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  "We will stay, Rand al’Thor." Bruan’s deceptively mild voice had a tight edge. The others’ agreements came in harder voices, but they came.

  "But it is wasting time," Han added, twisting his mouth. "May I never know shade if it is not." Jheran and Erim nodded.

  Rand had not expected them to give in so quickly. "Now and then you have to waste time to save it," he said, and Han snorted.

  Back at the green-striped tent the Thunder Walkers had lifted up the sides on poles, letting the breeze blow through the shaded interior. Hot and dry as it was, the Aiel seemed to find it refreshing. Rand did not think he sweated a drop less than he had in the sun. He pulled off the shoufa as he settled to the layered rugs with Bruan and the other chiefs facing him. The Maidens added their number to the Thunder Walkers around the tent; every so often banter between them drifted in, and laughter at it. This time Leiran seemed to be getting the better of it; at least, the Maidens rattled spears against bucklers at him twice. Rand understood almost none of it.

  Thumbing his short-stemmed pipe full of tabac, he passed the goatskin pouch around for the chiefs to fill their pipes — he had found a small cask of good Two Rivers leaf in Caemlyn — then channeled his alight while they sent a Thunder Walker for a burning twig from one of the cookfires. When all the pipes were lit they settled down to talk, puffing contentedly.

  The conversation lasted fully as long as his discussion with the lords, not because there was that much to talk about but because Rand had talked alone with the wetlanders. Aiel were touchy about honor; their lives were governed by ji’e’toh, honor and obligation, with rules as complex and odd as their humor. They talked of the Aiel still on their way down from Cairhien, of when Mat would arrive and of what if anything should be done about the Shaido. They talked about hunting and women and whether brandy was as good as oosquai, and about humor. Even patient Bruan finally spread his hands in surrender and gave up trying to explain Aiel jokes. What under the Light was funny about a woman stabbing her husband by accident, whatever the circumstances, or a man ending up married to the sister of the woman he wanted to marry? Han grumped and snorted and refused to believe Rand did not understand; he laughed so hard at the one about the stabbing that he nearly fell over. The one thing they did not talk about was the coming war against Illian.

  When they left, Rand stood squinting at the sun, halfway down toward the horizon. Han was repeating the story about the stabbing, and the departing chiefs chuckled over it again. Tapping his pipe out on the heel of his palm, Rand ground the dottle underfoot in the dust. There was still time to return to Caemlyn and meet Bashere, but he went back inside the tent and sat watching the sun sink. As it touched the horizon, turning red as blood, Enaila and Somara brought him a plate of mutton stew heaped high enough for two men, a round loaf of bread and a pitcher of mint tea that had been set in a bucket of water to cool.

  "You do not eat enough," Somara said, trying to smooth his hair before he moved his head away.

  Enaila eyed him. "If you did not avoid Aviendha so, she would see that you ate."

  "He attracts her interest, then runs from her," Somara muttered. "You must attract her again. Why do you not offer to wash her hair?"

  "He should not be that forward," Enaila said firmly. "Asking to brush her hair will be more than enough. He does not want her to think him forward."

  Somara sniffed. "She will not think he is forward when he runs from her. You can be too modest, Rand al’Thor."

  "You do realize that neither of you is my mother, don’t you?"

  The two cadin’sor-clad women looked at each other in confusion. "Do you think this is another wetlander joke?" Enaila asked, and Somara shrugged.

  "I do not know. He does not look amused." She patted Rand on the back. "I am sure it was a good joke, but you must explain it to us."

  Rand suffered in silence, grinding his teeth, while they watched him eat. They literally watched every spoonful. Matters became no better when they left with his plate and Sulin joined him. Sulin had some blunt, and most improper, advice on how he could reattract Aviendha’s notice; among the Aiel, it was the sort of thing a first-sister might do for a first-brother.

  "You must be decently modest in her eyes," the white-haired Maiden told him, "but not so modest she thinks you boring. Ask her to scrape your back in the sweat tent, but shyly, with your eyes downcast. When you undress for bed, let yourself dance as if life pleases you, then apologize when you suddenly realize she is there and put yourself straight into your blankets. Can you blush?"

