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Authors: Robert Jordan

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Keille watched, round face unreadable, until the white door closed, then suddenly rounded on Mat, who was on the point of slipping away. “Few men have ever refused an offer from me once, much less twice. You should have a care I do not take it in mind to do something about it.” Laughing, she reached up and pinched his cheek with thick fingers, hard enough to make him wince, then turned in Rand’s direction. “Tell him, my Lord Dragon. I have a feeling you know something of the dangers of scorning a woman. That Aiel girl who follows you about, glaring. I hear you belong to another. Perhaps she feels scorned.”
“I doubt it, Mistress,” he said dryly. “Aviendha would plant a knife in my ribs if she believed I had thought of her that way.”
The immense woman laughed uproariously. Mat flinched as she reached for him again, but all she did was pat the cheek she had pinched before. “You see, good sir? Scorn a woman’s offer, and perhaps she thinks nothing of it, but perhaps”—she made a skewering motion—“the knife. A lesson any man can learn. Eh, my Lord Dragon?” Wheezing with laughter, she hurried off to check on the men tending the mules.
Rubbing his cheek, Mat muttered, “They’re
all
crazy,” before he, too, left. He did not abandon his pursuit of Isendre, though.
So it went, for eleven days and into the twelfth, across a barren, hard-baked land. Twice they saw other stands, small, rough stone buildings much like Imre Stand, sited for easy defense against the sheer side of spire or butte. One had three hundred sheep or more, and men who were as startled to learn of Rand as they were of Trollocs in the Three-fold Land. The other was empty; not raided, only not in use. Several times Rand spotted goats, or sheep, or pale, long-horned cattle in the distance. Aviendha said the herds belonged to nearby sept holds, but he saw no people, surely no structure that deserved the name hold.
The twelfth day, with the thick columns of Jindo and Shaido flanking the Wise Ones’ party, and the peddlers’ wagons lurching along with Keille and Natael arguing, and Isendre eyeing Rand from Kadere’s lap.
“ … and that is how it is,” Aviendha said, nodding to herself. “Surely you must understand about a roofmistress, now.”
“Not really,” Rand admitted. He realized that for some time he had just been listening to the sound of her voice, not to the words. “I’m sure it works just fine, though.”
She growled at him. “When you marry,” she said in a tight voice, “with the Dragons on your arms proving your blood, will you follow that blood, or will you demand to own everything but the dress your wife stands in, like some wetland savage?”
“That’s not at all the way it is,” he protested, “and any woman where I come from would brain a man who thought it was. Anyway, don’t you think that ought to be settled between me and whoever I
do
decide to marry?” If anything, she scowled harder than before.
To his relief, Rhuarc came trotting back from the head of the Jindo. “We are there,” the Aielman announced with a smile. “Cold Rocks Hold.”
Cold Rocks Hold
F
rowning, Rand looked around. A mile ahead stood a tight cluster of tall, sheer-sided buttes, or perhaps one huge butte broken by fissures. To his left the land ran off in patches of tough grass and leafless spiny plants, scattered thorny bushes and low trees, across arid hills and jagged gullies, past huge, rough stone columns to jagged mountains in the distance. To the right the land was the same, except the cracked yellowish clay lay flatter, the mountains closer. It could have been any piece of the Waste he had seen since leaving Chaendaer.
“Where?” he said.
Rhuarc glanced at Aviendha, who was looking at Rand as though he had lost his wits. “Come. Let your own eyes show you Cold Rocks.” Dropping his
shoufa
to his shoulders, the clan chief turned and loped bareheaded toward the fissured rock wall ahead.
The Shaido had already halted, milling about and beginning to set up their tents. Heirn and the Jindo fell in behind Rhuarc at a trot with their pack mules, uncovering their heads and shouting wordlessly, and the Maidens escorting the peddlers cried for the drivers to hasten their teams and follow the Jindo. One of the Wise Ones lifted her skirts to her knees and ran to join Rhuarc—Rand thought it was Amys, from the pale hair; surely Bair could not move that nimbly—but the rest of the Wise Ones’ party maintained its original pace. For a moment Moiraine looked as if she
would break away, toward Rand, then hesitated, arguing with one of the other Wise Ones, hair still hidden by her shawl. Finally the Aes Sedai reined her white mare back beside Egwene’s gray and Lan’s black stallion, just ahead of the white-robed
gai’shain
who were tugging the pack animals along. They were heading the same way as Rhuarc and the others, though.
Rand leaned down to offer a hand to Aviendha. When she shook her head, he said, “If they are going to be making all that noise, I won’t be able to hear you down there. What if I make a wool-headed mistake because I can’t hear what you say?”
