Crossroads of Twilight

  “Is Daigian still bearing up?” Cadsuane asked.

  “Better than I expected,” Merise admitted. “She stays in her room too much, but she keeps her weeping private.” Her gaze shifted from the men dancing their swords to a green-painted bench where Verin’s stocky gray-haired Tomas sat next to a griz­zled fellow with only a fringe of white hair remaining. “Darner, he wanted to try his Healing on her, but Daigian refused. She may never have had a Warder before, but she knows that the grieving over a dead Warder is part of remembering him. I am surprised that Corele would consider allowing it.”

  With a shake of her head, the Taraboner sister returned to studying Jahar. Other sisters’ Warders did not really interest her, at least not like her own. “Asha’man, they grieve as Warders do. I thought perhaps Jahar and Darner merely followed the lead of the others, but Jahar, he says it is their way, too. I did not intrude, of course, but I watched them drink in memory of Daigian’s young Eben. They never mentioned his name, but they had a full winecup sitting for him. Bassane and Nethan, they know they can die on any day, and they accept that. Jahar expects to die; every day he expects it. To him, every hour is most assuredly his last.”

  Cadsuane barely refrained from glancing at the other woman. Merise did not often go on at such length. The other woman’s face was smooth, her manner unruffled, but something had upset her. “I know you practice linking with him,” she said delicately, peering down into the courtyard. Delicacy was required in talking to another sister about her Warder. That was part of the reason she stared into the courtyard, frowning. “Have you decided yet whether the al’Thor boy succeeded at Shadar Logoth? Did he really manage to cleanse the male half of the Source?”

  Corele practiced linking with Damer, too, but the Yellow was so focused on her futile efforts to reason out how to do with saidar what he did with saidin that she would not have noticed the Dark One’s taint sliding down her throat. A pity she herself had not come to the shawl fifty years later than she had, or she would have bonded one of the men herself and had no need to ask. But fifty years would have meant that Norla died in her little house in the Black Hills before Cadsuane Melaidhrin ever went to the White Tower. That would have altered a great deal of history. For one thing, it would have been unlikely that she would be in anything approaching her present circumstances. So she asked, delicately, and waited.

  Merise was quiet, and still, for a long moment, and then she sighed. “I do not know, Cadsuane. Saidar is a calm ocean that will take you wherever you want so long as you know the currents and let them carry you. Saidin. . . . An avalanche of burning stone. Collapsing mountains of ice. It feels cleaner than when I first linked with Jahar, but anything could hide in that chaos. Anything.”

  Cadsuane nodded. She was not sure she had expected any other answer. Why should she find any certainty about one of the two most important questions in the world when she could find none on so many simpler matters? In the courtyard, Lan’s wooden blade stopped, not with a crack this time, just touching Jahar’s throat, and the bigger man flowed back to his waiting stance. Nethan stood again, and again Jahar waved him back, angrily raising his sword and setting himself. Merise’s third, Bassane, a short wide fel­low nearly as sun-dark as Jahar for all he was Cairhienin, laughed and made a rude comment about over-ambitious men tripping on their own blades. Tomas and Darner exchanged glances and shook their heads; men of that age usually had given up taunting long ago. The clack of wood on wood began once more.

  The other four Warders were not the only audience for Lan and Jahar in the courtyard. The slim girl with her dark hair in a long braid, watching anxiously from a red bench, was the focus of Cadsuane’s frown. The child would need to flash her Great Serpent ring under people’s noses to be taken for Aes Sedai, which she was, if just technically. It was not only because Nynaeve’s face was a girl’s face; Beldeine still seemed as young. Nynaeve bounced on the bench, always on the point of leaping up. Occasionally her mouth moved as if she were silently shouting encouragement, and some­times her hands twisted as though demonstrating how Lan should have moved his sword. A frivolous girl, full of passions, who only rarely demonstrated that she had a brain. Min was not the only one to have thrown her heart and head both down the well over a man. By the customs of dead Malkier, the red dot painted on Nynaeve’s forehead indicated her marriage to Lan, though Yellows seldom married their Warders. Very few sisters did, for that matter. And of course, Lan was not Nynaeve’s Warder, however much he and the girl pretended otherwise. Who he did belong to was a matter they evaded like thieves slipping through the night.

