Berelain’s face took on an intensity, and her voice a brisk tone, as she moved around the table to take up this sheaf of papers or that, discussing what Cairhien needed to buy and what it could afford to buy, what it had to sell now and what it would have in six months, in a year. Depending on the weather, of course. She brushed by that as if it was of no matter, though giving Rand a level look that said he was the Dragon Reborn and if there was any way to stop the heat, he should find it. Rand had seen her meltingly seductive, he had seen her frightened, defiant, wrapped in arrogance, but never like this. She seemed a different woman altogether. Rhuarc, seated on one of his cushions puffing on his pipe, appeared amused as he watched her.

“ . . . this school of yours might do some good,” she said, frowning at a long sheet covered in a precise hand, “if they would stop thinking of new things long enough to make what they have already thought of.” She tapped her lips with a finger, peering at nothing thoughtfully. “You say give them what gold they ask, but if you would let me hold back unless they actually — ”

Jalani put her plump face in at the door — Aiel seemed not to understand knocking — and said, “Mangin is here to speak with Rhuarc and you, Rand al’Thor.”

“Tell him I’ll be happy to talk with him later — ” Rand got that far before Rhuarc broke in quietly.

“You should speak with him now, Rand al’Thor.” The clan chief’s face looked grave; Berelain had replaced the long paper on the table and was studying the floor.

“Very well,” Rand said slowly.

Jalani’s head vanished, and Mangin came in. Taller than Rand, he had been one of those who crossed the Dragonwall in search of He Who Comes With the Dawn, one of the handful who took the Stone of Tear. “Six days ago I killed a man,” he began without preamble, “a treekiller, and I must know if I have toh to you, Rand al’Thor.”

“To me?” Rand said. “You can defend yourself, Mangin; Light, you know tha—” For a moment he was silent, meeting gray eyes that were sober but certainly not afraid. Curious, maybe. Rhuarc’s face told him nothing; Berelain was still not meeting his gaze. “He did attack you, didn’t he?”

Mangin shook his head slightly. “I saw that he deserved to die, so I killed him.” He said it conversationally; he saw the drains needed cleaning, so he cleaned them. “But you have said we cannot kill the oathbreakers except in battle, or if they attack us. Do I have toh toward you now?”

Rand remembered what he had said . . . him will I hang. His chest felt tight. “Why did he deserve to die?”

“He wore what he had no right to,” Mangin replied.

“Wore what? What did he wear, Mangin?”

Rhuarc answered, touching his left forearm. “This.” He meant the Dragon coiled around his arm. Clan chiefs did not display them often, or even speak of them; almost everything about the markings were shrouded in mystery, and the chiefs were content to leave it so. “It was a thing of needles and inks, of course.” A tattoo.

“He was pretending to be a clan chief?” Rand realized he was searching for an excuse . . . him will I hang. Mangin had been one of the first to follow him.

“No,” Mangin said. “He was drinking, and showing off what he should not have had. I see your eyes, Rand al’Thor.” He grinned suddenly. “It is a puzzle. I was right to kill him, but now I have toh to you.”

“You were wrong to kill him. You know the penalty for murder.”

“A rope around the neck, as these wetlanders use.” Mangin nodded thoughtfully. “Tell me where and when; I will be there. May you find water and shade today, Rand al’Thor.”

“May you find water and shade, Mangin,” Rand told him sadly.

“I suppose,” Berelain said when the door closed behind Mangin, “that he really will walk to his own hanging of his own accord. Oh, don’t look at me that way, Rhuarc. I don’t mean to impugn him, or Aiel honor.”

“Six days,” Rand growled, rounding on her. “You knew why he was here, both of you. Six days ago, and you left it to me. Murder is murder, Berelain.”

She drew herself up regally, but she sounded defensive. “I am not used to men coming to me and saying they have just committed murder. Bloody ji’e’toh. Bloody Aielmen and their bloody honor.” The curses sounded odd coming from her mouth.

“You have no cause to be angry with her, Rand al’Thor,” Rhuarc put in. “Mangin’s toh is to you, not to her. Or to me.”