Muttering under her breath, she glanced at the Maidens around the peddlers’ wagons, then sighed and clasped his arm. He hoisted her up, ignoring her indignant squawk, and swung her onto Jeade’en behind the saddle. Whenever she tried to mount by herself, she came close to pulling him out of the saddle. He gave her a moment to settle her heavy skirts, though at best they bared her legs well above her soft, knee-high boots, then heeled the dapple to a canter. It was the first time Aviendha had ridden faster than a walk; she flung her arms around his waist and hung on.
“If you make me look the fool before my sisters, wetlander,” she snarled warningly against his back.
“Why would they think you a fool? I’ve seen Bair and Amys and the others ride behind Moiraine or Egwene sometimes to talk.”
After a moment, she said, “You accept changes more easily than I, Rand al’Thor.” He was not sure what to make of that.
When he brought Jeade’en up with Rhuarc and Heirn and Amys, a little ahead of the still shouting Jindo, he was surprised to see Couladin running easily alongside, flame-colored hair bare. Aviendha tugged Rand’s own
shoufa
down to his shoulders. “You must enter a hold with your face clear to be seen. I told you that. And make noise. We have been seen long since, and they will know who we are, but it is customary, to show you are not trying to take the hold by surprise.”
He nodded, but held his tongue. Neither Rhuarc nor any of the three with him were making a sound, and neither was Aviendha. Besides, the Jindo made enough clamor to be heard for miles.
Couladin’s head swung toward him. Contempt flashed across that sun-dark face, and something else. Hate and disdain Rand had come to expect, but amusement? What did Couladin find amusing?
“Fool Shaido,” Aviendha muttered at his back. Maybe she was right; maybe the amusement was for her riding. But Rand did not think so.
Mat galloped up trailing a cloud of yellowish brown dust, hat pulled
low and spear resting upright on his stirrup iron like a lance. “What is this place, Rand?” he asked loudly, to be heard over the shouts. “All those women would say was ‘Move faster. Move faster.’” Rand told him, and he frowned at the towering rock face of the butte. “You could hold that thing for years, I suppose, with supplies, but it isn’t a patch on the Stone, or the Tora Harad.”
“The Tora what?” Rand said.
Mat rolled his shoulders before answering. “Just something I heard of, once.” He stood in his stirrups to peer back over the heads of the Jindo toward the peddlers’ train. “At least they’re still with us. I wonder how long before they finish trading and go.”
“Not before Alcair Dal. Rhuarc says there’s a sort of fair whenever clan chiefs meet, even if it’s only two or three. With all twelve coming, I don’t think Kadere and Keille will want to miss it.”
Mat did not look pleased at the news.
Rhuarc led the way straight to the widest fissure in the sheer stone wall, ten or twelve paces across at the broadest, and shadowed by the height of its sheer sides as it wove deeper and deeper, dark and even cool beneath a ribbon of sky. It felt odd to be in so much shade. The Aiels’ wordless shouts swelled, magnified between the gray-brown walls; when they suddenly ceased, the silence, broken only by the clatter of mules’ hooves and the creak of wagon wheels far behind, seemed very loud.
They rounded another curve, and the fissure opened abruptly into a wide canyon, long and almost straight. From every side, shrill ululating cries broke from hundreds of women’s mouths. A thick crowd lined the way, women in bulky skirts, shawls wrapped about their heads, and men wearing grayish brown coats and breeches, the
cadin’sor
, and Maidens of the Spear, too, waving their arms in welcome, beating on pots or whatever could make a noise.
Rand gaped, and not just for the pandemonium. The canyon walls were green, in narrow terraces climbing halfway up both sides. Not all were really terraces, he realized. Small, flat-roofed houses of gray stone or yellow clay seemed to be stacked practically atop one another, in clusters with paths winding between, and every roof a garden of beans and squashes, peppers and melons and plants he did not know. Chickens ran loose, redder than those he knew, and some strange sort of fowl, larger and speckled gray. Children, most garbed like their elders, and white-robed
gai’shain
moved among the rows with big clay pitchers, apparently watering individual plants. The Aiel did not have cities, he had always been told, but this was certainly a fair-sized town at least, if as odd a one as he had ever
seen. The din was too great for him to ask any of the questions that popped into his head—such as, what were those round fruits, too red and shiny for apples, growing on low, pale-leaved bushes, or those straight, broad-leafed stalks lined with long, fat, yellow-tasseled sprouts? He had been too long a farmer not to wonder.
Rhuarc and Heirn slowed, and so did Couladin, but only to a quick walk, thrusting their spears through the bow-case harnesses on their backs. Amys ran on ahead, laughing like a girl, while the men continued their steady advance along the crowd-lined canyon floor, the cries of the hold’s women vibrating in the air and nearly overshadowing the clanging of pots. Rand followed, as Aviendha had told him to. Mat looked as if he wanted to turn around and ride right back out again.
