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Authors: Robert Jordan

BOOK: Shadow Rising, The
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Rubbing her hands on her skirt, she found she was holding a gnarled stick with a thick knob on the end. A fat lot of good that would do. But she tightened her grip on it. A sword might be more use—for an instant the stick flickered, half a sword—but she did not know how to use a sword. She laughed to herself ruefully. A cudgel was as good as a sword here; both practically useless. Channeling was the only real defense, that and running. Which left her only one choice at the moment.
She wanted to run now, with that feel of eyes on her, but she would not give up so quickly. Only what was she to do? Egwene was not here. She was somewhere in the Waste. Rhuidean, Elayne said. Wherever that was.
Between one step and the next she was suddenly on a mountainside, with a harsh sun rising over more jagged mountains beyond the valley below, baking the dry air. The Waste. She was in the Waste. For a moment the sun startled her, but the Waste was far enough east for sunrise there to still be night in Tanchico. In
Tel’aran’rhiod
it made no difference anyway. Sunlight or darkness there seemed to bear no relation to what was in the real world as far as she could determine.
Long, pale shadows still covered almost half the valley, but strangely a mass of fog billowed down there, not seeming to grow less for the sun beating on it. Great towers rose out of the fog, some appearing unfinished. A city. In the Waste?
Squinting, she could make out a person down in the valley, too. A man, though all she could see at this distance was someone who seemed to
be wearing breeches and a bright blue coat. Certainly not an Aiel. He was walking along the edge of the fog, every now and again stopping to poke at it. She could not be sure, but she thought his hand stopped short each time. Maybe it was not fog at all.
“You must get away from here,” a woman’s voice said urgently. “If that one sees you, you are dead, or worse.”
Nynaeve jumped, spinning with her club raised, nearly losing her footing on the slope.
The woman standing a little above her wore a short white coat and voluminous, pale yellow trousers gathered above short boots. Her cloak billowed on an arid gust of wind. It was her long golden hair, intricately braided, and the silver bow in her hands that made a name pop incredulously into Nynaeve’s mouth.
“Birgitte?”
Birgitte, hero of a hundred tales, and her silver bow with which she never missed. Birgitte, one of the dead heroes the Horn of Valere would call back from the grave to fight in the Last Battle. “It’s impossible. Who are you?”
“There is no time, woman. You must go before he sees.” In one smooth motion she pulled a silver arrow from the quiver at her waist, nocked it and drew fletching to ear. The silver arrowhead pointed straight at Nynaeve’s heart. “Go!”
Nynaeve fled.
She was not sure how, but she was standing on the Green in Emond’s Field, looking at the Winespring Inn with its chimneys and red tile roof. Thatched roofs surrounded the Green, where the Winespring gushed out of a stone outcrop. The sun stood high here, though the Two Rivers lay far west of the Waste. Yet despite a cloudless sky, a deep shadow lay across the village.
She had only a moment to wonder how they were doing without her. A flicker of movement caught her eye, a flash of silver and a woman ducking behind the corner of Ailys Candwin’s neat house beyond the Winespring Water. Birgitte.
Nynaeve did not hesitate. She ran for one of the footbridges across the narrow rushing stream. Her shoes pounded on the wooden planks. “Come back here,” she shouted. “You come back here and answer me! Who was that? You come back here, or I’ll hero you! I’ll thump you so you think you’ve had an adventure!”
Rounding the corner of Ailys’s house, she really only half-expected to
see Birgitte. What she did not expect at all was a man in a dark coat trotting toward her less than a hundred paces down the hard-packed dirt street. Her breath caught. Lan. No, but he had the same shape to his face, the same eyes. Halting, he raised his bow and shot. At her. Screaming, she threw herself aside, trying to claw her way awake.
 