  More interesting, more disturbing, was the jewelry Nynaeve wore, a long gold necklace and slim gold belt, with matching bracelets and finger rings, the gaudy red and green and blue gems that studded them clashing with her yellow-slashed dress. And she wore that peculiar piece as well, on her left hand, golden rings attached to a golden bracelet by flat chains. That was an angreal, much stronger than Cadsuane’s shrike hair ornament. The others were much like her own decorations, too, ter’angreal and plainly made at the same time, during the Breaking of the World, when an Aes Sedai might find many hands turned against her, most espe­cially those of men who could channel. Strange to think that they had been called Aes Sedai, too. It would be like meeting a man called Cadsuane.

  The question - her morning seemed filled with questions, and the sun not halfway to noon yet - the question was, did the girl wear her jewelry because of the al’Thor boy, or the Asha’man? Or because of Cadsuane Melaidhrin? Nynaeve had demonstrated her loyalty to a young man from her own village, and she had shown her wariness of him as well. She did have a brain, when she chose to use it. Until that question was answered, however, trusting the girl too far was dangerous. The trouble was, little these days did not seem dangerous.

  “Jahar is growing stronger,” Merise said abruptly.

  For an instant, Cadsuane frowned at the other Green. Stronger? The young man’s shirt was beginning to cling damply to his back, while Lan appeared not to have broken his first sweat. Then she understood. Merise meant in the Power. Cadsuane only raised a questioning eyebrow, though. She could not recall the last time she had let shock reach her face. It might have been all those years ago, in the Black Hills, when she began earning the ornaments she now wore.

  “At first, I thought the way these Asha’man train, the forcing, had pushed him to his full strength already,” Merise said, frowning down at the two men working their practice blades. No; it was at Jahar she was frowning. Just a faint crinkle of her eyes, but she reserved her frowns for those who could see and know her displea­sure. “At Shadar Logoth, I thought I must be imagining it. Three or four days ago, I was half convinced I was mistaken. Now, I am sure I am correct. If men gain strength by fits and starts, there is no saying how strong he will become.”

  She did not voice her obvious worry, of course: that he might grow stronger than she. Saying such a thing would have been unthinkable on many different levels, and while Merise had become somewhat accustomed to doing the unthinkable - most sisters would faint at the very idea of bonding a man who could channel - she was never comfortable giving them voice. Cadsuane was, yet she kept her voice neutral. Light, but she hated being del­icate. Hated the necessity, anyway.

  “He seems content, Merise.” Merise’s Warders always seemed content; she handled them well.

  “He is in a fury of. . . .” The other woman touched the side of her head as though fingering the bundle of sensations she felt through the bond. She really was upset! “Not rage. Frustration.” Reaching into her green worked-leather belt pouch, she took out a small enameled pin, a sinuous figure in red and gold, like a snake with legs and a lion’s mane. “I do not know where the al’Thor lad got this, but he gave it to Jahar. Apparently, for Asha’man, it is akin to attaining the shawl. I had to take it away, of course; Jahar, he is still at the stage where he has to learn to accept only what I say he can. But he is so agitated over the thing. . . . Should I give it ba
ck to him? In a way, it would come from my hand, then.”

  Cadsuane’s eyebrows began to climb before she could control them. Merise was asking advice about one of her Warders? Of course, Cadsuane had suggested she sound the man out in the first place, but this degree of intimacy was. . . . Unthinkable? Phaw! “I’m sure whatever you decide will be correct.”

