The tenth morning Egwene had finally stopped wearing her hair in those two braids, though it was the oddest thing. The Wise Ones talked to her for the longest time, off by themselves, while the gai'shain were folding their tents and Rand was saddling Jeade'en. Had he not known her better, he might have thought Egwene's headdown stance was an attempt at meekness, but that word could only be applied to her in comparison with Nynaeve. And maybe Moiraine. Suddenly Egwene clapped, her hands, laughing and hugging each of the Wise Ones in turn before hurriedly unraveling the plaits.
When he asked Aviendha what was going on — she had been sitting outside his tent when he woke — she muttered sourly, “They have decided she has grown —” Cutting off abruptly, she gave him a level look, folding her arms, and went on in a cool voice, “It is Wise Ones' business, Rand al'Thor. Ask them, if you wish, but be prepared to hear that it is no concern of yours.”
Egwene had grown what? Her hair? It made no sense. Aviendha would not say another word on the matter; instead she scraped a bit of grayish lichen from a rock and began describing how to poultice a wound with it. The woman was learning a Wise One's ways too quickly to suit him. The Wise Ones themselves paid him little apparent attention; of course, they did not need to, with Aviendha perched on his shoulder in a manner of speaking.
The rest of the Aiel, the Jindo at any rate, became a bit less standoffish each day, perhaps a little less uneasy about what He Who Comes With the Dawn meant for them, but Aviendha was the only one who spoke to him at any length. Each evening Lan came to practice the sword, and Rhuarc to teach him the spears and the Aiel's odd way of fighting with both hands and feet. The Warder knew something of that, and joined the practice sessions. Most others avoided Rand, especially the wagon drivers, who had learned he was the Dragon Reborn, a man who could channel; when he caught one of those roughfaced men looking at him, the fellow might as well have been staring at the Dark One. Not Kadere, though, or the gleeman.
Almost every morning as they started out, the peddler rode over on one of the mules from the wagons the Trollocs had burned, his face seeming even darker for the long white scarf tied about his head and hanging down his neck. With Rand he was all diffidence, but his cold, unchanging eyes made his hooked nose look an eagle's beak in truth.
“My Lord Dragon,” he had begun the morning after the attack, then wiped sweat from his face with his everpresent handkerchief and shifted uncomfortably on the battered old saddle he had found somewhere for the mule. “If I may call you that?”
The charred wreckage of the three wagons was dwindling in the distance to the south, and with them the graves of two of Kadere's men and a good many more Aiel. The Trollocs had been dragged from the camps and left for the scavengers, yipping, bigeared creatures — Rand did not know whether they were large foxes or small dogs; they looked like bits of each — and vultures with redtipped wings, some still circling in the sky as if fearful of landing in the melee among their fellows.
“Call me as you will,” Rand told him.
“My Lord Dragon. I have been thinking of what you said yesterday.” Kadere looked around as if he feared being overheard, though Aviendha was with the Wise Ones, and his own train of wagons, fifty paces or more away, held the nearest ears. He dropped his voice near a whisper anyway, and wiped his face nervously. His eyes never altered, though. “What you said about knowledge being valuable, paving the way to greatness. It is true.”
Rand looked at him for a long moment, not blinking, keeping his face blank. “You said that, not I,” he said finally.
“Well, perhaps I did. But it is true, is it not, my Lord Dragon?” Rand nodded, and the peddler went on, still whispering, eyes still shifting for eavesdroppers. “Yet there can be danger in knowledge. In giving more than receiving. A man who sells knowledge must have not only his price, but safeguards. Assurances and sureties against... repercussions. Would you not agree?”
“Do you have knowledge you want to... sell, Kadere?”
The heavyset man frowned at his train. Keille had dropped down to walk awhile despite the growing heat, her bulk sheathed in white and a white lace shawl on the ivory combs in her coarse dark hair. Every so often she glanced at the two men riding together, her expression unreadable at this distance. It still seemed odd, someone so large moving so lightly. Isendre had climbed out onto the driver's seat of the first wagon and was watching more openly, hanging on to lean around the corner of the whitepainted wagon as it swayed and lurched.
“That woman may be the death of me yet,” Kadere muttered. “Perhaps we can talk again later, my Lord Dragon, if it please you.” Booting the mule hard, he trotted to the lead wagon and swung himself onto the driver's seat with surprising nimbleness, tying the mule's reins to an iron ring at the corner of the big wagonbox. He and Isendre disappeared inside and did not emerge again until they stopped for the night.
He returned the next day, and other days when he saw that Rand was alone, always hinting at knowledge he might sell for the proper price, if the proper safeguards were set. Once he went so far as to say that anything — murder, treason, anything at all — could be forgiven in return for knowledge, and seemed increasingly nervous when Rand would not agree with him. Whatever he wanted to sell, he apparently wanted Rand's blanket protection for every misdeed he might ever have done.
“I don't know that I want to buy knowledge,” Rand told him more than once. “There's always the question of price, isn't there? Some prices I might not want to pay.”
