New Spring: The Novel

CHAPTER 22

If Canluum was a city of hills, Chachin was a city of mountains. The three highest rose almost a mile even with their peaks sheared off short, and all glittered in the noonday sun with colorful glazed tile roofs and tile-covered palaces. Atop the tallest, the Aesdaishar Palace shone brighter than any other in red and green, the prancing Red Horse flying above its largest dome. Three towered ring-walls surrounded the city, as did a deep dry moat a hundred paces wide spanned by two-dozen bridges, each with a fortress hulking at its mouth. The traffic was too great here, and the Blight too far away, for the helmeted and breastplated guards with the Red Horse on their chests to be so diligent as in Canluum, but crossing the Bridge of Sunrise, amid tides of wagons and carts and people mounted and afoot flowing both ways, still took some little while.

Once inside the first wall, Lan wasted no time drawing rein, out of the way of the heavy-laden merchants' wagons lumbering past. Even with Edeyn waiting, he had never been so glad to see any place in his life. By the letter of the law, they were not truly inside Chachin-the second, higher, wall lay more than a hundred paces ahead, and the third, still taller, as much beyond that-but he wanted to be done with this Alys. Where in the Light had she found fleas this early in the year? And blackflies! Blackflies should not appear for another month! He was a mass of itching welts. At least she had found no satisfaction in it. Of that, he was certain.

"The pledge was protection to Chachin, and it has been kept," he told the woman. "So long as you avoid the rougher parts of the city, you are as safe on any street as if you had a bodyguard of ten. So you may see to your affairs, and we will see to ours. Keep your coin," he added coldly when she reached for her purse. Irritation flared, for losing self-control. Yet she offered insult atop insult.

Ryne immediately started going on about giving offense to Aes Sedai and offering her smiling apologies and deep bows from his saddle that had his bells ringing like alarm gongs, while Bukama grumbled sourly about men with the manners of pigs, with some justification. Alys herself gazed at him, so near expressionless that she might even have been what she claimed. A dangerous claim if untrue. And if true… He especially wanted no part of her, then.

Whirling Cat Dancer, he galloped up the wide street scattering people afoot and some mounted. Another time that might have sparked duels. The hadori and the reputation that went with it certainly would not have held back anyone but commoners. But he rode too fast to hear a cry of challenge, dodging around sedan chairs and tradesmen's high-wheeled carts and porters carrying loads on their shoulder-poles, without slackening his pace. After the quiet of the country, the rumble of iron-rimmed wheels on paving stones and the cries of hawkers and shopkeepers seemed raucous. The flutes of street musicians sounded strident. The smells of roasted nuts and meat pies on vendors' barrows, the smells of cooking in the kitchens of dozens of inns and hundreds of homes, blended into an unpleasant stench after the clean air on the road. A hundred stables full of horses added their own flavor.

Bukama and Ryne caught him up with the packhorse before he was halfway up the mountain to the Aesdaishar Palace and fell in to either side. If Edeyn was in Chachin, she would be there. Wisely, Bukama and Ryne held their silence. Bukama, at least, knew what he was about to face. Entering the Blight would be much easier. Leaving the Blight alive, at any rate. Any fool could ride into the Blight. Was he a fool to come here?

The higher they climbed, the more slowly they moved. There were fewer people in the streets high up, where tile-roofed houses gave way to palaces and the homes of wealthy merchants and bankers, their walls covered with bright tiles, and the street musicians to liveried servants scurrying on errands. Brightly lacquered coaches with House sigils on the doors replaced merchants' wagons and sedan chairs. A coach behind a team of four or six with plumes on their bridles took up a great deal of room, and most had half a dozen outriders as well as a pair of backmen clinging to the rear of the coach, all armed and armored and ready to dispute with anyone who tried brushing by too closely. In particular, with three roughly dressed men who tried. Ryne's yellow coat did not look so fine as it had in Canluum, and with Lan's second-best coat bloodstained, he was reduced to wearing his third, worn enough to make Bukama seem well dressed. Thought of the bloodstains brought other thoughts. He owed Alys a debt for her Healing, as well as for her torments, though in honor it was only the first he could repay. No. He had to get that odd little woman out of his head, although she seemed to have lodged herself inside his skull, somehow. It was Edeyn he needed to concentrate on. Edeyn and the most desperate fight of his life.

