“With them!” Morgase exclaimed. “I feared he was in Cairhien right this —”
“You have a guest, Morgase? I should have been told, so I could greet her.”
A big man strode into the room, tall, his goldembroidered red silk coat fitting massive shoulders and a deep chest. Alteima did not need to see the radiant look on Morgase's face to name him as Lord Gaebril; the assurance with which he had interrupted the Queen did that. He lifted a finger, and the serving woman curtsied and left quickly; he did not ask Morgase's permission to dismiss her servants from her presence, either. He was darkly handsome, incredibly so, with wings of white at his temples
Composing her face to commonplace, Alteima put on a marginally welcoming smile, suitable for an elderly uncle with neither power, wealth nor influence. He might be gorgeous, but even if he did not belong to Morgase, he was not a man she would try manipulating unless she absolutely had to. There was perhaps even more of an air of power about him than about Morgase.
Gaebril stopped by Morgase and put his hand on her bare shoulder in a very familiar way. She clearly came close to resting her cheek on the back of his hand, but his eyes were on Alteima. She was used to men looking at her, but these eyes made her shift uneasily; they were far too penetrating, saw far too much.
“You come from Tear?” The sound of his deep voice sent a tingle through her; her skin, even her bones, felt as though she had been dipped in icy water, but oddly her momentary anxiety melted.
It was Morgase who answered; Alteima could not seem to find her tongue with him watching her. “This is the High Lady Alteima, Gaebril. She has been telling me all about the Dragon Reborn. She was in the Stone of Tear when it fell. Gaebril, there really were Aiel —” The pressure of his hand cut her off. Irritation flashed across her face, but then it was gone, replaced by a smile beaming up at him.
His eyes, still on Alteima, sent that shiver through her again, and this time she gasped aloud. “So much talking must have fatigued you, Morgase,” he said without shifting his gaze. “You do too much. Go to your bedchamber and sleep. Go now. I will wake you when you have rested enough.”
Morgase stood immediately, still smiling at him devotedly. Her eyes seemed slightly glazed. “Yes, I am tired. I will take a nap now, Gaebril.”
She glided from the room with never a glance at Alteima, but Alteima's attention was all on Gaebril. Her heart beat faster; her breath quickened. He was surely the handsomest man she had ever seen. The grandest, the strongest, the most powerful... Superlatives rolled through her mind like a flood.
Gaebril paid no more attention to Morgase's leaving than she did. Taking the chair the Queen had vacated, he leaned back with his boots stretched out in front of him. “Tell me why you came to Caemlyn, Alteima.” Again the chill ran through her. “The absolute truth, but keep it brief. You can give me details later if I want them.”
She did not hesitate. “I tried to poison my husband and had to flee before Tedosian and that trull Estanda could kill me instead, or worse. Rand al'Thor meant to let them do it, as an example.” Telling made her cringe. Not because it was a truth she had kept hidden so much as because she found she wanted to please him more than anything else in the world, and she feared that he might send her away. But he wanted the truth. “I chose Caemlyn because I could not bear Illian and though Andor is little better, Cairhien is in near ruins. In Caemlyn, I can find a wealthy husband, or one who thinks he is my protector if need be, and use his power to —”
He stopped her with a wave of his hand, chuckling. “A vicious little cat, though pretty. Perhaps pretty enough to keep, with your teeth and claws drawn.” Suddenly his face became more intent. “Tell me what you know of Rand al'Thor, and especially his friends, if he has any, his companions, his allies.”
She told him, talking until her mouth and throat went dry, and her voice cracked and rasped. She never raised her goblet until he told her to drink; then she gulped the wine down and spoke on. She could please him. She could please him better than Morgase could think of.
The maids working in Morgase's bedchamber dropped hasty curtsies, surprised to see her there in the middle of the morning. Waving them out of the room, she climbed onto her bed still in her dress. For a time she lay staring at the gilded carvings of the bedposts. No Lions of Andor here, but roses. For the Rose Crown of Andor, but roses suited her better than lions...
Stop being stubborn, she chided herself, then wondered why. She had told Gaebril she was tired, and — Or had he told her? Impossible. She was the Queen of Andor, and no man told her to do anything. Gareth. Now why had she thought of Gareth Bryne? He had certainly never told her to do anything; the CaptainGeneral of the Queen's Guards obeyed the Queen, not the other way around. But he had been stubborn, entirely capable of digging in his heels until she came around to his way. Why am I thinking of him? I wish he were here. That was ridiculous. She had sent him away for opposing her; about what no longer seemed quite clear, but that was not important. He had opposed her. She could remember the feelings she had had for him only dimly, as though he had been gone for years. Surely it had not been so long? Stop being stubborn!
Her eyes closed, and she fell immediately into sleep, a sleep troubled by restless dreams of running from something she could not see.