“His toh was to the man he murdered,” Rand said coldly. Rhuarc looked shocked. “The next time somebody commits murder, don’t wait for me. You follow the law!” That way, perhaps he would not have to pass sentence again on a man he knew and liked. He would if he had to. He knew that, and it saddened him. What had he become?

The wheel of a man’s life. Lews Therin murmured. No mercy. No pity.

Chapter 18

A Taste of Solitude

* * *

Are there any more problems you want me to deal with?” Rand’s tone made it clear he meant problems they should have already solved. Rhuarc shook his head slightly; Berelain’s face reddened as well. “Good. Set a date for Mangin’s hanging — ” If it hurts too much, Lews Therin laughed in a hoarse whisper, make it hurt someone else instead. His responsibility. His duty. He stiffened his back to keep that mountain from crushing him. “Hang him tomorrow. Tell him I said so.” He paused, glaring, then realized he was waiting for Lews Therin’s comment, not theirs. Waiting for a dead man’s voice, a dead madman. “I’m going to the school.”

Rhuarc pointed out that the Wise Ones were probably on their way from the tents, and Berelain that Tairen and Cairhienin nobles alike would be clamoring to know where she was hiding Rand, but he told them to tell the truth. And tell the lot of them not to follow him; he would return when he returned. The pair looked as if they had swallowed sour plums, but he snatched up the Dragon Scepter and left.

In the hallway, Jalani and a yellow-haired Red Shield not much older than she came smoothly to their feet, glancing at one another hastily. Otherwise the corridor was empty except for a few scurrying servants. One of each; it figured, though Rand wondered whether Urien had had to wrestle Sulin to make it so.

Motioning them to follow, he went straight down to the nearest stable, where the stalls were the same green marble as the columns that held the high ceiling. The head groom, a gnarled fellow with big ears, the Rising Sun of Cairhien worked on his short leather vest, was so shocked by Rand appearing with only two Aiel for escort that he kept staring at the stable doors for more and bowed so often between stares that Rand wondered whether he would ever get a horse. But once the man shouted “A horse for the Lord Dragon!” six stablemen leaped to prepare a tall, fiery-eyed bay gelding with a gold-fringed bridle and a gold-worked saddle atop a sky-blue saddlecloth fringed and embroidered with rising suns in gold.

As quickly as they moved, the big-eared head groom was gone by the time Rand swung into the saddle. To hunt for the coterie of followers the Dragon Reborn must have, possibly. Or to tell someone Rand was leaving the palace practically alone. Cairhien was like that. The sleek bay wanted to frisk, but while still trying to settle his dancing, Rand trotted him out of the palace grounds, past startled Cairhienin guards. He was not worried about assassins laying an ambush from the big-eared man’s warning; anyone who ambushed him would find they had come to the shearing without clippers. Any delay, though, and likely he would have nobles crowding around so thickly he could not leave without them. It felt good to be alone for a change.

He glanced at Jalani and the young Aielman trotting beside the bay. Dedric, he thought; a Jaern Rift Codara. Almost alone. He could feel Alanna still, and Lews Therin moaned in the far distance over his dead Ilyena. He could never be entirely alone. Maybe never again. What he had of solitude felt good, though, after so long.

Cairhien was a large city, its major streets wide enough to dwarf the people crowding them. Each street slashed arrow-straight through hills carved and stone-terraced until they seemed man-made, mee

ting every other street at a right angle. Throughout the city rose huge towers wrapped in wooden scaffolding that nearly hid elaborate square-arched buttresses, towers that seemed to touch the sky and meant to go higher. Twenty years since the fabled topless towers of Cairhien, a wonder of the world, had burned like torches during the Aiel War, and their rebuilding was still not done.