The Aesdaishar Palace filled the flattened mountaintop completely, an immense, shining structure of domes and high balconies covering fifty hides, a small city to itself, every surface shining in patterns of red and green. The great bronze gates, worked with the lacquered Red Horse, stood invitingly open beneath a red-tiled arch that led to the Visitor's Yard, but a dozen guards stepped out to bar the way when Lan and the others approached. The Red Horse was embroidered on the green tabards they wore over their breastplates, and their halberds bore red-and-green streamers. They were quite colorful, with their red helmets and breeches and their polished high green boots, but any man who served here was a veteran of more than a single battle, and they regarded the three new arrivals through the steel face-bars of their helmets with hard eyes.

Lan stepped down from the saddle and bowed, not too deeply, touching forehead, heart and sword hilt. "I am Lan Mandragoran," he said. Nothing more.

The guards' stiffness lessened at his name, but they did not give way immediately. A man could claim any name, after all. One of them went running off and returned in moments with a gray-haired officer who carried his red-plumed helmet on his hip. Jurad Shiman was a seasoned campaigner who had ridden with Lan in the south for a time, and his long face broke into a smile.

"Be welcome, al'Lan Mandragoran," he said, bowing much more deeply than he ever had for Lan on any previous visit. "Tai'shar Malkier!" Oh, yes; if Edeyn was not here now, she had been.

Leading his bay, Lan followed Jurad through the red arch onto the smooth paving stones of the Visitor's Yard feeling as though he should have his sword in hand and his armor on. The balconies of stone fretwork that overlooked the broad courtyard took on the aspect of archers' balconies to his eye. Ridiculous, of course. Those open balconies, like lace woven from stone, afforded little protection for archers. They were for watching new arrivals on grand occasions, not defense. No enemy had ever broken past the second ring-wall, and should Trollocs ever make it this deep into the city, all was lost. Still, Edeyn might be here, and he could not shake the feeling of walking onto a battlefield.

Grooms in red-and-green livery with the Red Horse embroidered on the shoulders came running to take the horses, and more men and women to carry the contents of the packhorse's wicker hampers and show each man to rooms befitting his station. Worryingly, the shatayan of the palace herself led them. She was a stately, straight-backed woman in livery, graying hair worn in a thick roll on the nape of her neck. The silvered ring of keys at her belt proclaimed that Mistress Romera had charge of all the Palace servants, but a shatayan was more than a servant herself. Usually, only crowned rulers could look for a greeting at the gates from the shatayan. He was swimming in a sea of other people's expectations. Men had drowned in seas like that.

He went along to see Bukama's and Ryne's rooms, and express his delight in them to Mistress Romera, not because he expected them to be given anything unsuitable, but because it was necessary that he see to his men before himself. Ryne wore a sour expression, but surely he had not expected better than this small room in one of the palace's stone barracks, the same as Bukama. He had known well enough how things would be here. At least Ryne had a room to himself, a bannerman's room with a tiled stove built in beneath the bed. Ordinary soldiers slept ten to a room and, as Lan recalled, spent half their time in winter arguing over who got the beds nearest the fireplace.

Bukama settled in happily-well, happily for him; his scowl very nearly vanished-talking over pipes of tabac with a few men he had fought alongside, and Ryne seemed to recover himself quickly. At any rate, by the time Lan was led away, Ryne was asking among the soldiers whether there were any pretty girls among the serving maids and how he could go about getting his clothes cleaned and pressed. He cared almost as much about his appearance, especially in front of women, young or old, as he did about women themselves. Perhaps it had been the thought of appearing in travel-stained garb in front of the shatayan and the serving women that had soured him.

