“That's a fine horse,” she said. “What have you named him?”
“Jeade'en,” he said cautiously, losing some of his good spirits. He was a little ashamed of the name, of his reasons for choosing it. One of his favorite books had always been The Travels of Jain Farstrider, and that great traveler had named his horse Jeade'en — True Finder, in the Old Tongue — because the animal had always been able to find the way home. It would have been nice to think Jeade'en might carry him home one day. Nice, but not likely, and he did not want anyone suspecting the cause for the name. Boyish fancies had no place in his life now. There was not much room for anything but what he had to do.
“A fine name,” she said absently. He knew she had read the book, too, and half expected her to recognize the name, but she seemed to be mulling over something else, chewing her lower lip pensively.
He was content with silence. The last dregs of the city gave way to country and pitiful scattered farms. Not even a Congar or a Coplin, Two River folk notorious for laziness among other things, would keep a place as run down and ramshackle as these rough stone houses, walls slanting as if about to topple over on the chickens scratching in the dirt. Sagging barns leaned against laurels or spicewoods. Roofs of cracked and broken slates all looked as if they leaked. Goats bleated disconsolately in stone pens that might have been thrown together hastily that morning. Barefoot men and women hoed stoop shouldered in unfenced fields, not looking up even when the large party was passing. Redbeaks and thrushes warbling in the small thickets were not enough to lighten the feel of oppressive gloom.
I have to do something about this. I... No, not now. First things first. I've done what I could for them in a few weeks. I can't do anything more now. He tried not to look at the tumbledown farms. Were the olive groves in the south as bad? The people who worked those did not even own the land; it all belonged to High Lords. No. The breeze. Nice, the way it cuts the heat. I can enjoy it a bit longer. I have to tell them, soon now.
“Rand,” Egwene said abruptly, “I want to talk to you.” Something serious by her expression; those big dark eyes, fixed on him, held a light reminiscent of Nynaeve's when she was about to lecture. “I want to talk about Elayne.”
“What about her?” he asked warily. He touched his pouch, where two letters crinkled against a small hard object. If they had not both been in the same elegantly flowing hand, he would not have believed they came from the same woman. And after all that kissing and snuggling. The High Lords were easier to understand than women.
“Why did you let her go in that way?”
Puzzled, he stared at her. “She wanted to go. I'd have had to tie her up to stop her. Besides, she'll be safer in Tanchico than near me — or Mat — if we are going to attract bubbles of evil the way Moiraine says. You would be, too.”
“That isn't what I mean at all. Of course she wanted to go. And you had no right to stop her. But why didn't you tell her you wished she would stay?”
“She wanted to go,” he repeated, and grew more confused when she rolled her eyes as if he were speaking gibberish. If he had no right to stop Elayne, and she wanted to go, why was he supposed to try to talk her out of it? Especially when she was safer gone.
Moiraine spoke, right behind him. “Are you ready to tell me the next secret? It has been clear you were keeping something from me. At the least I might be able to tell you if you are leading us over a cliff.”
Rand sighed. He had not heard her and Lan closing up on him. And Mat as well, although still holding a distance between himself and the Aes Sedai. Mat's face was a study, doubt and reluctance and grim determination all running across it by turns, especially when he glanced at Moiraine. He never looked at her directly, only from the edge of his eye.
“Are you sure you want to come, Mat?” Rand asked.
Mat shrugged and affected a grin, not a very confident one. “Who could pass up a chance to see bloody Rhuidean?” Egwene raised her eyebrows at him. “Oh, pardon my language, Aes Sedai. I've heard you say as bad, and for less cause, I'll wager.” Egwene stared at him indignantly, but spots of color in her cheeks said he had scored a hit.
“Be glad Mat is here,” Moiraine said to Rand, her voice cool, and not pleased. “You made a grave error letting Perrin run off, hiding his going from me. The world rests on your shoulders, but they must both support you or you will fall, and the world with you.” Mat flinched, and Rand thought he very nearly turned his gelding and rode away on the spot.
“I know my duty,” he told her. And I know my fate, he thought, but he did not say that aloud; he was not asking sympathy. “One of us had to go back, Moiraine, and Perrin wanted to. You're willing to let anything go to save the world. I... I do what I have to.” The Warder nodded, though he said nothing; Lan would not disagree with Moiraine in front of others.
“And the next secret?” she said insistently. She would not give up until she had ferreted it out, and he had no reason to keep it secret any longer. Not this part of it.
“Portal Stones,” he said simply. “If we are lucky.”
“Oh, Light!” Mat groaned. “Bloody flaming Light! Don't grimace at me, Egwene! Lucky? Isn't once enough, Rand? You almost killed us, remember? No, worse than killed. I would rather ride back to one of those farms and ask for a job slopping pigs the rest of my life.”
