She stopped near a wiry, damp-faced Illuminator; it was easy to tell what he was, or had been. His thick mustaches were not covered by the diaphanous veil Taraboners often wore, but baggy breeches, embroidered on the legs, and an equally loose shirt embroidered across the chest marked him well enough. He was selling finches and warblers in crudely made cages. With their chapter house burned by the Shaido, a number of Illuminators were trying to find the means to return to Tarabon.
“I have it from the most reliable source,” he was telling a handsome graying woman in a plainly cut dark blue dress. A merchant, no doubt, catching a jump on those waiting for better times in Cairhien. “The Aes Sedai,” the Illuminator confided, leaning over a caged bird to whisper, “they are divided. The Aes Sedai, they are at war. With one another.” The merchant nodded agreement.
Egwene stopped pretending to consider a green-headed finch and moved on, though she had to hop out of the way of a round-faced gleeman, striding along with self-important flourishes of his patch-covered cloak. Gleemen knew very well that they were among the few wetlanders welcome in the Waste; Aiel did not intimidate them. At least, they pretended so.
That rumor troubled her. Not that the Tower had split apart—that could not have been kept secret much longer—but talk of war between Aes Sedai. Knowing that Aes Sedai were set against Aes Sedai was like knowing one part of her family was set against another, just barely tolerable for knowing the reasons, yet the thought that it might come to more. . . . If only there were some way to Heal the Tower, to make it whole again without bloodshed.
A little farther down the street, a perspiring Foregate woman who might have been pretty if her face were cleaner was dispensing rumor along with ribbons and pins from a tray hung from a neckstrap. She wore a blue silk dress, slashed with red in the skirt, that had been made for a shorter woman; the heavily worn hem was high enough to show her stout shoes, and holes in the sleeves and bodice showed where embroidery had been picked out. “I tell you a fact,” she informed the women picking over her tray, “there has been Trollocs seen around the city. Ah, yes, that green will set off your eyes. Hundreds of Trollocs and. . . .”
Egwene barely paused. If there had been even one Trolloc anywhere near the city, the Aiel would have known long before it became street gossip. She wished the Wise Ones gossiped. Well, they did, sometimes, but only about other Aiel. As far as Aiel were concerned, nothing about wetlanders was very absorbing. Being able to pop into Elaida’s study in Tel’aran’rhiod whenever she wanted and read the woman’s letters had accustomed her to knowing what was happening in the world, though.
Abruptly Egwene realized she was looking around differently, looking at people’s faces. There were Aes Sedai eyes-and-ears in Cairhien as surely as she was sweating. Elaida must receive a report a day by pigeon from Cairhien, if not more. Tower spies, Ajah spies, spies for individual Aes Sedai. They were everywhere, often where and who you least suspected. Why were those two tumblers just standing there? Were they catching their breath, or watching her? They sprang back into action, one leaping up to a handstand on the other’s shoulders.
A spy for the Yellow Ajah had once tried to bundle Elayne and Nynaeve off to Tar Valon, on orders issued by Elaida. Egwene did not actually know that Elaida wanted her as well, but assuming anything else would be very foolish. Egwene could not make herself believe that Elaida would forgive anyone who had worked closely for the woman she deposed.
For that matter, some of the Aes Sedai in Salidar probably had eyes-and-ears here too. If word ever reached them of “Egwene Sedai of the Green Ajah. . . .” It could be anybody. That skinny woman in the shop door, apparently studying a bolt of dark gray cloth. Or the blowsy woman lolling beside the tavern door, flapping her apron at her face. Or that fat fellow with his pushcart full of pies—Why was he looking at her so strangely? She very nearly headed for the nearest city gate.
It was the fat fellow who stopped her, or rather the way he suddenly tried to cover his pies with his hands. He was staring at her because she had been staring at him. He was probably afraid an Aiel “savage” was going to take some of his wares without paying.
Egwene laughed weakly. Aiel. Even people who looked her in the face assumed she was Aiel. A Tower agent who was looking for her would walk right past. Feeling a good deal better, she went back to meandering through the streets, listening where she could.
The trouble was, she had grown used to knowing things just weeks, or even days, after they happened, and with a certainty that they had happened. Rumor might cross a hundred miles in a day or take a month, and it birthed ten daughters every day. Today she learned that Siuan had been executed because she unearthed the Black Ajah, that Siuan was Black Ajah and still alive, that the Black Ajah had driven those Aes Sedai who were not Black from the Tower. They were not new tales, only variations on old. One new story, spreading like fire in a summer meadow, was that the Tower had been behind all the false Dragons; that made her so angry she stalked away stiff-backed every time she heard it. Which meant she did a good bit of stiff-backed stalking. She heard that Andorans in Aringill had declared some noblewoman queen—Dylin, Delin, the name varied—now that Morgase was dead, which might be true, and that Aes Sedai were running around Arad Doman doing very improbable things, which was certainly untrue. The Prophet was Coming to Cairhien; the Prophet had been crowned King of Ghealdan—no, Amadicia; the Dragon Reborn had killed the Prophet for blasphemy. The Aiel were all leaving; no, they meant to settle and stay. Berelain was to be crowned on the Sun Throne. A skinny little man with shifty eyes nearly got himself beaten by his listeners outside a tavern for saying that Rand was one of the Forsaken, but Egwene stepped into that without thought.
“Have you no honor?” she demanded coldly. The four coarse-faced men who had been on the point of grabbing the skinny fellow blinked at her. They were Cairhienin, not all that much taller than she, but much bulkier, with the broken noses and sunken knuckles of brawlers, yet she held them where they stood with her sheer intensity. That and the presence of Aiel in the street; they were not fool enough to become rough with an Aiel woman, as they thought, in those circumstances. “If you must face a man for what he says, face him one at a time, in honor. This is not battle; you shame yourselves to go four at one.”
They stared at her as if she were mad, and slowly her face reddened. She hoped they thought it anger. Not how dare you pick on someone weaker, but how dare you not let him fight you one by one? She had just lectured them as if they followed ji’e’toh. Of course, if they did, there would hav