To Lan's great relief, he was not given a visiting king's apartments despite the shatayan's escort. His three rooms were spacious, with silk tapestries on the blue walls and a broad cornice worked in stylized mountains rimming the high ceilings, and the substantial furniture was simply carved with only a little gilding. The bedchamber had a small balcony overlooking one of the palace gardens and had a bed with a feather mattress wide enough to accommodate four or five. It was all entirely suitable to his station, and he thanked Mistress Romera perhaps a little more profusely than he should have, because she smiled, her hazel eyes crinkling.

"No one can know what the future may hold, my Lord," she said, "but we know who you are." And then she offered him a small curtsy before leaving. A curtsy. Remarkable. Whatever she said, the shatayan had her expectations of the future, too.

Along with the rooms, he acquired two square-faced serving women, Anya and Esne, who began placing his meager belongings in the wardrobe, and a lanky young fellow named Bulen, to run errands, who gaped at Lan's helmet and breast-and backplates as he set them on the black-lacquered rack beside the door, though he must have seen the like many times, here.

"Is Her Majesty in residence?" Lan asked politely.

"No, my Lord," Anya replied, frowning at his bloodstained coat and setting it aside with a sigh. The gray-haired one of the pair, she might be Esne's mother, he thought. It was not the sight of blood that made her sigh-she would be accustomed to that-but the difficulty of cleaning the coat. With luck, he would receive it back both cleaned and mended. As well as it could be, anyway. "Queen Ethenielle is making a progress through the heartland."

"And Prince Brys?" He knew the answer to that-Ethenielle and Brys Consort could be out of the city at the same time only during wartime-yet there were forms to be followed.

Bulen's jaw dropped open at the suggestion the Prince Consort might be absent, but an errand boy could not be expected to know all the usages of the court yet. Anya would not have been placed to serve Lan if she were not fully conversant, though. "Oh, yes, my Lord," she said. Lifting the black-stained shirt, she shook her head before laying the garment aside. Not with the coat. Apparently, the shirt was a lost cause. She was shaking her head over most of his garments, even those she put into the wardrobe. Most of them had seen hard use.

"Are any notables visiting?" He had been itching to ask that as badly as he did from flea and blackfly bites.

Anya and Esne exchanged looks. "Only one of true note, my Lord," Anya replied. She folded a shirt and laid it in the wardrobe, making him wait. "The Lady Edeyn Arrel." The two women smiled at one another, looking even more alike. Of course they had known from the start what he was trying to find out, but they had no call to go around grinning over it like idiots.

While Bulen gave his boots a much-needed blacking, Lan washed himself from head to toe at the washstand rather than waiting for a bathtub to be brought, and dabbed an ointment that Anya sent Esne for onto his welts, but he let the women dress him. Just because they were servants was no reason to insult them. He had one white silk shirt that did not show too much wear, a pair of tight black silk breeches that showed almost none, and a good black silk coat embroidered along the sleeves with golden bloodroses among their hooked thorns. Bloodroses for loss and remembrance. Fitting. His boots had taken on a gleam he had never expected Bulen to achieve. He was armored as well as he could be. With a weapon in hand, there was little he feared, but Edeyn's weapons would not be steel. He had small experience in the kind of battle he needed to fight now.

Giving Anya and Esne each a silver mark, and Bulen a silver penny-Mistress Romera would have been outraged to be offered coin, but a visitor's servants expected something on the first day and on the last-he sent the boy to make sure the stables had followed his instructions about Cat Dancer and set the women in the corridor to guard his door. Then he sat down to wait. His meetings with Edeyn must be public, with as many people around as possible. In private, all advantage belonged to a man's carneira.

He found himself wondering where Alys had gone, what she had wanted with him and the others, and tried to shake her out of his head. Even absent, the woman was a cockleburr down the back of his neck. A tall silver pitcher of tea sat on one of the carved side tables, doubtless flavored with berries and mint, and another of wine, but he ignored them. He was not thirsty, and he needed a clear head and focus for Edeyn. Waiting, he assumed the ko'di and sat wrapped in emotionless emptiness. It was always better to go into battle without emotion.

