Cadsuane was watching Rand, too. She and Nynaeve were wearing all of their ter’angreal jewelry. Nynaeve was making a good try at Aes Sedai calm. She seemed to practice that a great deal since sending Lan wherever she had sent him. Half the hilltop separated her plump brown mare from Cadsuane’s bay, of course. Nynaeve would never admit it, but Cadsuane intimidated her.
Logain rode up between Rand and Bashere, his black gelding prancing. The horse was almost the exact shade of his coat and cloak. “The sun is almost straight overhead,” he said. “Time we go down?” There was only a mere hint of question in that. The man chafed at taking orders. He did not wait on a reply. “Sandomere!” he called loudly. “Narishma!”
Merise held Narishma by his sleeve for another moment of instructions before letting him ride over, which made Logain scowl. Sun-dark Narishma with his dark, belled braids looked years younger than Rand, though he was a few years older in truth. Sitting his dun as straight as a sword, he nodded to Logain as to an equal, producing another scowl.
Sandomere spoke a quiet word to Ayako before mounting his dapple, and she touched his thigh once he was in the saddle. Wrinkled, with receding hair and a gray-streaked beard trimmed to a point and oiled, he made her appear youthful rather than ageless. He wore the red-and-gold dragon on his high black collar, now, as well as the silver sword. Every Asha’man on the hill did, even Manfor. He had only recently been raised to Dedicated, but he had been one of the first to come to the Black Tower, before there was a Black Tower. Most of the men who had begun with him were dead. Even Logain had not denied he deserved it.
Logain had enough sense not to call Cadsuane or Nynaeve, but they rode to join Rand anyway, placing themselves to either side of him, each briefly eyeing him, faces so smooth they might have been thinking anything. Their eyes met, and Nynaeve looked away quickly. Cadsuane gave a faint snort. And Min came, too. His “one more” to balance the honors. A man should never give promises in bed. He opened his mouth, and she arched an eyebrow, looking at him very directly. The bond felt full of. . . something dangerous.
“You stay behind me once we get there,” he told her, not at all what he had intended to say.
Danger faded to what he had come to recognize as love. There was wry amusement in the bond, too, for some reason. “I will if I want to, you wool-headed sheepherder,” she said with more than a little asperity, just as if the bond would not tell him her true feelings. Hard as those might be to decipher.
“If we’re going to do this fool thing, let’s get it done with,” Cadsuane said firmly, and heeled her dark bay down the hill.
A short distance from the hill, farms began to appear along a meandering dirt road through the forest, hard-packed by long years of use but still carrying a slick of mud from the last rainfall. The chimneys of thatched stone houses smoked with the midday meal-cooking. Sometimes girls and women sat out in the sun at their spinning wheels. Men in rough coats walked in the stone-walled fields checking their sprouting crops amid boys hoeing weeds. The pastures held brown-and-white cattle or black-tailed sheep, usually watched by a boy or two with bows or slings. There were wolves in these forests, and leopards and other things that enjoyed the taste of beef and mutton.
Some people shaded their eyes to peer at the passersby, doubtless wondering who these finely dressed folk were who had come to visit the Lady Deirdru. Surely there could be no other reason for their presence, heading toward the manor house and so far from anywhere important. No one seemed agitated or frightened, though, just going about their day’s work. Rumors of an army in the region surely would have upset them, and rumors of that sort spread like wildfire. Strange. The Seanchan could not Travel and arrive without news speeding ahead of them. It was very strange.
He felt Logain and the other two men seize saidin, filling themselves with it. Logain held almost as much as he could have himself, Narishma and Sandomere somewhat less. They were the strongest among the other Asha’man, though, and both had been at Dumai’s Wells. Logain had proven he could handle himself in other places, other battles. If this was a trap, they would be ready, and the other side would never know it until too late. Rand did not reach for the Source. He could feel Lews Therin lurking in his head. This was no time to give the madman a chance to get hold of the Power.
“Cadsuane, Nynaeve, you’d better embrace the Source now,” he said. “We’re getting close.”
“I’ve been holding saidar since back on that hill,” Nynaeve told him. Cadsuane snorted and gave him a look that called him an idiot.
Rand stilled a grimace before it could begin. His skin felt no tingling, no goosebumps. They had masked their ability, and with it, shielded him from sensing the Power in them. Men had had few advantages over women when it came to channeling, but now they had lost those few while women retained all of theirs. Some of the Asha’-man were trying to puzzle out how to duplicate what Nacelle had created, to find a weave that would allow men to detect women’s weaves, but so far without success. Well, it would have to be dealt with by someone else. He had all he could manage on his plate at the moment.
The farms continued, some alone in a clearing, others clustered three or four or five together. If they followed the road far enough they would reach the village of King’s Crossing in a few miles, where a wooden bridge spanned a narrow river called the Reshalle, but well short of that the road passed by a large clearing marked by a pair of tall stone gateposts, though there were neither gates nor fence. A hundred paces or more beyond it, at the end of a mud-slicked clay lane, lay Lady Deidru’s manor, two stories of thatch-roofed gray stone saved from looking a large farmhouse only by the gateposts and the tall twinned doors at the front. The stables and outbuildings had the same practical appearance, sturdy and unornamented. There was no one in sight, no stablemen, no servant on her way to fetch eggs, no men in the fields that flanked the lane. The house’s tall chimneys stood smokeless. It did smell of a trap. But the countryside was quiet, the farmers unruffled. There was only one way to find out.
Rand turned Tai’daishar in through the gateposts, and the others followed. Min did not heed his warning. She pushed her gray in between Tai’daishar and Nynaeve’s mare and grinned at him. The bond carried nervousness, but the woman grinned!
When he was halfway to the house, the doors opened, and two women came out, one in dark gray, the other in blue with red panels on her breast and ankle-length skirts. Sunlight glinted off the silvery leash connecting them. Two more appeared, and two more, until three pairs stood in a row to either side of the door. As he reached the three-quarter point, another woman stepped into the doorway, very dark and very small, dressed in pleated white, her head covered by a transparent scarf that fell over her face. The Daughter of the Nine Moons. She had been described to Bashere right down to her shaven head. A tension in his shoulders he had not been aware of melted. That she was actually here did away with the possibility of a trap. The Seanchan would not risk the heir to their throne in anything so dangerous. He
