention to herself. A long, brass-studded cudgel balanced the sword hanging at the heavyset woman's waist, looking out of place. Deni was getting better with the sword but still preferred the cudgel she had used keeping order in a wagon drivers' tavern. "A servant came to say that the Lady Dyelin has arrived, my Lady, and will be at your service as soon as she's freshened herself."

"Send the Lady Dyelin word that she's to meet me in the Map Room." Elayne felt a surge of hope. At last, perhaps, she might hear some good news.

CHAPTER 17 A Bronze Bear

Leaving Mistress Harfor and Master Norry, Elayne started eagerly toward the Map Room still holding saidar. Eagerly, but not hurriedly. Deni and three Guardswomen strode ahead of her, heads swiveling in constant search of threats, and the other four stamped along behind. She doubted that Dyelin would take long over her ablutions, good news or bad. The Light send that it was good. Birgitte, hands clasped behind her back and wearing a frown, seemed sunk in silence as they walked, though she studied every crossing corridor as if expecting an attack from it. The bond still carried worry. And tiredness. A yawn cracked Elayne's jaws before she could stop herself.

An unwillingness to start rumors was not the only reason she maintained a stately pace. There were more than servants in the hallways, now. Courtesy had required her to offer rooms in the palace to the nobles who managed to reach the city with armsmen—counting armsmen loosely; some were well-trained and carried a sword every day, others had been guiding a plow before being called to follow their lord or lady—and a fair number had accepted. Mainly those who had no dwelling in Caemlyn or, she suspected, felt pinched for coin. Farmers or laborers might think all nobles wealthy, and certainly most were, if only in comparison, but the expenses required by their positions and duties left many counting coins as carefully as any farmwife. What she was to do for the newest arrivals she did not know. Nobles already were sleeping three and four to a bed wherever the beds were large enough; all but the narrowest could take at least two, and did. Many Kinswomen had been reduced to pallets on the floor in the servants' quarters, and thank the Light spring had made that possible.

It seemed the whole lot of her noble guests were out strolling, and when they offered her courtesies, she had to stop and pass at least a few words. Sergase Gilbearn, small and slim in a green riding dress, her dark hair lightly touched with white, who had brought all twenty of the armsmen in her service, and vinegary old Kelwin Janevor, wiry in his discreetly darned blue wool coat, who had brought ten, received as gracious an exchange as did lanky Barel Layden and stout Anthelle Sharplyn, though they were High Seats, if of minor Houses. All had ridden to her support with whatever they could gather, and none had turned back on learning the odds. Many looked uneasy today, though. No one said anything of it—they were all full of good wishes and hopes for a speedy coronation and how honored they were to follow her—but worry was written on their faces. Arilinde Branstrom, normally so ebullient you might think she believed her fifty armsmen could turn the tide for Elayne by themselves, was not the only woman chewing her lip, and Laerid Traehand, stocky and taciturn and usually as stolid as stone, was not the only man with a furrowed brow. Even news of Guybon and the aid he had brought caused only brief smiles, quickly swallowed in ill ease.

"Do you think they've heard of Arymilla's confidence?" she asked in one of the brief intervals when she was not responding to bows and curtsies. "No, that wouldn't be enough to upset Arilinde or Laerid." Arymilla inside the walls with thirty thousand men likely would fail to upset that pair.

"It wouldn't," Birgitte agreed. She glanced around as if to see who besides the Guardswomen might hear before going on. "Maybe they're worried over what's been worrying me. You didn't get lost when we got back. Or rather, you had help."

Elayne paused to offer a few hurried words to a gray-haired couple in woolens that would have suited prosperous farmers. Brannin and Elvaine Martan's manor house was much like a large farmhouse, sprawling and housing generations. A third of their armsmen were their sons and grandsons, nephews and great-nephews. Only those too young or too old to ride had been left behind to see to planting. She hoped the smiling pair did not feel they were getting short shrift, but she was walking on almost as soon as she stopped. "What do you mean, I had help?" she demanded.

"The palace is . . . changed." For a moment, there was confusion in the bond. Birgitte grimaced. "It sounds mad, I know, but it's as if the whole thing had been built to a slightly different plan." One of the Guardswomen ahead missed a step, caught herself. "I have a good memory. . . ." Birgitte hesitated, the bond filled with a jumble of emotions hastily pushed down. Most of her memories of past lives had vanished as surely as the winter's snow. Nothing remained before the founding of the White Tower, and the four lives s

he had lived between then and the end of the Trolloc Wars were beginning to fragment. Little seemed to frighten her, yet she feared losing the rest, especially her memories of Gaidal Cain. "I don't forget a path once I've followed it," she went on, "and some of these hallways aren't the same as they were. Some of the corridors have been . . . shifted. Others aren't there anymore, and there are some new. Nobody is talking about it that I could find out, but I think the old people are keeping quiet because they're afraid their wits are going, and the younger are afraid they'll lose their positions."

"That's—" Elayne shut her mouth. Clearly it was not impossible. Birgitte did not suffer from sudden fancies. Naris' reluctance to leave her apartments suddenly made sense, and perhaps Reene's earlier puzzlement, too. She almost wished being with child really had befuddled her. But how? "Not the Forsaken," she said firmly. "If they could do something like this, they'd have done it long since, and worse than. ... A good day to you, too, Lord Aubrem."

Lean and craggy and bald save for a thin white fringe, Aubrem Pensenor should have been dandling his grandchildren's children on his knee, but his back was straight, his eyes clear. He had been among the first to reach Caemlyn, with near to a hundred men and the first news that it was Arymilla Marne marching against the city, with Naean and Elenia supporting her. He began reminiscing about riding for her mother in the Succession, until Birgitte murmured that Lady Dyelin would be waiting for her.

"Oh, in that case, don't let me delay you, my Lady," the old man said heartily. "Please give my regards to Lady Dyelin. She's been so busy, I've not exchanged two words with her since reaching Caemlyn. My very best regards, if you will." House Pensenor had been allied to Dyelin's Taravin since time out of mind.

"Not the Forsaken," Birgitte said once Aubrem was out of earshot. "But what caused it is only the first question. Will it happen again? If it does, will the changes always be benign? Or might you wake up and find yourself in a room without doors or windows? What happens if you're sleeping in a room that disappears? If a corridor can go, so can a room. And what if it's more than the palace? We need to find out if all the streets still lead where they did. What if the next time, part of the city wall isn't there anymore?"

"You do think dark thoughts," Elayne said bleakly. Even with the Power in her, the possibilities were enough to give her a sour stomach.

Birgitte fingered the four golden knots on the shoulder of her white-collared red coat. "They came with these." Strangely, the worry carried by the bond was less now that she had shared her concerns. Elayne hoped the woman did not think she had answers. No, that really was impossible. Birgitte knew her too well for that. "Does this frighten you, Deni?" she asked. "I'll admit it does me."

"No more than needful, my Lady," the blocky woman answered without stopping her careful scan of what lay ahead. Where the others walked with a hand on their sword hilts, her hand rested on her long cudgel. Her voice was as placid, and as matter-of-fact, as her face. "One time a big wagon man named Eldrin Hackly came near breaking my neck. Not usually a rough man, but he was drunk beyond drunk that night. I couldn't get the angle right, and my cudgel seemed to bounce off his skull without making a dent. That frightened me more, because I knew certain sure I was about to die. This is just maybe, and any day you wake up, maybe you die."

Any day you wake up, maybe you die. There were worse ways to look at life, Elayne supposed. Still, she shivered. She was safe, at least till her babes were born, but no one else was.

Tags: Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net