  With one last glance at Nynaeve, she left the taller woman stroking the enameled pin with her thumb and frowning down into the courtyard. Lan had just defeated Jahar once more, but the young man was squaring up again, demanding yet another match. Whatever Merise decided, she had already learned one thing she did not like. The boundaries between Aes Sedai and Warders had always been as clear as the connections; Aes Sedai commanded, and Warders obeyed. But if Merise, of all people, was dithering over a collar pin - Merise, who managed her Warders with a firm hand - then new boundaries would have to be worked out, at least with Warders who could channel. It seemed unlikely that bonding them would stop now; Beldeine was evidence for that. People never really changed, yet the world did, with disturbing regularity. You just had to live with it, or at least live through it. Now and then, with luck, you could affect the direction of the changes, but even if you stopped one, you only set another in motion.

  As expected, she did not find the door to the al’Thor boy’s rooms unguarded. Alivia was there, of course, seated on a bench to one side of the door with her hands folded patiently in her lap. The pale-haired Seanchan woman had appointed herself the boy’s pro­tector, of sorts. Alivia credited him with freeing her from a damane’s collar, but there was more to it than that. Min disliked her, for one thing, and it was not the usual sort of jealousy. Alivia hardly seemed to know what men and women did together. But there was a connection between her and the boy, a connection revealed in glances that carried determination on her side and on his, hope, hard as that was to believe. Until Cadsuane knew what that was all about, she intended to do nothing to separate them. Alivia’s sharp blue eyes regarded Cadsuane with a respectful wari­ness, but she did not see an enemy. Alivia had a short way with those she considered the al’Thor boy’s enemies.

  The other woman on guard was much of a size with Alivia, but the two could not have been more different, and not just because Elza’s eyes were brown and she had the smooth, ageless look of Aes Sedai, where Alivia had fine lines at the corners of her eyes and threads of white almost hidden in her hair. Elza leaped to her feet as soon as she saw Cadsuane, drawing herself up in front of the door and wrapping herself tight in her shawl. “He is not alone,” she said, frost riming her voice.

  “Do you mean to stand in my way?” Cadsuane asked, just as coldly. The Andoran Green should have moved aside. Elza stood far enough below her in the Power that she should not have hesitated, much less waited, for a command, but the woman planted her feet, and her gaze actually grew heated.

  It was a quandary. Five other sisters in the manor house sworn fealty to the boy, and those who had been loyal to Elaida all stared at Cadsuane as if suspicious of her intentions toward him. Which raised the question of why Verin did not, of course. But only Elza tried to keep her away from him. The woman’s attitude reeked of jealousy, which made no sense. She could not possibly believe herself better suited to advise him, and if there had been any suggestion that Elza desired the boy, as a man or a Warder, Min would have been snarling. The girl had finely honed instincts, there. Cadsuane would have ground her teeth, had she been the sort of woman to grind her teeth.

  At the point when she thought she would have to order Elza to step aside, Alivia leaned forward. “He did send for her, Elza,” she drawled. “He’ll be upset if we keep her out. Upset with us, not her. Let her in.”

  Elza glanced at the Seanchan woman from the corner of her eye, and her lip curled in contempt. Alivia stood far above her in the Power - Alivia stood well above Cadsuane, for that matter - but she was a wilder, and a liar in Elza’s view. The dark-haired woman hardly seemed to accept that Alivia had been damane, much less the rest of her story. Still, Elza darted a look at Cadsuane, then at the door behind her, and shifted her shawl. Plainly, she did not want the boy upset. Not with her.

  “I’ll see whether he’s ready for you,” she said, very near to sullen. “Keep her here,” she added to Alivia, more sharply, before turning to knock lightly at the door. A male voice called from the other side, and she opened the door just wide enough to slip in, pulling it shut behind her.

  “You’ll have to forgive her,” Alivia said in that irritatingly slow, soft Seanchan accent. “I think it’s just that she takes her oath very seriously. She isn’t used to serving anyone.”

  “Aes Sedai keep their word,” Cadsuane replied dryly. The woman made her feel as if her own way of talking were as quick and crisp as a Cairhienin’s! “We must.”

  “I think you do. Just so you know, I keep my word, too. I owe him anything he wants of me.”

