Egwene had to swallow before she could speak. “That was Irella, and Else. Did they notice us?” She could not make herself look back to see.
“No,” Min said after a moment. “All they saw was our clothes.” Egwene let out a long, relieved breath, and heard one from Nynaeve, too.
“My heart may burst before we reach the stables,” Elayne murmured. “Is this what an adventure is like all the time, Egwene? Your heart in your mouth, and your stomach in your feet?”
“I suppose it is,” Egwene said slowly. She found it hard to think that there had been a time when she had been eager to have an adventure, to do something dangerous and exciting like the people in stories. Now she thought the exciting part was what you remembered when you looked back, and the stories left out a good deal of unpleasantness. She told Elayne as much.
“Still,” the DaughterHeir said firmly, “I have never had any real excitement before, and never likely to as long as Mother has any say in it, which she will until I take the throne myself.”
“You two be quiet,” Nynaeve said. They were alone in the hall for a change, with no one in sight in either direction. She pointed to a narrow flight of stairs going down. “That should be what we want. If I haven't gotten turned around completely, with all the twists and turns we've made.”
She took the stairs as if she were certain anyway, and the others followed. Surely enough, the small door at the bottom let out into the dusty yard of the South Stable, where novices' horses were kept, for those who had them, until they had need of mounts again, which was generally not until they became Accepted or were sent home. The gleaming bulk of the Tower itself rose behind them; the Tower grounds spread over a good many hides of land, with its own walls higher than some city walls.
Nynaeve strode into the stable as if she owned it. It had a clean smell of hay and horse, and two long rows of stalls ran back into shadows barred with light from the vents above. For a wonder, shaggy Bela and Nynaeve's gray mare stood in stalls near the doors. Bela put her nose over the stall door and whickered softly to Egwene. There was only one groom in evidence, a pleasantlooking fellow with gray in his beard, chewing a straw.
“We will have our horses saddled,” Nynaeve told him in her most commanding tone. “Those two. Min, find your horse. and Elayne's.” Min dropped the saddlebags and drew Elayne deeper into the stables.
The stableman frowned after them and slowly took the straw from his mouth. “There must be some mistake, my Lady. Those animals —”
“— are ours,” Nynaeve said firmly, folding her arms so that the Serpent ring was obvious. “You will saddle them now.”
Egwene held her breath; it was a lastditch plan, that Nynaeve would try to pass as an Aes Sedai if they had difficulties with anyone who might actually accept her as one. No Aes Sedai or Accepted would, of course, and probably not even a novice, but a stableman ...
The man blinked at Nynaeve's ring, then at her. “I was told two,” he said at last, sounding unimpressed. “One of the Accepted and a novice. Wasn't nothing said about four of you.”
Egwene felt like laughing. Of course Liandrin would not have believed them able to get their horses by themselves.
Nynaeve looked disappointed, and her voice sharpened. “You trot those horses out and saddle them, or you'll have need of Liandrin's Healing, if she will give it to you.”
The groom mouthed Liandrin's name, but one look at Nynaeve's face and he saw to the horses with no more than a mutter or two, not loud enough for any but himself to hear. Min and Elayne came back with their own mounts just as he finished tightening the second girth. Min's was a tall dustcolored gelding, Elayne's a bay mare with an arched neck.
When they were mounted, Nynaeve addressed herself to the stableman again. “No doubt you were told to keep this quiet, and that hasn't changed whether we are two or two hundred. If you think it has, think about what Liandrin will do if you talk what you were told to keep quiet.”
As they were riding out, Elayne tossed him a coin and murmured, “For your trouble, goodman. You have done well.” Outside, she caught Egwene's eye and smiled. “Mother says a stick and honey always work better than a stick alone.”
“I hope we don't need either with the guards,” Egwene said. “I hope Liandrin spoke to them, too.”
At Tarlomen's Gate, though, piercing the tall south wall of the Tower grounds, there was no telling if anyone had spoken to the guards or not. They waved the four women through with no more than a glance and a cursory bow. Guards were meant to keep out those who were dangerous; apparently these had no orders about keeping anyone in.
A cool river breeze gave them an excuse to pull up the hoods of their cloaks as they rode slowly through the streets of the city. The ring of their horses' hooves on the paving stones was lost in the murmur of the crowds filling the streets and the music that came from some of the buildings they passed. People dressed in garments from every land, from the dark and somber mode of Cairhien to the bright, brilliant colors of the Traveling People, and every style in between, split around the horsewomen like a river around a rock, but they still could not move at more than a slow walk.
Egwene gave no attention to the fabulous towers with their skyborne bridges or the buildings that looked more like breaking waves, or windsculpted cliffs, or fanciful shells, than anything made from stone. Aes Sedai often went into the city, and in that crowd they could come facetoface with one before they knew it. After a time she realized the other women were keeping as close a watch as she, but she still felt more than a glimmer of relief when the Ogier grove came into view.
The Great Trees were now visible beyond the rooftops, their spreading tops a hundred spans and more in the air. Towering oaks and elms, leatherleafs and firs, were dwarfed beneath them. A wall of sorts encompassed the grove, which was a good two miles across, but it was only an endless series of spiraling stone arches, each five spans high and twice as wide. By the outer side of the wall, carriages, carts, and people bustled along a street, while inside lay a wilderness of sorts. The grove had neither the tame look of a park nor the complete haphazardness of the forest depths. Rather, it seemed to be the ideal of nature, as if this were the perfect woods, the most beautiful forest that could be. Some of the leaves had already begun to turn, and even the small swathes of orange and yellow and red among the green seemed to Egwene to be exactly the way autumn foliage should look.
A few people strolled just inside the open arches, and no one looked twice when the four women rode in under the trees. The city was quickly lost to view, even the sounds of it softened, then blocked, by the grove. In the space of ten strides they seemed to be miles from the nearest town.
“The north edge of the grove, she said,” Nynaeve muttered, peering around. “There isn't any point of it further north than —” She cut off as two horses burst from a copse of black elder, a dark, glossy mare with a rider and a lightly laden packhorse.
The dark mare reared, pawing the air, as Liandrin reined her harshly. The Aes Sedai's face wore fury like a mask. “I told you not to tell anyone of this! Not anyone!” Egwene noticed polelanterns on the packhorse, and thought it odd.
“These are friends,” Nynaeve began, her back stiffening, but Elayne broke in on her.
“Forgive us, Liandrin Sedai. They did not tell us; we overheard. We did not mean to listen to anything we should not have, but we did overhear. And we want to help Rand al'Thor, too. And the other boys, of course,” she added quickly.
Liandrin peered at Elayne and Min. The late afternoon sunlight, slanting through the branches, shadowed their faces beneath the hoods of their cloaks. “So,” she said finally, still watching those two. “I had made arrangements for you to be taken care of, but as you are here, you are here. Four can make this journey as well as two.”
“Taken care of, Liandrin Sedai?” Elayne said. “I do not understand.”