At the far end of the canyon, the wall leaned inward, making a deep, dark pocket. The sun never reached to the back of it, so Aviendha had said, and the rocks there, always cool, gave the hold its name. In front of the shadows, Amys stood with another woman atop a wide gray boulder, its top smoothed for a platform.
The second woman, slender in her bulky skirts, scarf-bound yellow hair spilling below her waist and touched with white from her temples, appeared older than Amys though certainly more than handsome, with a few fine wrinkles at the corners of her gray eyes. She was dressed the same as Amys, a plain brown shawl over her shoulders, her necklaces and bracelets of gold and carved ivory no finer or richer, but this was Lian, the roofmistress of Cold Rocks Hold.
The wavering, high-pitched cries dwindled away to nothing as Rhuarc halted before the boulder, a step closer than Heirn and Couladin. “I ask leave enter your hold, roofmistress,” he announced in a loud, carrying tone.
“You have my leave, clan chief,” the yellow-haired woman replied formally, and just as loudly. Smiling, she added in a much warmer voice, “Shade of my heart, you will always have my leave.”
“I give thanks, roofmistress of my heart.” That did not sound particularly formal, either.
Heirn stepped forward. “Roofmistress, I ask leave to come beneath your roof.”
“You have my leave, Heirn,” Lian told the stocky man. “Beneath my roof, there is water and shade for you. The Jindo sept is always welcome here.”
“I give thanks, roofmistress.” Heirn clapped Rhuarc on the shoulder and left to rejoin his people; Aiel ceremony was short, it seemed, and to the point.
Swaggering, Couladin joined Rhuarc. “I ask leave to enter your hold, roofmistress.”
Lian blinked, frowning at him. A murmur rose behind Rand, an astonished buzz from hundreds of throats. A sudden feel of danger hung in the air. Mat certainly felt it, too, fingering his spear and half-turning to see what the mass of Aiel was doing.
“What is the matter?” Rand asked quietly over his shoulder. “Why doesn’t she say something?”
“He asked as if he were a clan chief,” Aviendha whispered disbelievingly. “The man
is
a fool. He must be mad! If she refuses him, it will mean trouble with the Shaido, and she may, for such an insult. Not blood feud—he is not their clan chief, however swollen his head—but trouble.” Between one breath and the next her voice sharpened. “You did not listen, did you? You did not listen! She could have refused permission even to Rhuarc, and he would have had to leave. It would break the clan, but it is in her power. She can refuse even He Who Comes With the Dawn, Rand al’Thor. Women are not powerless among us, not like your wetlander women who must be queens or nobles or else dance for a man if they wish to eat!”
He shook his head slightly. Every time he was on the point of berating himself for how little he had learned about the Aiel, Aviendha reminded him how little she knew about anyone not Aiel. “Someday I would like to introduce you to the Women’s Circle in Emond’s Field. It will be … interesting … to hear you explain to them how powerless they are.” He felt her shifting against his back, trying to get a good look at his face, and carefully kept his expression smooth. “Maybe they’ll explain a few things to you, too.”
“You have my leave,” Lian began—Couladin smiled, swelling up where he stood—“to step beneath my roof. Water and shade will be found for you.” Soft gasps from hundreds of mouths made quite a loud sound.
The fire-haired man quivered as if struck, face red with rage. He did not seem to know what to do. He took a challenging step forward, staring up at Lian and Amys, clutching his own forearms as though to keep his hands from his spears, then whirled and strode back toward the gathering, glaring this way and that, daring anyone to speak. Finally he stopped not far from where he had begun, staring at Rand. Coals could not have been hotter than his blue eyes.
“As one friendless and alone,” Aviendha whispered. “She has welcomed him as a beggar. The gravest insult to him, and none to the Shaido.” Suddenly she fisted Rand so hard in the ribs that he grunted. “Move, wetlander.
You hold such honor as I have left in your hands; all will know I have taught you! Move!”
Swinging a leg over, he slid from Jeade’en’s back and strode up beside Rhuarc.
I am not Aiel
, he thought.
I do not understand them, and I cannot let myself come to like them too much. I cannot.
None of the other men had done so, but he bowed to Lian; that was how he had been brought up. “Roofmistress, I ask leave to come beneath your roof.” He heard Aviendha’s breath catch. He had been supposed to say the other thing, what Rhuarc had. The clan chief’s eyes narrowed worriedly, watching his wife, and Couladin’s flushed face twisted in a scornful smile. The soft murmurs from the crowd sounded puzzled.
The roofmistress stared at Rand even harder than she had at Couladin, taking him in from hair to boots and back again, the
shoufa
lying on the shoulders of a red coat that would surely never be worn by an Aiel. She looked questioningly at Amys, who nodded.

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