  A great deal of suffering in silence. The Maidens knew too much, and not enough.

  When they returned to Caemlyn, well after the sun had gone down, Rand crept into his apartment with his boots in his hands, fumbling his way through the anteroom into his bedchamber in the dark. Even if he had not known Aviendha would be there, already on her pallet on the floor by the wall, he would have felt her presence. In the stillness of the night, he could hear her breathing. For once it seemed he had managed to wait long enough for her to fall asleep. He had tried to stop this, but Aviendha paid him no mind and the Maidens laughed at his ‘shyness’ and ‘modesty.’ Good things in a man when alone, they agreed, so long as not carried too far.

  He climbed into his bed with a sense of relief that Aviendha was already asleep — and some disgruntlement that he dared not light a lamp to wash — and she turned over on her pallet. Very likely she had been awake all along.

  "Sleep well and wake," was all she said.

  Thinking what idiocy it was to feel this sudden contentment because a woman he wanted to avoid told him good night, he stuffed a goose-down pillow beneath his head. Aviendha probably thought this the most marvelous joke; taunting was almost an art among Aiel, and the nearer it came to bringing blood, the better. Sleep began to come, and his last conscious thought was that he had a huge joke of his own, though only he and Mat and Bashere knew it yet. Sammael had no sense of humor at all, but that great hammer of an army waiting in Tear was the biggest joke the world had ever seen. With any luck, Sammael would be dead before he knew he should laugh.

  Chapter 5

  (Dice)

  A Different Dance

  The Golden Stag lived up to its name in most ways. Polished tables and benches with rose-carved legs dotted the large common room. One white-aproned serving girl did nothing but sweep the white stone floor. Blue-and-gold scrollwork made a broad painted band on the plaster walls just below the high beamed ceiling. The fireplaces were well-dressed stone, their hearths decorated with a few evergreen branches, and a stag chiseled above each lintel supporting a winecup in branching antlers. A tall clock with a little gilding stood on one mantel. A knot of musicians played on a small dais at the back, two perspiring men in their shirtsleeves with keening flutes, a pair plucking nine-string bitterns, and a red-faced woman in a blue-striped dress working tiny wooden hammers across a dulcimer on thin legs. More than a dozen serving maids scurried in and out, stepping quickly in their aprons and pale blue dresses. Most were pretty, though some carried nearly as many years as Mistress Daelvin, the round little innkeeper with her wispy gray bun at the nape of her neck. Just the sort of place Mat liked; it fairly oozed comfort and an air of money. He had chosen it because it sat nearly dead center in the town, but the other had not hurt.

  Not everything fitted the second-best inn in Maerone, of course. The smells from the kitchen were mutton and turnips again, and the inevitable spicy barley soup, and they mingled with the smell of dust and horses from outside. Well, food was a problem in a town jammed with refugees and soldiers, and more in camps all around it. Men’s voices singing raucous marching songs came and went in the street, the sounds of boots and horses’ hooves and men cursing the heat. The common room was hot, too, without a breath of air stirring; had the windows been swung out, dust would soon have coated everything inside, and it still would not have done much for the heat inside. Maerone was a griddle.

  As far as Mat could see, the whole bloo
dy world was drying up, and he did not want to think about why. He wished he could forget the heat, forget why he was in Maerone, forget everything. His good green coat, gold-embroidered on collar and cuffs, was undone, his fine linen shirt unlaced, yet he still sweated like a horse. It might have helped to remove the black silk scarf looped around his neck, but he seldom did where anyone could see. Draining the last of his wine, he set the burnished pewter cup on the table at his elbow and picked up his broad-brimmed hat to fan himself. Whatever he drank no sooner went in than he sweated it out.