“You can go your own way if you want, Mat,” Rand told him. Moiraine's calm face was a mask over fury, but he ignored the icy stare that tried to still his tongue. Even Lan looked disapproving, for all his hard face did not change very much; the Warder believed in duty before anything else. Rand would do his duty, but his friends... He did not like making people do things; he would not do it to his friends. That much he could avoid, surely. “You've no reason to come to the Waste.”
“Oh, yes I do. At least... Oh, burn me! I've one life to give away, don't I? Why not like this?” Mat laughed nervously, and a bit wildly. “Bloody Portal Stones! Light!”
Rand frowned; he was the one they all said was supposed to go mad, but Mat was the one who seemed on the edge of it now.
Egwene blinked at Mat worriedly, but it was Rand she leaned toward. “Rand, Verin Sedai told me a little about Portal Stones. She told me about the... journey you took. Do you really mean to do this?”
“It's what I have to do, Egwene.” He had to move quickly, and there was no quicker way than Portal Stones. Remnants of an Age older than the Age of Legends; even Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends had not understood them, it seemed. But there was no quicker way. If it worked the way he hoped.
Moiraine had listened to the exchange patiently. Especially to Mat's part of it, though Rand could not see why. Now she said, “Verin also told me of your journey using Portal Stones. That was only a few people and horses, not hundreds, and if you did not almost kill everyone as Mat says, it yet sounded an experience no one would wish to repeat. Nor did it turn out as you expected. It also required a great deal of the Power; almost enough to kill you at least, Venn said. Even if you leave most of the Aiel behind, do you dare risk the attempt?”
“I have to,” he said, feeling at his belt pouch, at the small hard shape behind the letters, but she went right on as if he had not spoken.
“Are you even certain there is a Portal Stone in the Waste? Verin certainly knows more of them than I, but I have never heard of one. If there is, will it place us any closer to Rhuidean than we are right now?”
“Some six hundred or so years ago,” he told her, “a peddler tried to get a look at Rhuidean.” Another time it would have been a pleasure to be able to lecture her for a change. Not today. There was too much he did not know. “This fellow apparently didn't see anything of it; he claimed to have seen a golden city up in the clouds, drifting over the mountains.”
“There are no cities in the Waste,” Lan said, “in the clouds or on the ground. I've fought the Aiel. They have no cities.”
Egwene nodded. “Aviendha told me she had never seen a city until she left the Waste.”
“Maybe so,” Rand said. “But the peddler also saw something sticking out of the side of one of those mountains. A Portal Stone. He described it perfectly. There isn't anything else like a Portal Stone. When I described one to the chief librarian in the Stone...” Without naming what he was after, he did not add. “...he recognized it, even if he didn't know what it was, enough to show me four on an old map of Tear — ”
“Four?” Moiraine sounded startled. “All in Tear? Portal Stones are not so common as that.”
“Four,” Rand said definitely. The bony old librarian had been certain, even digging out a tattered yellowed manuscript telling of efforts to move the “unknown artifacts of an earlier Age” to the Great Holding. Every attempt had failed, and the Tairens had finally given up. That was confirmation to Rand; Portal Stones resisted being moved. “One lies not an hour's ride from where we are,” he continued. “The Aiel allowed the peddler to leave, since he was a peddler. With one of his mules and as much water as he could carry on his back. Somehow he made it as far as a stedding in the Spine of the World, where he met a man named Soran Milo, who was writing a book called The Killers of the Black Veil. The librarian brought me a battered copy when I asked for books on the Aiel. Milo apparently based it all on Aiel who came to trade at the stedding, and he got almost everything wrong anyway, according to Rhuarc, but a Portal Stone can't be anything but a Portal Stone.” He had examined other maps and manuscripts, dozens of them, supposedly studying Tear and its history, learning the land; no one could have had a clue what he intended before a few minutes ago.
Moiraine sniffed, and her white mare, Aldieb, frisked a few steps, picking up her irritation. “A supposed story told by a supposed peddler who claimed to have seen a golden city floating in the clouds. Has Rhuarc seen this Portal Stone? He has actually been to Rhuidean. Even if this peddler did go into the Waste, and did see a Portal Stone, it could have been anywhere. A man telling a story usually tries to better what really happened. A city floating in the clouds?”
“How do you know it doesn't?” he said. Rhuarc had been willing to laugh at all the wrong things Milo had written about Aiel, but he had not been very forthcoming about Rhuidean. No, more than that; or less, rather. The Aielman had refused even to comment on the parts of the book supposedly about Rhuidean. Rhuidean, in the lands of the Jenn Aiel, the clan which is not; that was almost the extent of what Rhuarc would say about it. Rhuidean was not to be spoken of.
The Aes Sedai was not best pleased with his flippant remark, but he did not care. She had kept too many secrets herself, made him follow her on blind trust too often. Let it be her turn. She had to learn that he was not a puppet. I'll take her advice when I think it's right, but I won't dance on Tar Valon's strings again. He w
