“You will hold a moment for me, I think,” Merean said, turning from Moiraine. Brys rose from the walk. The stocky man’s face never changed, never stopped staring hatred at Merean.
Moiraine struggled to her knees. She could not channel. She had no courage left, no strength. Only determination. Brys floated over the railing. Moiraine tottered to her feet. Determination. That look of pure hate etched on his face, Brys fell, never making a sound. This had to end. Iselle lifted into the air, writhing frantically, throat working in an effort to scream past her gag. It had to end now! Stumbling, Moiraine
drove her belt knife into Merean’s back, blood spurting over her hands.
They fell to the paving stones together, the glow around Merean vanishing as she died, the shield on Moiraine vanishing. Iselle screamed, swaying where Merean’s bonds had let her drop, atop the stone railing. Pushing herself to move, Moiraine scrambled across Merean’s corpse, seized one of Iselle’s flailing hands in hers just as the girl’s slippers slid off into open air.
The jolt pulled Moiraine belly-down across the railing, staring down at the girl held by her blood-slick grip above a drop that seemed to go on forever. It was all Moiraine could do to hold them where they were, teetering. If she tried to pull the girl up, they would both go over. Iselle’s face was contorted, her mouth a rictus. Her hand slipped in Moiraine’s grasp. Forcing herself to calm, Moiraine reached for the Source and failed. Staring down at those distant rooftops did not help her whirling head. Again she tried, but it was like trying to scoop up water with spread fingers. She would save one of the three, though, if the most useless of them. Fighting dizziness, she strove for
saidar.
And Iselle’s hand slid out of her bloody fingers. All Moiraine could do was watch her fall, hand still stretched up as if she believed someone might still save her.
An arm pulled Moiraine away from the railing.
“Never watch a death you don’t have to,” Lan said, setting her on her feet. His right arm hung at his side, a long slash laying open the blood-soaked sleeve and the flesh beneath, and he had other injuries besides the gash on his scalp that still trickled red down his face. Ryne lay on his back ten paces away, staring at the sky in sightless surprise. “A black day,” Lan muttered. “As black as ever I’ve seen.”
“A moment,” she told him, her voice unsteady. “I am too dizzy to walk far, yet.” Her knees wavered as she walked to Merean’s body. There would be no answers. The Black Ajah would remain hidden. Bending, she withdrew her belt knife and cleaned it on the traitor’s skirts.
“You are a cool one, Aes Sedai,” Lan said flatly.
“As cool as I must be,” she told him. Diryk’s scream rang in her ears. Iselle’s face dwindled below her. “It seems Ryne was wrong as well as a Darkfriend. You were better than he.”
Lan shook his head slightly. “He was better. But he thought I was
finished, with only one arm. He never understood. You surrender after you’re dead.”
Moiraine nodded. Surrender after you are dead. Yes.
It took a little while for her head to clear enough that she could embrace the Source again, and she had to put up with Lan’s anxiety to let the
shatayan
know that Brys and Diryk were dead before word came that their bodies had been found on the rooftops. Understandably, he seemed less eager to inform the Lady Edeyn of her daughter’s death. Moiraine was anxious about time, too, if not for the same reasons. She Healed him as soon as she was able. He gasped in shock as the complex weaves of Spirit, Air, and Water knit up his wounds, flesh writhing together into unscarred wholeness. Like anyone who had been Healed, he was weak afterward, weak enough to catch his breath leaning on the stone rail. He would run nowhere for a while.
Carefully Moiraine floated Merean’s body over that rail and down a little, close to the stone of the mountain. Flows of Fire, and flame, enveloped the Black sister, flame so hot there was no smoke, only a shimmering in the air, and the occasional crack of a splitting rock.
“What are you—?” Lan began, then changed it to, “Why?”
Moiraine let herself feel the rising heat, currents of air fit for a furnace. “There is no proof she was Black Ajah, only that she was Aes Sedai.” The White Tower needed its armor of secrecy again, more than it had when Malkier died, but she could not tell him that. Not yet. “I cannot lie about what happened here, but I can be silent. Will you be silent, or will you do the Shadow’s work?”