  When he chose to stay at the Golden Stag, the lords and officers of the Band of the Red Hand followed his lead, which meant all others stayed clear. That usually did not displease Mistress Daelvin. She could have rented out every bed five times over just among the lords and lordlings of the Band, and that sort paid well, had few fights and usually took them outside before spilling blood. This midday, however, only nine or ten men occupied the tables, and she occasionally blinked at the empty benches, patted at her bun and sighed; she would not sell much wine before evening. A large part of her profits came from wine. The musicians played vigorously, though. A handful of lords pleased with the music — anyone with gold deserved a "my Lord" so far as they were concerned — could be more generous than a room full of common soldiers.

  Unfortunately for the musicians’ purses, Mat was the only man listening, and he winced at every third note. It really was not their fault; the music sounded fine if you did not know what you were listening to. Mat did — he had taught it to them, clapping the beat and humming — but no one else had heard that tune in more than two thousand years. The best to be said was that they had the rhythms right.

  A bit of conversation caught his ear. Tossing his hat down, he waved his cup to signal for more wine and leaned across his table toward the three men drinking around the next. "What was that?"

  "We are trying to figure out how to win some of our money back from you," Talmanes said, unsmiling over his winecup. He was not upset. Only a few years older than Mat’s twenty, and a head shorter, Talmanes seldom smiled. The man always made Mat think of a compressed spring. "No one can beat you at cards." The commander of half the Band’s cavalry, he was a lord here in Cairhien, but the front of his head was shaved and powdered, though sweat had washed some of it away. A good many younger Cairhienin lords had taken up soldiers’ styles. Talmanes’ coat was plain, too, without a noble’s slashes of color, although he was entitled to quite a few.

  "Not so," Mat protested. True, when his luck was in, it was perfect, but it ran in cycles, especially with things that had as much order as a deck of cards. "Blood and ashes! You won fifty crowns from me last week." Fifty crowns; a year or so ago, he would have turned backflips at winning one crown, and wept at the thought of losing one. A year or so ago, he had not had one to lose.

  "How many hundred behind does that leave me?" Talmanes asked dryly. "I want a chance to win some back." If he ever did start winning against Mat with any consistency, he would start worrying too. Like most of the Band, he took Mat’s luck as a talisman.

  "Dice are no bloody good," Daerid said. Commander of the Band’s foot, he drank thirstily and ignored a grimace only half-hidden behind Nalesean’s oiled beard. Most nobles Mat had met thought dice common, fit only for peasants. "I have never seen you end the day behind at dice. It has to be something you have no control over, no hand in, if you understand."

  Just a little taller than his fellow Cairhienin Talmanes, Daerid was a good fifteen years older, his nose broken more than once and three white scars crisscrossing his face. The only one of the three not nobly born, he wore the front of his head shaved and powdered, too; Daerid had been a soldier all his life.

  "We thought horses," Nalesean put in, gesturing with his pewter cup. A blocky man, taller than either of the Cairhienin, he led the other half of the cavalry in the Band. Given the heat, Mat often wondered why he kept his luxuriant black beard, but he trimmed it every morning to keep the point sharp. And where Daerid and Talmanes wore their plain gray coats hanging open, Nalesean had his — green silk with those padded Tairen sleeves striped and cuffed in gold satin — buttoned to the neck. His face glistened with sweat that he ignored. "Burn my soul, but your luck holds hard with battle and cards. And dice," he added with another grimace at Daerid. "But in horse racing, it’s all the horse."

  Mat smiled and propped his elbows on the table. "Find yourself a good horse, and we’ll see." His luck might not affect a horse race — aside from dice and cards and the like, he could never be sure what it would touch or when — but he had grown up watching his father trade horseflesh, and his own eye for a horse was fairly sharp.

  "Do you want this wine, or not? I cannot pour it if I cannot reach your cup."

  Mat glanced over his shoulder. The serving maid behind him with a polished pewter pitcher was short and slim, a dark-eyed, pale-cheeked beauty with black curls nestling on her shoulders. And that precise, musical Cairhienin accent made her voice into chimes. He had had his eye on Betse Silvin since the first day he walked into the Golden Stag, but this was his first chance to speak to her; there were always five things that needed doing immediately and ten that should have been done yesterday. The other men had already buried their faces in their wine, leaving him as alone with the woman as they could without walking out. They had manners, even the two nobles.

