The Dragon Reborn - By Robert Jordan Page 0,248

to deliver that letter or a knife in my back waiting. It’s six up, and a half dozen down. Just you have that meal waiting, Thom.” He tossed a gold mark on the table in front of Gill. “Have my things put in a room, innkeeper. If it takes more coin, you will have it. Be careful of the big roll; it frightens Thom something awful.”

As he stalked out, he heard Gill say to Thom, “I always thought that lad was a rascal. How does he come by gold?”

I always win, that’s how, he thought grimly. I just have to win once more, and I’m done with Elayne, and that’s the last of the White Tower for me. Just once more.

CHAPTER

46

A Message Out of the Shadow

Even as he returned to the Inner City on foot, Mat was far from certain that what he intended would actually work. It would, if what he had been told was true, but it was the truth of that he was not sure of. He avoided the oval plaza in front of the Palace, but wandered around the sides of the huge structure and its grounds, along streets that curved with the contours of the hills. The golden domes of the Palace glittered, mockingly out of reach. He had made his way almost all the way around, nearly back to the plaza, when he saw it. A steep slope thick with low flowers, rising from the street to a white wall of rough stone. Several leafy tree limbs stuck over the top of the wall, and he could see the tops of others beyond, in a garden of the Royal Palace.

A wall made to look like a cliff, he thought, and a garden on the other side. Maybe Rand was telling the truth.

A casual look both ways showed him he had the curving street to himself for the moment. He would have to hurry; the curves did not allow him to see very far; someone could come along any moment. He scrambled up the slope on all fours, careless of how his boots ripped holes in the banks of red and white blossoms. The rough stone of the wall gave plenty of fingerholds, and ridges and knobs provided toeholds even for a man in boots.

Careless of them to make it so easy, he thought as he climbed. For a moment the climbing took him back home with Rand and Perrin, to a journey they had made beyond the Sand Hills, into the edge of the Mountains of Mist. When they returned to Emond’s Field, they had all caught the fury from everyone who could lay hands on them—him worst of all; everyone assumed it had been his idea—but for three days they had climbed the cliffs, and slept under the sky, and eaten eggs filched from redcrests’ nests, and plump, gray-winged grouse fetched with an arrow, or a stone from a sling, and rabbits caught with snares, all the while laughing about how they were not afraid of the mountains’ bad luck and how they might find a treasure. He had brought home an odd rock from that expedition, with the skull of a good-sized fish somehow pressed into it, and a long, white tail feather dropped by a snow eagle, and a piece of white stone as big as his hand that looked almost as if it had been carved into a man’s ear. He thought it looked like an ear, even if Rand and Perrin did not, and Tam al’Thor had said it might be.

His fingers slipped out of a shallow groove, his balance shifted and he lost the toehold under his left foot. With a gasp, he barely caught hold of the top of the wall, and pulled himself up the rest of the way. For a moment he lay there, breathing hard. It would not have been that long a fall, but enough to break his head. Fool, letting my mind wander like that. Nearly killed myself on those cliffs that way. That was all a long time ago. His mother had likely thrown all those things out already, anyway. With one last look each way to make sure no one had seen him—the curving length of street below was still empty—he dropped inside the Palace grounds.

It was a large garden, with flagstoned walks through expanses of grass among the trees, and grapevines thick on arbors over the walks. And everywhere, flowers. White blossoms covering the pear trees, and white and