Winter's Heart

  “And on you, my Lord,” their stocky officer replied, ambling forward, and Mat recognized him, Surlivan Sarat, a good fellow, always ready with a quip and possessing a fine eye for horses. Shaking his head, Surlivan tapped the side of his pointed helmet with the thin, gilded rod of his office. “Have you been in another fight, my Lord? She will go up like a waterspout, when she sees you.”

  Squaring his shoulders, and trying not to lean so obviously on his staff, Mat bristled. Ready with a quip? Come to think on it, the sun-dark man had a tongue like a rasp. And his eye for horses was not all that fine, either. “Will there be any questions if my friend here beds down with my men?” Mat asked roughly. “There shouldn’t be. There’s room for one more with my fellows.” Room for more than one, truth be told. Eight men had died so far, for following him to Ebou Dar.

  “None from me, my Lord,” Surlivan said, though he eyed the scrawny man at Mat’s side and pursed his lips judiciously. Noal’s coat appeared of good quality, though, at least in the dim light, and he did have his lace, and in a better state than Mat’s. Perhaps that tipped the balance. “And she doesn’t need to know everything, so none from her, either.”

  Mat scowled, but before intemperate words could put himself and Noal in the soup kettle, three armored Seanchan galloped up to the gate, and Surlivan turned to face them.

  “You and your lady wife live in the Queen’s Palace?” Noal enquired, starting toward the gate.

  Mat pulled him back. “Wait on them,” he said, nodding toward the Seanchan. His lady wife? Bloody women! Bloody dice in his bloody head!

  “I have dispatches for the High Lady Suroth,” one of the Seanchan announced, slapping a leather satchel hanging from one armored shoulder. Her helmet bore a single thin plume, marking her a low-ranking officer, yet her horse was a tall dun gelding with a look of speed. The other two animals were sturdy enough, but there was nothing to be said for them beyond that.

  “Enter with the blessings of the Light,” Surlivan said, bowing slightly.

  The Seanchan woman’s bow from her saddle was a mirror of his. “The blessings of the Light be on you also,” she drawled, and the three of them clattered into the stableyard.

  “It is very strange,” Surlivan mused, peering after the three. “They always ask permission of us, not them.” He flicked his rod toward the Seanchan guards on the other side of the gates. They had not stirred an inch from their rigid stance, or even glanced at the arrivals that Mat had noticed.

  “And what would they do if you said they couldn’t go in?” Noal asked quietly, easing the bundle on his back.

  Surlivan spun on his heel. “It is enough that I have given oath to my Queen,” he said in an expressionless voice, “and she has given hers . . . where she has given it. Give your friend a bed, my Lord. And warn him, there are things better left unsaid in Ebou Dar, questions better left unasked.”

  Noal looked befuddled and began protesting that he was simply curious, but Mat exchanged further benisons and courtesies with the Altaran officer—as quickly as he could, to be sure—and hustled his new-found acquaintance through the gates, explaining about Listeners in a low voice. The man might have saved his hide from the gholam, but that did not mean he would let the fellow hand it over to the Seanchan. They had people called Seekers, too, and from the little he had heard—even people who spoke freely about the Deathwatch Guard locked their teeth when it came to the Seekers—from the little he had heard, Seekers made Whitecloak Questioners look like boys tormenting flies, nasty but hardly anything to worry a man.

  “I see,” the old man said slowly. “I hadn’t known that.” He sounded irritated with himself. “You must spend a good deal of time with the Seanchan. Do you know the High Lady Suroth as well, then? I must say, I had no idea you had such high connections.”

  “I spend time with soldiers in taverns, when I can,” Mat replied sourly. When Tylin let him. Light, he might as well be married! “Suroth doesn’t know I’m alive.” And he devoutly hoped it remained that way.

  The three Seanchan were already out of sight, their horses being led into the stables, but several dozen sul’dam were giving damane their evening exercise, walking them in a big circle around the stone-paved yard. Nearly half the gray-clad damane were dark-skinned women, lacking the jewelry they had worn as Windfinders. There were more like them in the Palace and elsewhere; the Seanchan had had a rich harvest from Sea Folk vessels that had failed to escape. Most wore sullen resignation or stony faces, but seven or eight stared ahead of them, lost and confused, disbelieving still. Each of those had a Seanchan-born damane at her side, holding her hand or with an arm around her, smiling and whispering to her under the approving eyes of the women who wore the bracelets attached to their silvery collars. A few of those dazed women clutched the damane walking with them as if holding to lifelines. It would have been enough to make Mat shiver, if his damp clothes had not already been doing the job.

