An Offer Refused

An Offer Refused

"Is that the kind of woman you like?" Aviendha said contemptuously.

Rand looked down at her, striding along at Jeade'en's stirrup in her heavy skirts, brown shawl doubled over her head. Big blue-green eyes flashed up at him from beneath her wide headscarf as if she wished she still had the spear the Wise Ones had scolded her for taking up during the Trolloc attack.

Sometimes it made him uncomfortable, her walking while he rode, but he had tried walking with her, and his feet were grateful for a horse. Occasionally - very occasionally - he had managed to get her to ride behind his saddle, by complaining that he was getting a crick in his neck talking to her. Riding a horse did not exactly violate custom, it turned out, yet contempt for not using your own legs to carry you kept her afoot most of the time. One laugh from any of the Aiel, especially a Maiden, even one looking the other way, was enough to have her off Jeade'en in a flash.

"She is soft, Rand al'Thor. Weak."

He glanced back over at the boxlike white wagon leading the peddlers' train in a crooked, lurching snake across the dusty, broken landscape, escorted by Jindo Maidens again today. Isendre was up with Kadere and the driver, seated on the heavyset peddler's lap, her chin on his shoulder while he held a small, blue silk parasol to shade her - and himself, too - from the harsh sun. Even in a white coat, Kadere continually mopped his dark face with a large handkerchief, more affected by the heat than she, in her sleek, clinging gown that matched the parasol. Rand was not close enough to be sure, but he thought her dark eyes were on him above the misty scarf wrapped about her face and head. She usually seemed to be watching him. Kadere did not appear to mind.

"I do not think Isendre is soft," he said quietly, adjusting the shoufa around his head; it did keep the broiling sun off after a fashion. He had resisted donning any more Aiel garb, no matter how much more suited to the climate than his red wool coat. Whatever his blood, whatever the marks on his forearms, he was not Aiel, and he would not pretend. Whatever he had to do, he could hang on to that scrap of decency. "No, I would not say that."

On the driver's seat of the second wagon, fat Keille and the gleeman, Natael, were arguing again. Natael had the reins, though he did not drive as well as the man who usually did the job. Sometimes they looked at Rand, too, quick glances before diving back into their quarrel. But then, everyone did. The long column of Jindo on the other side of him, the Wise Ones beyond them, with Moiraine and Egwene and Lan. Among the more distant, thicker line of Shaido he thought heads turned toward him, too. It did not surprise him now any more than it ever had. He was He Who Comes With the Dawn. Everyone wanted to know what he would do. They would find out soon enough.

"Soft," Aviendha grunted. "Elayne is not soft. You belong to Elayne; you should not be caressing eyes with this milk-skinned wench." She shook her head fiercely, muttering half to herself, "Our ways shock her. She could not accept them. Why should I care if she can? I want no part of this! It cannot be! If I could, I would take you gai'shain and 929p1524j give you to Elayne!"

"Why should Isendre accept Aiel ways?"

The wide-eyed look she gave him was so startled he almost laughed. Immediately she scowled as if he had done something infuriating. Aiel women were surely no easier to understand than any others.

"You are certainly not soft, Aviendha." She should take it for a compliment; the woman was as rough as a honing stone sometimes. "Explain to me about the roofmistress again. If Rhuarc is clan chief of the Taardad and chief of Cold Rocks Hold, how is it that the hold belongs to his wife and not him?"

She glowered at him a moment longer, lips working as she muttered under her breath, before answering. "Because she is roofmistress, you stone-headed wetlander. A man cannot own a roof any more than he can own land! Sometimes you wetlanders sound like savages."

"But if Lian is roofmistress of Cold Rocks because she is Rhuarc's wife -"

"That is different! Will you never understand? A child understands!" Taking a deep breath, she adjusted the shawl around her face. She was a pretty woman, except for looking at him most of the time as if he had committed some crime against her. What it might be, he did not know. White-haired Bair, leathery-faced and as reluctant to speak of Rhuidean as ever, had finally, unwillingly told him that Aviendha had not visited the glass columns: she would not do that until she was ready to become a Wise One. So why did she hate him? It was a mystery he would have liked an answer to.

"I will attack it from another direction," she grumbled at him. "When a woman is to marry, if she does not already own a roof, her family builds one for her. On her wedding day her new husband carries her away from her family across his shoulder, with his brothers holding off her sisters, but at the door he puts her down and asks her permission to enter. The roof is hers. She can..."

These lectures had been the most pleasant thing in the eleven days and nights since the Trolloc attack. