The Dragon Reborn - By Robert Jordan Page 0,290

and tie you to a bed with that cloak of yours! I never had a gleeman come to me before, and I’ll not let the first one that does cough himself to death.”

Thom glowered and blew out his mustaches with a cough, but he seemed to take her threat seriously. At least, he did not say anything, but he looked as if he meant to throw her tea and her salve right back at her.

The more this Mother Guenna talked, the more she sounded like the Amyrlin to Mat. From the sour look on Thom’s face, and the steady stare on hers, he decided he had better smooth matters over a little before the gleeman refused to take her medicines. And she decided to make him. “I knew a woman once who talked like you,” he said. “All fish and nets and things. Sounded like you, too. The same accent, I mean. I suppose she’s Tairen.”

“Perhaps.” The gray-haired woman suddenly sounded tired again, and she kept staring at the floor. “I knew some girls with the sound of your speech on their tongues, too. Two of them had it, anyway.” She sighed heavily.

Mat felt his scalp prickle. My luck can’t be this good. But he would not bet a copper on two other women with Two Rivers accents just happening to be in Tear. “Three girls? Young women? Named Egwene, and Nynaeve, and Elayne? That one has hair like the sun, and blue eyes.”

She frowned at him. “Those were not the names they gave,” she said slowly, “yet I suspected they did not give me their true names. But they had their reasons, I thought. One of them was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and red-gold hair to her shoulders.” She described Nynaeve with her braid to her waist and Egwene with her big, dark eyes and ready smile, too. Three pretty women as different from one another as they could be. “I see they are the ones you know,” she finished. “I am sorry, boy.”

“Why are you sorry? I have been trying to find them for days!” Light, I walked right past this place the first night! Right past them! I wanted random. What could be more random than where a ship docks on a rainy night, and where you happen to look in a bloody lightning flash? Burn me! Burn me! “Tell me where they are, Mother Guenna.”

The gray-haired woman stared wearily at the stove where her spouted kettle was steaming. Her mouth worked, but she said nothing.

“Where are they?” Mat demanded. “It is important! They are in danger if I don’t find them.”

“You do not understand,” she said softly. “You are an outlander. The High Lords. . . .”

“I do not care about any—” Mat blinked, and looked at Thom. The gleeman seemed to be frowning, but he was coughing so hard, Mat could not be sure. “What do the High Lords have to do with my friends?”

“You just do not—”

“Don’t tell me I do not understand! I will pay for the information!”

Mother Guenna glared at him. “I do not take money for . . . !” She grimaced fiercely. “You ask me to tell you things I have been told not to speak of. Do you know what will happen to me if I do and you breathe my name? I will lose my tongue, to begin. Then I will lose other parts before the High Lords have what is left of me hung up to scream its last hours as a reminder to others to obey. And it will do those young women no good, not my telling or my dying!”

“I promise I will never mention your name to anyone. I swear it.” And I’ll keep that oath, old woman, if you only tell me where they bloody are! “Please? They are in danger.”

She studied him for a long time; before she was done he had the feeling she knew every detail of him. “On that oath, I will tell you. I . . . liked them. But you can do nothing. You are too late, Matrim Cauthon. Too late by nearly three hours. They have been taken to the Stone. The High Lord Samon sent for them.” She shook her head in worried puzzlement. “He sent . . . women who . . . could channel. I hold nothing against Aes Sedai myself, but that is against the law. The law the High Lords made. If they break every other law, they