  He tried to hurry Noal across the yard, but the circle brought a damane who was neither Seanchan nor Atha’an Miere near him, linked to a plump, graying sul’dam, an olive-skinned woman who might have passed for Altaran and someone’s mother. A stern mother with a possibly fractious child, from the way she regarded her charge. Teslyn Baradon had fleshed out after a month and a half in Seanchan captivity, yet her ageless face still looked as if she ate briars three meals a day. On the other hand, she walked placidly on her leash and obeyed the sul’dam’s murmured directions without hesitation, pausing to bow very deeply to him and Noal. For an instant, though, her dark eyes flashed hatred at him before she and the sul’dam continued their circuit of the stableyard. Placidly, obediently. He had seen damane upended and switched till they howled in this same stableyard for making any sort of fuss, Teslyn among them. She had done him no good turns, and maybe a few bad, but he would not have wished this on her.

  “Better than being dead, I suppose,” he muttered, moving on. Teslyn was a hard woman, likely plotting every moment how to escape, yet hardness only took you so far. The Mistress of the Ships and her Master of the Blades had died on the stake without ever screaming, but it had not saved them.

  “Do you believe that?” Noal asked absently, fumbling awkwardly with his bundle again. His broken hands had handled that knife well enough, but they seemed clumsy at everything else.

  Mat frowned at him. No; he was not sure he believed it. Those silver a’dam seemed too much like the invisible collar Tylin had on him. Then again, Tylin could tickle him under the chin the rest of his life if it kept him off the stake. Light, he wished those bloody dice in his head would just stop and get it over with! No, that was a lie. Since he had finally realized what they meant, he had never wanted the dice to stop.

  The room Chel Vanin and the surviving Redarms shared lay not far from the stables, a long white-plastered chamber with a low ceiling and too many beds for those who remained alive. Vanin, a balding suety heap, was lying on one in his shirtsleeves, an open book propped on his chest. Mat was surprised the man could read. Spitting through a gap in his teeth, Vanin eyed Mat’s mud-smeared clothes. “You been fighting again?” he asked. “She won’t like that, I reckon.” He did not rise. With a few startling exceptions, Vanin considered himself as good as any lord or lady.

  “Trouble, Lord Mat?” Harnan growled, leaping to his feet. He was a solid man, physically and by temperament, but his heavy jaw clenched, twisting the hawk crudely tattooed on his cheek. “Begging your pardon, but you’re in no condition for it. Tell us what he looks like, and we’ll sort him out for you.”

  The last three gathered behind him with eager expressions, two grabbing for their coats while still tucking in shirttails. Metwyn, a boyish-appearing Cairhienin who was ten years older than Mat, instead picked up his sword from where it was propped at the foot of his bed and eased a little of the blade out of the scabbard to check the edge. He was the best of them with a sword, very good indeed, though Gorderan came close for all he looked a blacksmith. Gorderan was not nearly as
slow as his thick shoulders made him appear. A dozen Redarms had followed Mat Cauthon to Ebou Dar, eight of those were dead, and the rest were stuck here in the Palace where they could not pinch the maids, get into a fight over dice, and drink till they fell on their faces, as they could have staying at an inn and knowing the innkeeper would see them carried up to their beds, though maybe with their purses a little lighter than they had been.

  “Noal here can tell you what happened better than I can,” Mat replied, pushing his hat back on his head. “He’ll be bedding in here with you. He saved my life tonight.”

  That brought exclamations of shock, and cries of approbation for Noal, not to mention slaps on the back that almost toppled the old fellow. Vanin went so far as to mark his place in the book with a fat finger and sit up on the side of his thin mattress.

  Setting his bundle down on a vacant bed, Noal told the tale with elaborate gestures, playing down his own role and even making himself a bit of a buffoon, slipping in the mud and gaping at the gholam while Mat fought like a champion. The man was a natural storyteller, as good as a gleeman for making you see what he described. Harnan and the Redarms laughed genially, knowing what he was about, not stealing their captain’s thunder, and approving of it, but laughter died when he came to Mat’s attacker slipping away through a tiny hole in a wall. He made you see that, too. Vanin put down his book and spat through his teeth again. The gholam had left Vanin and Harnan half-dead in the Rahad. Half-dead because it was after other prey.