“You are a very hard woman,” he said finally. That was the only answer he gave, but it was enough.
“I am as hard as I must be,” she told him. Diryk’s scream. Iselle’s face. There was still Ryne’s body to dispose of, and the blood. As hard as she must be.
N
ext dawn found the Aesdaishar in mourning, white banners flying from every prominence, the servants with long white cloths tied to their arms. Rumors in the city already talked of portents foretelling the deaths, comets in the night, fires in the sky. People had a way of folding what they saw into what they knew and what they wanted to believe. The disappearance of a simple soldier, and even of an Aes Sedai, escaped notice alongside grief.
Returning from destroying Merean’s belongings—after searching in vain for any clue to other Black sisters—Moiraine stepped aside for Edeyn Arrel, who glided down the corridor in a white gown, her hair cut raggedly short. Whispers said she intended to retire from the world. Moiraine thought she already had. The woman’s staring eyes looked haggard and old. In a way, they looked much as her daughter’s did, in Moiraine’s mind.
When Moiraine entered her apartments, Siuan leaped up from a chair. It seemed weeks since Moiraine had seen her. “You look like you reached into the bait well and found a fangfish,” she growled. “Well, it’s no surprise. I always hated mourning when I knew the people. Anyway, we can go whenever you’re ready. Rahien was born in a farmhouse almost two miles from Dragonmount. Merean hasn’t been near him, as of this morning. I don’t suppose she’ll harm him on suspicion even if she is Black.”
Not the one. Somehow, Moiraine had almost expected that. “Merean will not harm anyone, Siuan. Put that mind of yours to a puzzle for me.” Settling in a chair, she began with the end, and hurried through despite Siuan’s gasps and demands for more detail. It was almost like living it again. Getting to what had led her to that confrontation was a relief. “She wanted Diryk dead most of all, Siuan; she killed him first. And she tried to kill Lan. The only thing those two had in common was luck. Diryk survived a fall that should have killed him, and everyone says Lan is the luckiest man alive or the Blight would have killed him years ago. It makes a pattern, but the pattern looks crazy to me. Maybe your blacksmith is even part of it. And Josef Najima, back in Canluum, for all I know. He was lucky, too. Puzzle it out for me if you can. I think it is important, but I cannot see how.”
Siuan strode back and forth across the room, kicking her skirt and rubbing her chin, muttering about “men with luck” and “the blacksmith rose suddenly” and other things Moiraine could not make out. Suddenly she stopped dead and said, “She never went near Rahien, Moiraine. The Black Ajah knows the Dragon was Reborn, but they don’t bloody know
when
! Maybe Tamra managed to keep it back, or maybe they were too rough and she died before they could pry it out of her. That has to be it!” Her eagerness turned to horror. “Light! They’re killing any man or boy who
might
be able to channel! Oh, burn me, thousands could die, Moiraine. Tens of thousands.”
It did make a terrible sense. Men who could channel seldom knew what they were doing, at least in the beginning. At first, they often just seemed to be lucky. Events favored them, and frequently, like the blacksmith, they rose to prominence with unexpected suddenness. Siuan was right. The Black Ajah had begun a slaughter.
“But they do not know to look for a boychild,” Moiraine said. As hard as she had to be. “An infant will show no signs.” Not until he was sixteen at the earliest. No man on record had begun channeling before that, and some not for ten years or more later. “We have more time than we thought. Not enough to be careless, though. Any sister can be Black. I think Cadsuane is. They know others are looking. If one of Tamra’s searchers locates the boy and they find her with him, or if they decide to question one of them instead of killing her as soon as it is convenient …” Siuan was staring at her. “We still have the task,” Moiraine told her.
“I know,” Siuan said slowly. “I just never thought. Well, when there’s work to do, you haul nets or gut fish.” That lacked her usual force, though. “We can be on our way to Arafel before noon.”