Chapter 2
(Dragon)
Rhuidean
High in the city of Rhuidean, Rand al'Thor looked out from a tall window; whatever glass might have once been in it was long since gone. The shadows below slanted sharply east. A bardharp played softly in the room behind him. Sweat evaporated from his face almost as soon as it appeared; his red silk coat, damp between the shoulders, hung open in a fruitless bid for air, and his shirt was unlaced half down his chest. Night in the Aiel Waste would bring freezing cold, but during daylight even a breeze was never cool.
With his hands above his head on the smooth stone window frame, his coatsleeves fell down to reveal the front part of the figure wrapped around each forearm: a goldenmaned, serpentine creature with eyes like the sun, scaled in scarlet and gold, each foot tipped with five golden claws. Part of his skin, they were not tattoos; they glittered like precious metals and polished gems, seemed almost alive in the lateafternoon sunlight.
Those marked him, to the people on this side of the mountain range variously called the Dragonwall or the Spine of the World, as He Who Comes With the Dawn. And like the herons branded into his palms, they marked him for those beyond the Dragonwall, too, according to the Prophecies, as the Dragon Reborn. In both cases prophesied to unite, save — and destroy.
They were names he would have avoided if he could, but that time was long past if it had ever existed, and he no longer thought of it. Or if he did, on rare occasion, it was with the faint regret of a man recalling a foolish dream of his boyhood. As if he were not close enough to boyhood to remember every minute. Instead, he tried to think only of what he had to do. Fate and duty held him on the path like a rider's reins, but he had often been called stubborn. The end of the road must be reached, but if it could be attained by a different way, maybe it need not be the end. Small chance. No chance, almost certainly. The Prophecies demanded his blood.
Rhuidean stretched below him, seared by a sun still pitiless as it sank toward craggy mountains, bleak, with barely a sign of vegetation. This rugged, broken land, where men had killed or died over a pool of water they could step across, was the last place on earth anyone would think to find a great city. Its longago builders had never finished their work. Impossibly tall buildings dotted the city, stepped and slabsided palaces that sometimes ended after eight or even ten stories not with a roof but with the ragged masonry of another halfbuilt floor. The towers soared higher yet, but stopped in jagged abruptness as often as not. Now a good quarter of the great structures, with their massive columns and immense windows of colored glass, lay strewn as rubble across wide avenues with broad strips of bare dirt down their centers, dirt that had never held the trees they were planned for. The marvelous fountains stood dry as they had for hundreds upon hundreds of years. All that futile labor, the builders finally dying with their work undone; yet at times Rand thought that maybe the city had only been begun so he could find it.
Too proud, he thought. A man would have to be halfmad at least to be so proud. He could not help chuckling dryly. There had been Aes Sedai with the men and women who had come here so long ago, and they had known The Karaethon Cycle, the Prophecies of the Dragon. Or perhaps they had written the Prophecies. Too proud by tenfold.
Directly below him lay a vast plaza, halfcovered in stretching shadow, littered with a jumble of statues and crystal chairs, oddities and peculiar shapes of metal or glass or stone, things he could put no name to, scattered about in tangled heaps as if deposited by a storm. Even the shadows were cool only by comparison. Roughclothed men — not Aiel — sweated to load wagons with items chosen by a short, slender woman in pristine blue silk, straightbacked and gliding from place to place as though the heat did not press down on her as hard as on the others. Still, she wore a damp white cloth tied around her temples; she just did not let herself show the effects of the sun. Rand would have wagered she did not even perspire.
The workmen's leader was a dark, bulky man named Hadnan Kadere, a supposed merchant dressed all in creamcolored silk that was sweatsodden today. He mopped his face continually with a large handkerchief, shouting curses at the men — his wagon drivers and guards — but he leaped as quickly as they to haul at whatever the slim woman pointed out, big or small. Aes Sedai had no need of size to impose their will, but Rand thought Moiraine would have done as well if she had never been near the White Tower.
Two of the men were trying to move what appeared to be an oddly twisted redstone doorframe; the corners did not meet properly, and the eye did not want to follow the straight pieces. It stayed upright, turning freely but refusing to tip over however they manhandled it. Then one slipped and fell, through the doorway up to his waist. Rand tensed. For a moment, the fellow seemed not to exist above the waist; his legs kicked wildly in panic. Until Lan, a tall man in drab shades of green, strode over and hauled him out again by his belt. Lan was Moiraine's Warder, bonded to her in some way Rand did not understand, and a hard man who moved like the Aiel, like a hunting wolf; the sword at his hip did not seem part of him, it was part of him. He dropped the workman on the paving stones on the seat of his breeches and left him there; the fellow's terrified cries rose thinly to Rand, and his companion looked ready to run. Several of Kadere's men who had been close enough to see were looking at one another and at the mountains around the city, plainly assessing their chances.
Moiraine appeared among them so quickly it seemed by the Power, moving smoothly from man to man. Her manner made Rand almost hear the cool, imperious instructions coming from her lips, so full of certainty that they would be obeyed, that not obeying would seem foolish. In short order she overrode resistance, stamped firmly on objections, chivvied them every one back to work. The pair with the doorframe were soon dragging and shoving as hard as ever, if with frequent looks at Moiraine when they thought she would not see. In her own way, she was even harder than Lan.