  “The thing wants me for some reason, it seems,” Mat said lightly when the old man finished and sank onto the bed with his belongings, seemingly exhausted. “It probably played at dice with me some time I don’t recall. None of you has to worry, as long as you don’t get between it and me.” He grinned, trying to make it all a joke, but no one so much as smiled. “In any case, I’ll parcel out gold to you in the morning. You’ll book passage on the first ship leaving for Illian, and take Olver with you. Thom and Juilin, too, if they’ll go.” He imagined the thief-catcher would, anyway. “And Nerim and Lopin, of course.” He had gotten used to having a pair of serving men look after him, but he hardly needed them here. “Talmanes must be somewhere close to Caemlyn by this time. You shouldn’t have much trouble finding him.” When they were gone, he would be alone with Tylin. Light, he would rather face the gholam again!

  Harnan and the other three Redarms exchanged looks, Fergin scratching his head as if he did not quite understand. He might not. The bony man was a good soldier—not the best, mind, but good enough—yet he was not very bright when it came to other things.

  “That wouldn’t be right,” Harnan allowed finally. “One thing, Lord Talmanes’d have our hides if we came back without you.” The other three nodded. Fergin could understand that.

  “And you, Vanin?” Mat asked.

  The fat man shrugged. “I take that boy away from Riselle, and he’ll gut me like a trout the first time I go to sleep. I would myself, in his boots. Anyway, I got time to read, here. Don’t get much chance for that working as a farrier.” That was one of the itinerant trades he claimed to follow. The other was stableman. In truth, he was a horsethief and poacher, the best in two countries and maybe more.

  “You’re all mad,” Mat said with a frown. “Just because it wants me, doesn’t mean it won’t kill you if you get in the way. The offer stays open. Anyone who comes to his senses can go.”

  “I have seen your like before,” Noal said suddenly. The stooped old man was the image of hard age and exhaustion, but his eyes were bright and sharp studying Mat. “Some men have an air about them that makes other men follow where they lead. Some lead to devastation, others to glory. I think your name may go into the history books.”

  Harnan looked as confused as Fergin. Vanin spat and lay back down, opening his book.

  “If all my luck goes away, maybe,” Mat muttered. He knew what it took to get into the histories. A man could get killed, doing that sort of thing.

  “Better clean up before she sees you,” Fergin piped up suddenly. “All that mud will put a burr under her saddle for sure.”

  Snatching his hat off angrily, Mat stalked out without a word. Well, he stalked as well as he could, hobbling on a walking staff. Before the door closed behind him, he heard Noal starting a story about one time he sailed on a Sea Folk ship and learned to bathe in cold salt water. At least, that was how it began.

  He intended to get himself clean before Tylin saw him—he did—but as he limped through hallways hung with the flowered tapestries Ebou Dari called summer-hangings, for the season they evoked, four serving men in the Palace’s green-and-white livery and no fewer than seven maids suggested he might want to bathe and change his clothes before the Queen saw him, offering to draw him a bath and fetch clean garments without her learning of it. They did not know everything about him and Tylin, thank the Light—no one but Tylin and himself knew the worst bits—but they knew too bloody much. Worse, they approved, every last flaming servant in the whole flaming Tarasin Palace. For one thing, Tylin was Queen and could do as she pleased, so far as they were concerned. For another, her temper had been on a razor’s edge since the Seanchan captured the city, and if Mat Cauthon scrubbed and bright in lace kept her from snapping their noses off for trifles, then they would scrub behind his ears and wrap him in lace like a Sunday gift!

  “Mud?” he said to a pretty, smiling maid spreading her skirts in a curtsy. There was a twinkle in her dark eyes, and the plunging neckline of her bodice displayed a fair amount of bosom to almost rival Riselle’s. On another day he might have taken a little time to enjoy looking. “What mud? I don’t see any mud!” Her mouth dropped open, and she forgot to straighten, staring at him with her knees bent as he hobbled away.

  Juilin Sandar, rounding a corner quickly, nearly walked into him. The Tairen thief-catcher leaped back with a muffled oath, his swarthy face turning gray until he realized who had almost run him over. Then he muttered an apology and started to hurry on by.