Making a way was not easy; the trotting did not last. Rand had grown accustomed to crowds opening up before his usual escort, yet with hundreds of cadin’sor-clad Aiel just within his sight among the slow-flowing throng, it was not quite the same, not for only two. Some of those Aiel recognized him, he thought, but they ignored him, not about to cause embarrassment by calling attention when the Car’a’carn wore a sword and, not as bad but hardly to be applauded, rode a horse. To Aiel, shame and embarrassment were far worse than pain, though of course ji’e’toh had to complicate things with degrees Rand understood only in part. Aviendha could explain it certainly; she seemed to want him to become Aiel.

Plenty of others jammed the streets too, Cairhienin in their usual drab clothing and also in the shabby bright colors of those who had lived in the Foregate before it burned, Tairens a head taller in the crowd, if not as tall as the Aiel. Ox-carts and horse-drawn wagons threaded through the throng, yielding way to closed lacquer carriages and sedan chairs, sometimes with a House banner. Hawkers cried wares from trays, and peddlers from pushcarts; musicians, tumblers and jugglers performed on street corners. Both were changes. Once Cairhien had been quiet, subdued, except in the Foregate. Some of that sobriety still held. The shops still had small signs, displaying no goods outside. And if the former Foregaters seemed raucous as ever, laughing loudly and shouting at one another, arguing right there in the street, the other Cairhienin still eyed them with prim distaste.

No one but Aiel recognized the bareheaded horseman in a silver-worked blue coat, though occasionally someone glanced twice at his saddlecloth. The Dragon Scepter was not well known here yet. Nobody gave way. Rand felt torn between impatience and the pleasure of not being the focus of every eye.

The school occupied a palace a mile from the Sun Palace, once the property of one Lord Barthanes, now dead and unlamented, a great heap of stone squares with sharply angular towers and severe balconies. The tall gates onto the main courtyard stood open, and when Rand rode in, he found a welcome.

Idrien Tarsin, who headed the school, stood on the broad steps at the far end of the courtyard, a stocky woman in a plain gray dress, straight-backed enough to seem a head taller than she was. She was not alone. Dozens and dozens of others crowded the stone steps, men and women in wool much more often than silk, frequently worn and seldom ornamented. Older folk, mainly. Idrien was not the only one with more gray than black in her hair, or no black at all, or no hair at all, though here and there a younger face peered eagerly at Rand. Younger meaning ten or fifteen years older than he.

They were the teachers, in a way, though this was not exactly a school. Pupils did come to learn — young men and women hung gaping out of every window around the courtyard, now — but for the most part Rand had wanted to gather knowledge in one place. Time and again he had heard how much had been lost in the War of the Hundred Years and the Trolloc Wars. How much more must have vanished in the Breaking of the World? If he was going to Break the World again, he meant to create repositories where knowledge could be preserved. Another school had already started in Tear, though just barely, and he had begun seeking a place in Caemlyn.

Nothing ever goes as you expect, Lews Therin murmured. Expect nothing, and you will not be surprised. Expect nothing. Hope for nothing. Nothing.

Suppressing the voice, Rand dismounted.

Idrien came to meet him with a curtsy. As usual, when she rose it was something of a shock to realize yet again that she was barely as tall as his chest. “Welcome to the School of Cairhien, my Lord Dragon.” Her voice was surprisingly sweet and youthful, a startling contrast to her blunt face. He had heard it harden, though, with students and teachers; Idrien held a tight rein on the school.

“How many spies do you have in the Sun Palace?” he asked mildly. She looked startled, perhaps that he would suggest such a thing, but more likely because the question was not proper manners in Cairhien.

“We have prepared a small display.” Well, he had not really expected an answer. She eyed the two Aiel like a woman eyeing two large and muddy dogs of uncertain temperament, but contented herself with a sniff. “If my Lord Dragon will follow me?”

He followed, frowning. A display of what?

The entry hall of the school was a vast chamber of polished dark gray columns and pale gray floor tiles, with a gray-veined marble balcony all the way around three spans up. Now it was largely filled with . . . contraptions. The teachers crowding in behind him went running to them. Rand stared, suddenly remembering what Berelain had said about the school making things. But what?

Idrien told him — after a fashion — leading him from one to the next, where men and women explained what they had created. He even understood some of it.