  A fascinating comment, and an opening, but before she could take advantage of it, Elza came out. Behind her came Algarin, white beard trimmed to a neat point. He offered Cadsuane a bow, with a smile that deepened the wrinkles of his face. His plain coat of dark wool, made in his younger days, hung loosely on him now, and the hair on his head provided a thin covering. There was no chance to find out why he had been visiting the al’Thor boy.

  “He will see you now,” Elza said sharply.

  Cadsuane very nearly did grind her teeth. Alivia would have to wait. And Algarin.

  The boy was on his feet when Cadsuane entered, almost as tall and broad-shouldered as Lan in a black coat worked with gold on the sleeves and the high collar. It was too much like an Asha’man’s coat with embroidery added to suit her, but she said nothing. He made a courteous bow, ushering her to a chair with a tasseled cush­ion in front of the fireplace and asking whether she would like wine. That in the pitcher sitting on a side table with two winecups had gone cold, but he could send for more. She had worked hard enough to force him into civility; he could wear any coat he wanted. There were more important matters he had to be guided in. Or prodded, or pulled as need be. She was not going to waste time or talk on his clothing.

  Inclining her head politely, she declined the wine. A winecup offered many opportunities - to sip when you needed a moment’s thought; to peer into when you wished to hide your eyes - yet this young man needed watching every moment. His face gave away almost as little as a sister’s. With that dark reddish hair and those blue-gray eyes, he could have passed for Aiel, but few Aiel had eyes that cold. They made the morning sky she had been staring at ear­lier seem warm. Colder than they had been before Shadar Logoth. Harder, too, unfortunately. They also looked . . . weary.

  “Algarin had a brother who could channel,” he said, turning toward a facing chair. Halfway into the turn, he staggered. He caught himself on an arm of the chair with a barked laugh, pre­tending he had tripped over his own boots, but there had been no tripping. And he had not seized saidin - she had seen him stagger, doing that - or her ornaments would have warned her. Corele said he only needed a little more sleep to recover from Shadar Logoth. Light, she needed to keep the boy alive, or it had all been for noth­ing!

  “I know,” she said. And since it seemed Algarin might have told him everything, she added, “I was the one who captured Emarin and took him to Tar Valon.” A strange thing for Algarin to be grateful for, in some eyes, but his younger brother survived being gentled for more than ten years after she had helped him rec­oncile to it. The brothers had been close.

  The boy’s eyebrows twitched as he settled into his chair. He had not known. “Algarin wants to be tested,” he said.

  She met his gaze levelly, serenely, and held her tongue. Algarin’s children were married, those who still lived. Maybe he was ready to turn this piece of land over to his descendants. In any case, one man more or less who could channel hardly made any difference at this point. Unless it was the boy who was star­ing at her.

  After a moment, his chin moved, the vesti
ge of a nod. Had he been testing her? “Never fear that I’ll fail to tell you when you’re being a fool, boy.” Most people remembered that after one meeting she had a sharp tongue. This young man required reminding from time to time. He grunted. It might have been a laugh. It might have been rueful. She reminded herself that he wanted her to teach him something, though he did not seem to know what. No matter. She had a list to choose from, and she had only begun on it.

  His face might have been carved from stone for all the expres­sion he showed, but he bounded to his feet and began to pace back and forth between the fireplace and the door. His hands were clenched in fists behind his back. “I’ve been talking with Alivia, about the Seanchan,” he said. “They call their army the Ever Victo­rious Army for a reason. It’s never lost a war. Battles, yes, but never a war. When they lose a battle, they sit down and work out what they did wrong, or what the enemy did right. Then they change what needs changing for them to win.”

  “A wise way,” she said when the flow of words paused. Plainly, he expected some comment. “I know men who do the same. Davram Bashere, for one. Gareth Bryne, Rodel Ituralde, Agelmar Jagad. Even Pedron Niall did, when he was alive. All judged great captains.”

  “Yes,” he said, still pacing. He did not look at her, perhaps did not see her, but he was listening. It was to be hoped that he actu­ally heard, as well. “Five men, all great captains. The Seanchan all do it. That’s been their way for a thousand years. They change what they have to change, but they don’t give up.”