The Dragon Reborn - By Robert Jordan Page 0,205

to Tear, Aes Sedai?”

Egwene glanced at Nynaeve. Light, a moment ago they were laughing, and now they’re as tense as they ever were.

“We hunt some evil women,” Nynaeve said carefully. “Dark friends.”

“Shadowrunners.” Jolien twisted her mouth around the word as if she had bitten into a rotten apple.

“Shadowrunners in Tear,” Bain said, and as if part of the same sentence Chiad added, “And three Aes Sedai seeking the Heart of the Stone.”

“I did not say we were going to the Heart of the Stone,” Nynaeve said sharply. “I merely said I did not want to stay here till it falls to dust. Egwene, Elayne, are you ready?” She started out of the thicket without waiting for an answer, walking staff thumping the ground and long strides carrying her south.

Egwene and Elayne made hasty goodbyes before following after her. The four Aiel on their feet stood watching them go.

When the two of them were a little way beyond the trees, Egwene said, “My heart almost stopped when you named yourself. Weren’t you afraid they might try to kill you, or to take you prisoner? The Aiel War was not that long ago, and whatever they said about not harming women who don’t carry spears, they looked ready enough to use those spears on anything, to me.”

Elayne shook her head ruefully. “I have just learned how much I do not know about the Aiel, but I was taught that they do not think of the Aiel War as a war at all. From the way they behaved toward me, I think maybe that much of what I learned is truth. Or maybe it was because they think I am Aes Sedai.”

“I know they are strange, Elayne, but no one can call three years of battles anything but a war. I do not care how much they fight among themselves, a war is a war.”

“Not to them. Thousands of Aiel crossed the Spine of the World, but apparently they saw themselves more like thief-takers, or headsmen, come after King Laman of Cairhien for the crime of cutting down Avendoraldera. To the Aiel, it was not a war; it was an execution.”

Avendoraldera, according to one of Verin’s lectures, had been an offshoot of the Tree of Life itself, brought to Cairhien some five hundred years ago as an unprecedented offer of peace from the Aiel, given along with the right to cross the Waste, a right otherwise given to none but peddlers, gleemen, and the Tuatha’an. Much of Cairhien’s wealth had been built on the trade in ivory and perfumes and spices and, most of all, silk, from the lands beyond the Waste. Not even Verin had any idea of how the Aiel had come by a sapling of Avendesora—for one thing, the old books were clear that it made no seed; for another, no one knew where the Tree of Life was, except for a few stories that were clearly wrong, but surely the Tree of Life could have nothing to do with the Aiel—or of why the Aiel had called the Cairhienin the Watersharers, or insisted their trains of merchant wagons fly a banner bearing the trefoil leaf of Avendesora.

Egwene supposed, grudgingly, that she could understand why they had started a war—even if they did not think it was one—after King Laman cut down their gift to make a throne unlike any other in the world. Laman’s Sin, she had heard it called. According to Verin, not only had Cairhien’s trade across the Waste ended with the war, but those Cairhienin who ventured into the Waste now vanished. Verin claimed they were said to be “sold as animals” in the lands beyond the Waste, but not even she understood how a man or a woman could be sold.

“Egwene,” Elayne said, “you know who He Who Comes With the Dawn must be, don’t you?”

Staring at Nynaeve’s back still well ahead of them, Egwene shook her head—Does she mean to race us to Jurene?—then almost stopped walking. “You do not mean—?”

Elayne nodded. “I think so. I do not know much of the Prophecies of the Dragon, but I have heard a few lines. One I remember is, ‘On the slopes of Dragonmount shall he be born, born of a maiden wedded to no man.’ Egwene, Rand does look like an Aiel. Well, he looks like the pictures I have seen of Tigraine, too, but she vanished before he was born, and I hardly think she could have been his mother anyway. I think Rand’s