  “Has Thom got you mixed into his foolishness, Juilin?” Mat said. Juilin and Thom shared a room deep in the servants’ quarters, and there was no excuse for him to be up here. In that dark Tairen coat, flaring over his boot tops, Juilin would stand out among the servants like a duck in a chicken coop. Suroth was strict about things like that, stricter than Tylin. The only reason for it Mat could see was whatever Thom and Beslan were meddling with. “No; don’t bother telling me. I’ve made an offer to Harnan and the others, and it’s open to you, too. If you want to leave, I’ll give you the money for it.”

  Actually, Juilin did not look ready to tell him anything. The thief-catcher tucked his thumbs behind his belt and met Mat’s gaze levelly. “What did Harnan and the others say? And what is Thom doing that you call foolish? This is one set of rooftops he knows his way around better than you or I.”

  “The gholam is still in Ebou Dar, Juilin.” Thom knew that the Game of Houses was what he knew, and he loved sticking his nose into politics. “The thing tried to kill me, earlier this evening.”

  Juilin grunted as if he had been hit in the pit of his belly, and scrubbed a hand through his short black hair. “I have a reason to stay a while longer,” he said, “even so.” His air changed slightly, to something stubborn and defensive and tinged with guilt. He had never shown a roving eye that Mat had seen, but when a man looked like that, it could only mean one thing.

  “Take her with you,” Mat said. “And if she won’t go, well, you’ll not be in Tear an hour before you have a woman on each knee. That’s the thing about women, Juilin. If one says no, there’s always another will say yes.”

  A serving man hurrying by with an armload of linen towels stared at Mat’s muddiness in amazement, but Juilin thought it was at him, and snatched his thumbs free of his belt and attempted to adopt a more humble stance. Without much success. Thom might sleep with the servants, yet from the beginning he had somehow made it seem to be his own choice, an eccentricity, and no one thought it odd to see
him up here, perhaps slipping into Riselle’s rooms that had once been Mat’s. Juilin had gone on at length about being a thief-catcher—never a thief-taker—and stared so many prickly lordlings and complacent merchants in the eye to show he was as good as they that everyone in the Palace knew who and what he was. And where he was supposed to be, which was belowstairs.

  “My Lord is wise,” he said, too loudly, and making a stiff, jerky bow. “My Lord knows all about women. If my Lord will forgive a humble man, I must return to my place.” Turning to go, he spoke over his shoulder, still in a carrying voice. “I heard today that if my Lord comes back one more time looking like he’s been dragged in the street, the Queen intends taking a switch to my Lord’s person.”

  And that was the stone that broke the wagon clean in two.

  Flinging open the doors of Tylin’s apartments, Mat strode in, sailed his hat across the width of the room . . . And stopped dead, his mouth hanging open and everything he had planned to say frozen on his tongue. His hat hit the carpets and rolled, he did not see where. A gust of wind rattled the tall triple-arched windows that let out onto a long, screened balcony overlooking the Mol Hara.

  Tylin turned in a chair carved to look like gilded bamboo and stared at him over her golden winecup. Waves of glossy black hair touched with gray at the temples framed a beautiful face with the eyes of a bird of prey, and not one best pleased at the moment. Inconsequential things seemed to leap at him. She kicked her crossed leg slightly, rippling layered green and white petticoats. Pale green lace trimmed the oval opening in her gown that half exposed her full breasts, where the jeweled hilt of her marriage knife dangled. She was not alone. Suroth sat facing her, frowning into her winecup and tapping long fingernails on the arm of her chair, a pretty enough woman despite her hair being shaved to that long crest, except that she made Tylin seem a rabbit by comparison. Two of those fingernails on each hand were lacquered blue. Seated at her side was a little girl, of all things, also in an elaborately flowered robe over pleated white skirts, but with a sheer veil covering her entire head—it seemed to be shaved completely!—and wearing a fortune in rubies. Even in a state of shock, he noticed rubies and gold. A slender woman, nearly as dark as her stark black gown and tall even had she been Aiel, stood behind the girl’s chair with her arms folded and ill-concealed impatience. Her wavy black hair was short, but not shaved at all, so she was neither of the Blood nor so’jhin. Imperiously beautiful, she put Tylin and Suroth both in the shade. He noticed beautiful women, too, even when he did feel hit in the head with a hammer.