In a shockingly short time, Anya reentered, carefully closing the door behind her. "My Lord, the Lady Edeyn sends a request for your presence in her chambers." Her tone was very neutral, her face as blank as an Aes Sedai's.

"Tell her messenger I have not yet recovered from my journey," he said.

Anya seemed disappointed with that answer as she curtsied.

Courtesy demanded he be given time for that recovery, as much as he required, but in less than half an hour by the gilded ball-clock on the mantel over the fireplace, Anya entered again carrying a letter sealed with a crouching lioness impressed in blue wax. A crouching lioness ready to spring. Edeyn's personal sigil, and worthy of her. He broke it reluctantly. The letter was very short.

Come to me, sweetling. Come to me now.

There was no signature, but he would have needed none had the sealing wax been blank. Her elaborate hand remained as familiar to him as his own far plainer. The letter was very like Edeyn. Commanding. Edeyn had been born to be a queen, and knew it.

He consigned the page to the flames in the fireplace. There was no seeming about Anya's disappointment this time. Light, the woman had been placed to serve him, but Edeyn had an ally in her if she knew it. Very likely, Edeyn did. She had a way of learning anything that might be of use to her.

No more summonses came from Edeyn, but as the ball-clock chimed three times for the hour, Mistress Romera appeared.

"My Lord," she said formally, "are you rested enough to be received by the Prince Consort?" At last.

It was an honor to be conducted by her personally, but outsiders needed a guide to find their way anywhere in the Palace. He had been there many times and still lost himself upon occasion. His sword remained on the lacquered rack by the door. It would do him no good here, and would insult Brys besides, indicating he thought he needed to protect himself. Which he did, only not with steel.

He expected a private meeting first, but Mistress Romera took him to a large formal hall with a dome painted like the sky in the center of the high ceiling, its base supported by thin, fluted white columns, and the hall was full of people and a murmur of conversation that died as his arrival was noticed. Soft-footed servants in livery moved through the crowd offering spiced wine to Kandori lords and ladies in silks embroidered with House sigils, and to folk in fine woolens worked with the sigils of the more important guilds. And to others, too. Lan saw men in long coats wearing the hadori, men he knew had not worn it these ten years or more. Women with hair still cut at the shoulders and higher wore the small dot of the ki'sain painted on their foreheads. They bowed at his appearance, and made deep curtsies, those men and women who had decided to remember Malkier. They watched the shatayan present him to Brys like hawks watching a field mouse. Or like hawks awaiting a signal to take wing. Perhaps he never should have come here. Too late for that decision now. The only way was forward, whatever lay at the end.

Prince Brys was a stocky, rough-hewn man in his middle years who appeared more suited to armor than to his gold-worked green silks, though in truth he was accustomed to either. Brys was Ethenielle's Swordbearer, the general of her armies, as well as her consort, and he had not come by the office through marrying Ethenielle. Brys owned a strong reputation as a general. He caught Lan's shoulders, refusing to allow him to bow.

"None of that from the man who twice saved my life in the Blight, Lan." He laughed.

"And twice you saved mine," Lan said. "Honors are even."

"That's as may be, that's as may be. But your coming seems to have rubbed some of your luck off on Diryk. He fell from a balcony this morning, a good fifty feet to the paving stones, without breaking a bone." He motioned to his second son, a handsome dark-eyed boy of eight in a coat like his. The child came forward. A large bruise marred the side of his head, and he moved with the stiffness of other bruises, yet he made a formal bow spoiled only somewhat by a wide grin. "He should be at his lessons," Brys confided, "but he was so eager to meet you, he'd have forgotten his letters and cut himself on a sword." Frowning, the boy protested that he would never cut himself.

Lan returned the lad's bow with equal formality, but the last shreds of protocol vanished from the boy in an instant.

"They say you've fought Aiel in the south and on the Shienaran marches, my Lord," he said. "Is that true? Are they really ten feet tall? Do they really veil their faces before they kill? And eat their dead? Is the White Tower really taller than a mountain?"