Natael drew Rand aside that first evening, after the fires were lit and cooking smells began to drift among the low tents. The gleeman seemed almost as nervous as Kadere. “I have thought a good deal about you,” he said, peering at Rand sideways, head tilted to one side. “You should have a grand epic to tell your tale. The Dragon Reborn. He Who Comes With the Dawn. Man of who knows how many prophecies, in this Age and others.” He drew his cloak around him, the colorful patches fluttering in the breeze. Twilight was short in the Waste; night and cold came on quickly and together. “How do you feel about your prophesied destiny? I must know, if I am to compose this epic.”
“Feel?” Rand looked around the camp, at the Jindo moving among the tents. How many of them would be dead before he was done? “Tired. I feel tired.”
“Hardly a heroic emotion,” Natael murmured. “But to be expected, given your destiny. The world riding on your shoulders, most people willing to kill you given the chance, the rest fools who think to use you, ride you to power and glory.”
“Which are you, Natael?”
“I? I am a simple gleeman.” The man lifted an edge of his patchcovered cloak as if for proof. “I would not take your place for all the world, not with the fate that accompanies it. Death or madness, or both. 'His blood on the rocks of Shayol Ghul...' That is what The Karaethon Cycle, the Prophecies of the Dragon, says, is it not? That you must die to save fools who will heave a sigh of relief at your death. No, I would not accept that for all your power and more.”
“Rand,” Egwene said, stepping out of the deepening darkness with her pale cloak wrapped around her, the hood well up, “we have come to see how you have held up after your Healing, and a day in that heat.” Moiraine was with her, face shrouded in the deep cowl of her white cloak, and Bair and Amys, Melaine and Seana, heads swathed in dark shawls, all watching him, calm and cold as the night. Even Egwene. She did not have the Aes Sedai agelessness yet, but she had Aes Sedai eyes.
He did not notice Aviendha at first, trailing behind the others. For a moment he thought he saw compassion on her face, but if it was there, it vanished as soon as she saw him looking. Imagination. He was tired.
“Another time,” Natael said, speaking to Rand but looking at the women in that peculiar sidelong manner. “We will talk another time.” With the slightest of bows he strode away.
“Does the future chafe you, Rand?” Moiraine said quietly when the gleeman was gone. “Prophecies speak in flowery, hidden language. They do not always mean what they seem to say.”
“The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills,” he told her. “I will do what I must. Remember that, Moiraine. I will do what I must.” She seemed satisfied; with Aes Sedai, it was hard to tell. She would not be satisfied when she learned everything.
Natael returned the next evening, and the next, and the next, always talking about the epic he would compose, but he displayed a morbid streak, digging for how Rand meant to face madness and death. His tale was meant to be a tragedy, it appeared. Rand certainly had no desire to root his fears out into the open; what was in his heart and head could remain buried there. Finally the gleeman seemed to tire of hearing him say “I will do what I must,” and stopped coming. It seemed that he did not want to compose his epic unless it could be full of pained emotion. The man looked frustrated when he stalked off for the last time, cloak fluttering furiously behind him.
The fellow was odd, but going by Thom Merrilin, so were all gleemen. Natael certainly demonstrated other gleeman's traits. For instance, he certainly had a fine opinion of himself. Rand did not care whether the man called him by titles, but Natael addressed Rhuarc, and Moiraine, the few times he was around her, as if he was plainly their equal. That was Thom to perfection. And he gave up performing for the Jindo at all, beginning to spend most of every night at the Shaido camp. There were more of the Shaido, he explained to Rhuarc as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. A larger audience. None of the Jindo liked it, but there was nothing even Rhuarc could do. In the Threefold Land, a gleeman was allowed anything short of murder without being called down for it.
Aviendha spent her nights among the Wise Ones, and sometimes walked with them for an hour or so during the day, all of them gathered around her, even Moiraine and Egwene. At first Rand thought they must be advising her on how to handle him, how to pull what they wanted to know out of his head. Then one day, with the sun molten overhead, a ball of fire as big as a horse suddenly burst into being ahead of the Wise Ones' party and went spinning and tumbling away, blazing a furrow across the sere land, until it finally dwindled and winked out.
Some of the wagon drivers pulled their startled, snorting teams to a halt and stood to watch, calling to each other in a blend of fear, confusion and coarse curses. Murmurs rippled through the Jindo, and they stared, as did the Shaido, but the two columns of Aiel kept moving with barely a pause. It was among the Wise Ones that real excitement was evident. The four of them clustered around Aviendha, all apparently talking at once, with considerable armwaving. Moiraine and Egwene, leading their horses, tried to get in a word; even without hearing, Rand knew that Amys told them in no uncertain terms, shaking a furiously admonishing finger, to stay out of it.
Staring at the blackened gouge stretching arrowstraight for half a mile, Rand sat back down in his saddle. Teaching Aviendha to channel. Of course. That was what they were doing. He scrubbed sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand; the sun had nothing to do with it. When that fireball leaped out into existence, he had instinctively reached for the True Source. It had been like trying to dip water with a torn sieve. All his clawing at saidin might as well have been clawing at air. One day that could happen when he needed the Power desperately. He had to learn, too, and he had no teacher. He had to learn not just because the Power would kill him before he had to worry about going mad if he did not; he had to learn because he had to use it. Learn to use it; use it to learn. He began laughing so hard that some of the Jin