An array of screens and scrapers and crocks full of linen scraps produced finer paper than anyone made now, or so its inventor said. A great hulking shape of levers and huge flat plates was a printing press, much better than those already in use, according to its maker. Dedric showed considerable interest in that, until Jalani apparently decided he should be watching for somebody trying to attack the Car’a’carn: she trod hard on his foot, and he limped after Rand. There was a plow on wheels meant to turn six furrows at once — Rand could recognize that, at least; he thought it might work — and another thing with shafts for horses that was meant to harvest hay in place of men with scythes, and a new sort of loom that was easier to operate, so the fellow who made it said. There were painted wooden models of viaducts to carry water to places where the wells were going dry, of new drains and sewers for Cairhien, even a tabletop exhibit with tiny figures of men and carts, cranes and rollers, meant to show how roads could be built and paved as well as they had in years long gone.

Rand did not know whether any of it would work, but some looked worth trying. That plow, for instance, could be handy if Cairhien was ever to feed itself again. He would tell Idrien to build it. No, he would tell Berelain to tell her. Always follow lines of authority in public view, Moiraine had said, unless you mean to undercut someone and bring them down.

Among the teachers he knew was Kin Tovere, a stocky lensmaker who kept wiping his bald head with a striped handkerchief. Aside from looking glasses in various sizes — “Count the hairs in a man’s nose at a mile,” he said; that was how he talked — he had a lens as big across as his head, a sketch of the looking glass to hold it and more like it, a thing six paces long, and a scheme for looking at the stars, of all things. Well, Kin always wanted to look at things far off.

Idrien wore a look of quiet satisfaction while Rand studied Master Tovere’s sketch. She was not much for anything but the practical. During the siege of Cairhien, she herself had built a huge crossbow, all levers and pulleys, that hurled a small spear a full mile hard enough to drive through a man. Had she her way, there would be no time wasted on anything not real and solid.

“Build it,” Rand told Kin. Maybe it was of no real use, not like the plow, but he liked Tovere. Idrien sighed and shook her head. Tovere beamed. “And I’m giving you a prize of a hundred gold crowns. This looks interesting.” That produced a buzz, and it was close whether Idrien’s jaw or Tovere’s dropped farther.

Other things in the hall made Tovere seem as levelheaded as the would-be road-builder. The round-faced fellow who did something with cow dung that ended with a bluish flame burning at the end of a brass tube; even he did not seem to know what it was for. The lanky young woman whose display was mainly a shell of paper moored by strings and kept aloft by the heat rising from a small fire in a brazier. She mumbled something about flying — he was sure that was what she said — and birds’ wings being curved — she had sketc

hes of birds, and of what seemed to be wooden birds — but she was so tongue-tied meeting the Dragon Reborn that he could not understand another word, and Idrien certainly could not explain what it was about.

And then there was the balding man with an assemblage of brass tubes and cylinders, rods and wheels, all covering a heavy wooden table freshly gouged and scraped, some gouges nearly deep enough to pierce the tabletop. For some reason half the man’s face and one of his hands were swathed in bandages. As soon as Rand appeared in the entry hall, he had begun anxiously building a fire under one of the cylinders. When Rand and Idrien stopped in front of him, he moved a lever and smiled proudly.

The contraption began to quiver, steam hissing out from two or three places. The hiss grew to a shriek, and the thing began trembling. It groaned ominously. The shriek became ear-piercing. It shook so hard the table moved. The balding man threw himself at the table, fumbling a plug loose on the largest cylinder. Steam rushed out in a cloud, and the thing went still. Sucking burned fingers, the man managed a weak grin.

“Very nice brasswork,” Rand said before letting Idrien lead him away. “What was that?” he asked quietly when they were out of earshot.

She shrugged. “Mervin will not tell anyone. Sometimes there are bangs in his rooms loud enough to make doors tremble, and he has scalded himself six times so far, but he claims it will bring a new Age when he makes it work.” She glanced at Rand uneasily.