  Grinning, Mat swung his legs over the bench and held out his cup for her to fill. "Thank you, Betse," he said, and she bobbed a curtsy. When he asked her to pour one for herself and join him, however, she set the pitcher on the table, folded her arms and tilted her head to one side, eyeing him up and down.

  "I hardly think Mistress Daelvin would like that. Oh, no, I do not think she would. Are you a lord? They all seem to jump for you, but no one calls you ‘my Lord.’ They barely even bow; just the commoners."

  Mat’s eyebrows shot up. "No," he said, more curtly than he wished, "I am not a lord." Rand could let people run around calling him Lord Dragon and the like, but that was not for Matrim Cauthon. No, indeed. Taking a deep breath, he put his grin back on. Some women tried to nudge a man off balance, but it was a dance he was good at. "Just call me Mat, Betse. I’m sure Mistress Daelvin won’t mind if you just sit with me."

  "Oh, yes, she would. But I suppose I can talk a bit; you must be almost a lord. Why are you wearing that in this heat?" Leaning forward, she pushed his scarf down with a finger. He had not been paying attention, and had let it slip, a little. "What is this?" She ran her finger along the pale thickened ridge that circled his neck. "Did someone try to hang you? Why? You are too young to be a hardened scofflaw." He pulled his head back and hastily retied the black silk to hide his scar, but Betse was not put off. Her hand dipped into the unlaced front of his shirt to pull up the silver foxhead medallion he wore on a leather thong. "Was it for stealing this? It looks valuable; is it valuable?" Mat snatched the medallion away, stuffed it back where it belonged. The woman hardly drew breath, certainly not enough for him to get a word in. He heard Nalesean and Daerid chuckling behind him, and his face darkened. Sometimes his luck with gambling was stood on its head with women, and they always found it funny. "No, they would not have let you keep it if you stole it, would they?" Betse chattered on. "And if you are almost a lord, I suppose you can own things like that. Perhaps it was because you knew too much. You look a young man who knows a great deal. Or thinks he does." She smiled one of those shrewd little smiles that women wore when they wanted to fuddle a man. It seldom meant they knew anything, but they could make you think they did. "Did they try to hang you for thinking you knew too much? Or was it for pretending to be a lord? Are you sure you are not a lord?"

  Daerid and Nalesean were laughing right out, now, and even Talmanes was chuckling, though they tried to pretend it was about something else. Daerid wheezingly interjected some tale about a man falling off a horse whenever he had breath enough, but there was nothing funny in the bits Mat heard.

  He kept his gr
in on, though. He was not going to be routed even if she could talk faster than he could run. She was very pretty, and he had spent the last few weeks talking to the likes of Daerid and worse, sweaty men who sometimes forgot to shave and too often had no chance to bathe. Perspiration beaded Betse’s cheeks, but she gave off a faint smell of lavender-scented soap. "Actually, I got that scratch for knowing too little," he said lightly. Women always liked it when you played down your scars; the Light knew he was growing enough of them. "I know too much now, but too little then. You could say I was hanged for knowledge."

  Shaking her head, Betse pursed her lips. "That sounds like it is supposed to be witty, Mat. Lordlings say witty things all the time, but you say you are not a lord. Besides, I am a simple woman; wit goes right over my head. I think simple words are best. Since you are not a lord, you should speak simply, or else some might think you were playing at being a lord. No woman likes a man pretending to be what he is not. Maybe you could explain what you were trying to say?"

  Maintaining his smile was an effort. Bandying words with her was not going at all the way he wanted. He could not tell whether she was a complete nit or just managing to make him trip over his ears trying to keep up. Either way, she was still pretty, and she still smelled of lavender, not sweat. Daerid and Nalesean seemed to be choking to death. Talmanes was humming "A Frog on the Ice." So he was skidding about with his feet in the air, was he?

  Mat put down his winecup and rose, bowing over Betse’s hand. "I am who I am and no more, but your face drives words right out my head." That made her blink; whatever they said, women always like flowery talk. "Will you dance?"