"Give the man a chance to answer, Diryk," Brys said, mock outrage spoiled by amused laughter. The boy blushed in embarrassment, but still managed an affectionate smile for his father, who ruffled his hair with a quick hand.

"Recall what it is like to be eight, Brys," Lan said. "Let the boy show his excitement." For himself, at eight he had been learning the ko'di and what he would face when he first entered the Blight. Beginning to learn how to kill with hands and feet. Let Diryk have a happier childhood before he had to think too closely on death.

Freed, Diryk unleashed another torrent of questions, though he did wait for answers this time. Given a chance, the boy would have drained him dry about the Aiel, and the wonders of the great cities in the south like Tar Valon and Far Madding. Likely, he would not have believed Chachin was as big as either of those. At last, his father put an end to it.

"Lord Mandragoran will fill your head to your heart's content later," Brys told the boy. "There is someone else he must meet now. Off with you to Mistress Tuval and your books."

Lan thought everyone in the room was holding their breath in anticipation as Brys escorted him across the red-and-white floor tiles.

Edeyn was exactly as he remembered. Oh, ten years older, with touches of white streaking her temples and a few fine lines at the corners of her eyes, but those large dark eyes gripped him. Her ki'sain was still the white of a widow, and her hair still hung in black waves below her waist. She wore a red silk gown in the Domani style, clinging and little short of sheer. She was beautiful, but even she could do nothing here. He made his bow calmly.

For a moment she merely looked at him, cool and considering. "It would have been… easier had you come to me," she murmured, seeming not to care whether Brys heard. And then, shockingly, she knelt gracefully and took his hands in hers. "Beneath the Light," she announced in a strong, clear voice, "I, Edeyn ti Gemallen Arrel, pledge fealty to al'Lan Mandragoran, Lord of the Seven Towers, Lord of the Lakes, the true Blade of Malkier. May he sever the Shadow!" Even Brys looked startled. A moment of silence held while she kissed Lan's fingers; then cheers erupted on every side. Cries of "The Golden Crane!" and even "Kandor rides with Malkier!"

The sound freed him to pull his hands loose, to lift her to her feet. "My Lady," he said quietly, but in a tight voice, "there is no King of Malkier. The Great Lords have not cast the rods."

She put a hand over his lips. A warm hand. "Three of the surviving five are in this room, Lan. Shall we ask them how they will cast? What must be, will be." And then she faded back into the crowd of those who wanted to cluster around him, congratulate him, pledge fealty on the spot had he let them.

Brys rescued him, drawing him off to a long, stone-railed walk above a two-hundred-foot drop to the roofs below. It was known as a place Brys went to be private, and no one followed. Only one door let onto it, no window overlooked it, and no sound from the Palace intruded.

"Had I known she intended that," the older man said as they walked up and down, hands clasped behind their backs, "I would never have given her welcome. If you wish it, I'll let her know that welcome is withdrawn. Don't look at me that way, man. I know enough of Malkieri customs not to insult her. She has you neatly nailed into a box I know you would never choose for yourself." Brys knew less than he thought he did. However delicate the words, withdrawing the welcome would be a deadly insult.

"'Even the mountains will be worn down with time,'" Lan quoted. He was unsure whether he could avoid leading men into the Blight, now. Unsure that he wanted to avoid it. All of those men and women remembering Malkier. Malkier deserved remembrance. But at what price?

"What will you do?" A simple question simply stated, yet very hard to answer.

"I do not know," Lan replied. She had won only a skirmish, but he felt stunned at the ease of it. A formidable opponent, the woman who wore part of his soul in her hair.