“You go back to the Tower,” Moiraine said. Together, they could search no faster than one could alone, and if they had to be apart, what better place for Siuan than working for Cetalia Delarme, seeing the reports of all the Blue Ajah eyes-and-ears? The Blue was a small Ajah, but every sister said it had a larger network than any other. While Moiraine hunted for the boy, Siuan could learn what was happening in every land, and knowing what she was looking for, she could spot any sign of the Black Ajah or the Dragon Reborn. Siuan truly could see sense when it was pointed out to her, though it took some effort this time, and when she agreed, she did it with a poor grace.
“Cetalia will use me to caulk drafts for running off without leave,” she grumbled. “Burn me! Hung out on a drying rack in the Tower! Moiraine, the politics are enough to make you sweat buckets in midwinter! I hate it!” But she was already pawing through the trunks to see what she could take with her for the ride back to Tar Valon. “I suppose you warned that fellow Lan. Seems to me, he deserves it, much good it’ll do him. I heard he rode out an hour ago, heading for the Blight, and if that doesn’t kill him—Where are you going?”
“I have unfinished business with the man,” Moiraine said over her
shoulder. She had made a decision about him the first day she knew him, and she intended to keep it.
In the stable where Arrow was kept, silver marks tossed like pennies got the mare saddled and bridled almost while the coins were still in air, and she scrambled onto the animal’s back without a care that her skirts pushed up to bare her legs above the knee. Digging her heels in, she galloped out of the Aesdaishar and north through the city, making people leap aside and once setting Arrow to leap cleanly over an empty wagon with a driver too slow to move out of her way. She left a tumult of shouts and shaken fists behind.
On the road north from the city, she slowed enough to ask wagon drivers heading the other way whether they had seen a Malkieri on a bay stallion, and was more than a little relieved the first time she got a yes. The man could have gone in fifty directions after crossing the moat bridge. And with an hour’s lead … . She would catch him if she had to follow him into the Blight!
“A Malkieri?” The skinny merchant in a dark blue cloak looked startled. “Well, my guards told me there’s one up there.” Twisting on his wagon seat, he pointed to a grassy hill a hundred paces off the road. Two horses stood in plain sight at the crest, one a packhorse, and the thin smoke of a fire curled into the breeze.
Lan barely looked up when she dismounted. Kneeling beside the remains of a small fire, he was stirring the ashes with a long twig. Strangely, the smell of burned hair hung in the air. “I had hoped you were done with me,” he said.
“Not quite yet,” she told him. “Burning your future? It will sorrow a great many, I think, when you die in the Blight.”
“Burning my past,” he said, rising. “Burning memories. A nation. The Golden Crane will fly no more.” He started to kick dirt over the ashes, then hesitated and bent to scoop up damp soil and pour it out of his hands almost formally. “No one will sorrow for me when I die, because those who would are dead already. Besides, all men die.”
“Only fools choose to die before they must. I want you to be my Warder, Lan Mandragoran.”
He stared at her unblinking, then shook his head. “I should have know it would be that. I have a war to fight, Aes Sedai, and no desire to help you weave White Tower webs. Find another.”
“I fight the same war as you, against the Shadow. Merean was Black
Ajah.” She told him all of it, from Gitara’s Foretelling in the presence of the Amyrlin Seat and two Accepted to what she and Siuan had reasoned out. For another man, she would have left most unsaid, but there were few secrets between Warder and Aes Sedai. For another man, she might have softened it, but she did not believe hidden enemies frightened him, not even when they were Aes Sedai. “You said you burned your past. Let the past have its ashes. This is the same war, Lan. The most important battle yet in that war. And this one, you can win.”
For a long time he stood staring north, toward the Blight. She did not know what she would do if he refused. She had told him more than she would have anyone but her Warder.
Suddenly he turned, sword flashing out, and for an instant she thought he meant to attack her. Instead he sank to his knees, the sword lying bare across his hands. “By my mother’s name, I will draw as you say ‘draw’ and sheathe as you say ‘sheathe.’ By my mother’s name, I will come as you say ‘come’ and go as you say ‘go.’” He kissed the blade and looked up at her expectantly. On his knees, he made any king on a throne look meek. She would have to teach him some humility for his own sake. And for a pond’s sake.
“There is a little more,” she said, laying hands on his head.