 
Elayne jumped to her feet, toppling the stool over backward, as Nynaeve screamed and sat up on the bed, eyes wide.
“What happened, Nynaeve? What happened?”
Nynaeve shuddered. “He looked like Lan. He looked like Lan, and he tried to kill me.” She put a trembling hand to her left arm, where a shallow slash oozed blood a few inches below her shoulder. “If I hadn’t jumped, it would have gone through my heart.”
Seating herself on the edge of the bed, Elayne examined the cut. “It is not bad. I’ll wash and bandage it for you.” She wished she knew how to Heal; trying without knowing might well make it worse. But it really was little more than a long nick. Not to mention that her head still seemed full of jelly. Quivering jelly. “It was not Lan. Calm yourself. Whoever it was, it was not Lan.”
“I know that,” Nynaeve said acidly. She recounted what had happened in much the same angry voice. The man who had shot at her in Emond’s Field, and the man in the Waste; she was not sure they were one and the same. Birgitte herself was incredible enough.
“Are you certain?” Elayne asked. “Birgitte?”
Nynaeve sighed. “The only thing I am certain of is that I did not find Egwene. And that I am not going back there tonight.” She pounded a fist on her thigh. “Where is she? What happened to her? If she met that fellow with the bow … . Oh, Light!”
Elayne had to think a minute; she wanted to sleep so badly, and her thoughts kept shimmering. “She said she might not be there when we are supposed to meet again. Maybe that is why she left so hurriedly. Whyever she can’t … . I mean … .” It did not seem to make a great deal of sense, but she could not get it out properly.
“I hope so,” Nynaeve said wearily. Looking at Elayne, she added, “We had better get you to bed. You look ready to fall over.”
Elayne was grateful to be helped out of her clothes. She did remember to bandage Nynaeve’s arm, but the bed looked so inviting she could hardly
think of anything else. In the morning perhaps the room would have stopped its slow spin around the bed. Sleep came as soon as her head touched the pillow.
In the morning she wished she were dead.
With sunlight barely in the sky, the common room was empty except for Elayne. Head in her hands, she stared at a cup Nynaeve had set on the table before going off to find the innkeeper. Every time she breathed, she could smell it; her nose tried to clench. Her head felt … . It was not possible to describe how her head felt. Had someone offered to cut it off, she might have thanked him.
“Are you all right?”
She jerked at the sound of Thom’s voice and barely stifled a whimper. “I am quite all right, thank you.” Talking made her head throb. He fiddled with one of his mustaches uncertainly. “Your stories were wonderful last night, Thom. What I remember of them.” Somehow she managed a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I am afraid I don’t remember very much of anything except sitting there listening. I seem to have eaten some bad apple jelly.” She was not about to admit to drinking all that wine; she still had no idea how much. Or to making a fool of herself in his room. Above all, not that. He seemed to believe her, from the relieved way he took a chair.
Nynaeve appeared, handing her a damp cloth as she sat down. She also pushed the cup with its horrible brew closer. Elayne pressed the cloth to her forehead gratefully.
“Have either of you seen Master Sandar this morning?” the older woman asked.
“He did not sleep in our room,” Thom replied. “Which I should be grateful for, considering the size of the bed.”
As though the words had summoned him, Juilin came in through the front door, his face weary and his snug-fitting coat rumpled. There was a bruise beneath his left eye, and the short black hair that normally lay flat on his head looked rough-combed with his fingers, but he smiled as he joined them. “The thieves in this city are as numerous as minnows in reeds, and they will talk if you buy a cup of something. I have talked with two men who claim to have seen a woman with a white streak in her hair above the left ear. I think I believe one of them.”
“So they are here,” Elayne said, but Nynaeve shook her head.
“Perhaps. More than one woman can have a white streak in her hair.”
“He could not say how old she was,” Juilin said, hiding a yawn behind his hand. “No age at all, he claimed. He joked that maybe she was Aes Sedai.”
“You go too fast,” Nynaeve told him in a tight voice. “You do us no good if you bring them down on us.”
Juilin flushed darkly. “I am careful. I have no wish for Liandrin to put her hands on me again. I do not ask questions; I talk. Sometimes of women I used to know. Two men bit on that white streak, and neither ever knew it was more than a scrap of idle talk over cheap ale. Tonight maybe another will swim into my net, only this time maybe it will be a fragile woman from Cairhien with very big blue eyes.” That would be Temaile Kinderode. “Bit by bit, I will narrow where they have been seen, until I know where they are. I will find them for you.”
“Or I will.” Thom sounded as if he thought that much more likely. “Rather than thieves, would they not be meddling with nobles and politics? Some lord in this city will begin doing what he usually does not, and he will draw me to them.”
The two men eyed one another. In another moment Elayne expected one of them to offer to wrestle. Men. First Juilin and Domon, now Juilin and Thom. Very likely Thom and Domon would get in a fistfight to complete it. Men. That was the only comment she could think of.
“Perhaps Elayne and I will succeed without either of you,” Nynaeve said dryly. “We will begin looking ourselves, today.” Her eyes barely shifted toward Elayne. “At least, I will. Elayne may need a little more rest to recover from … the voyage.”
Setting the cloth down carefully, Elayne used both hands to pick up the cup in front of her. The thick, gray-green liquid tasted worse than it smelled. Shuddering, she made herself keep swallowing. When it hit her stomach, for an instant she felt like a cloak flapping in a high wind. “Two pairs of eyes can see better than one,” she told Nynaeve, setting the empty cup back down with a clink.
“A hundred pairs can see even better,” Juilin said hastily, “and if that Illianer eel truly sends his people out, we will have at least that many, what with the thieves and cutpurses.”
“I—
we
—will find these women for you if they can be found,” Thom said. “There is no need for you to stir from the inn. This city has a dangerous feel even if Liandrin is not here.”
“Besides which,” Juilin added, “if they are here, they know the two of you. They know your faces. Much better if you stay here at the inn, out of sight.”
Elayne stared at them in amazement. A moment gone they had been trying to stare each other down, and now they were shoulder to shoulder.
Nynaeve had been right about them causing trouble. Well, the Daughter-Heir of Andor was not about to hide behind Master Juilin Sandar and Master Thom Merrilin. She opened her mouth to tell them so, but Nynaeve spoke first.
“You are right,” she said calmly. Elayne stared at her incredulously; Thom and Juilin looked surprised, and at the same time disgustingly satisfied. “They do know us,” Nynaeve went on. “I took care of that this morning, I think. Ah, here is Mistress Rendra with our breakfast.”
Thom and Juilin exchanged disconcerted frowns, but they could say nothing with the innkeeper smiling at them all through her veil.
“About what I asked you?” Nynaeve said to her as the woman placed a bowl of honeyed porridge in front of her.
“Ah, yes. It will be no problem to find the clothes to fit both of you. And the hair—you have such lovely hair; so long—it will be the work of no time to put it up.” She fingered her own deep golden braids.
Thom’s and Juilin’s faces made Elayne smile. They might have been ready for arguments; they had no defense against being ignored. Her head was actually feeling a little better; Nynaeve’s vile mixture seemed to be working. As Nynaeve and Rendra discussed costs and cut and fabric—Rendra wanted to duplicate her clinging dress, pale green today; Nynaeve was opposed, but seemed to be wavering—Elayne took a spoon of porridge to wash the taste from her mouth. It reminded her that she was hungry.
There was one problem none of them had mentioned yet, one that Thom and Juilin did not know. If the Black Ajah was in Tanchico, then so was whatever it was that endangered Rand. Something able to bind him with his own Power. Finding Liandrin and the others was not enough. They had to find that, too. Suddenly her newfound appetite was completely gone.

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