For the rest they spoke quietly of hunting and bandits and whether this past year's flare-up in the Blight might die down soon. Brys regretted withdrawing his army from the war against the Aiel, but there had been no alternative. They talked of the rumors about a man who could channel-every tale had him in a different place; Brys thought it another jak o'the mists and Lan agreed-and of the Aes Sedai who seemed to be everywhere, for what reason no one knew. Ethenielle had written him that in a village along her progression two sisters had caught a woman pretending to be Aes Sedai. The woman could channel, but that did her no good. The two real Aes Sedai flogged her squealing through the village, making her confess her crime to every last man and woman who lived there. Then one of the sisters carried her off to Tar Valon for her true punishment, whatever that might be. Lan found himself hoping that Alys had not lied about being Aes Sedai, though he could not think why he should care.

He hoped to avoid Edeyn the rest of the day, too, but when he was guided back to his rooms-by a serving man, this time-she was there, waiting languorously in one of the gilded chairs in the sitting room. His servants were nowhere to be seen. It seemed Anya truly was Edeyn's ally.

"You are no longer beautiful, I fear, sweetling," she said when he came in. "I think you may even be ugly when you are older. But I always enjoyed your eyes more than your face." Her smile became sultry. "And your hands."

He stopped still gripping the door handle. "My Lady, not two hours gone you swore-" She cut him off.

"And I will obey my king. But as the saying goes, a king is not a king, alone with his carneira."She laughed, a smoky laugh. Enjoying her power over him. "I brought your daori.Bring it to me."

Unwillingly, his eyes followed hers to a flat lacquered box on a small table beside the door. Lifting the hinged lid took as much effort as lifting a boulder. Coiled inside lay a long cord woven of hair. He could recall every moment of the morning after their first night, when she took him to the women's quarters of the Royal Palace in Fal Moran and let ladies and serving women watch as she cut his hair at his shoulders. She even told them what it signified. The women had all been amused, making jokes as he sat at Edeyn's feet to weave the daori for her. Edeyn kept custom, but in her own way. The hair felt soft and supple; she must have had it rubbed with lotions every day.

Crossing the floor slowly, he knelt before her and held out his daori stretched between his hands. "In token of what I owe to you, Edeyn, always and forever." If his voice did not hold the fervor of that first morning, surely she understood.

She did not take the cord. Instead, she studied him, a lioness studying a fawn. "I knew you had not been gone so long as to forget our ways," she said finally. "Come."

Rising, she grasped his wrist and drew him to the doors to the balcony overlooking the garden ten paces below. Two servants were pouring water from buckets onto chosen plants, and a young woman was strolling along a slate path in a blue dress as bright as any of the early flowers that grew beneath the trees.

"My daughter, Iselle." For a moment, pride and affection warmed Edeyn's voice. "Do you remember her? She is seventeen, now. She hasn't chosen her carneira, yet." Young men were chosen by their carneira; young women chose theirs. "But I think it time she married anyway."

He vaguely recalled a child who always had servants running, the blossom of her mother's heart, but his head had been full of Edeyn, then. Light, the woman filled his head now, just as the scent of her perfume filled his nose. The scent of her. "She is as beautiful as her mother, I am sure," he said politely. He twisted the daori in his hands. She had too much advantage as long as he held it, all advantage, but she had to take it from him. "Edeyn, we must talk." She ignored that.

"Time you were married, too, sweetling. Since none of your female relatives is alive, it is up to me to arrange." She smiled warmly toward the girl below, a loving mother's smile.

He gasped at what she seemed to be suggesting. At first he could not believe. "Iselle?" he said hoarsely. "Your daughter?" She might keep custom in her own way, but this was scandalous. "I'll not be reined into something so shameful, Edeyn. Not by you, or by this." He shook the daori at her, but she only looked at it and smiled.

"Of course you won't be reined, sweetling. You are a man, not a boy. Yet you do keep custom," she mused, running a finger along the cord of hair quivering between his hands. "Perhaps we do need to talk."

But it was to the bed that she led him. At least he would regain some lost ground there, whether or not she took the daori from his hands. He was a man, not a fawn, however much the lioness she was. He was not surprised when she told him he could lay it aside to help her undress, though. Edeyn would never give up all of her advantage. Not until she presented his daori to his bride on his wedding day. And he could see no way to stop that bride being Iselle.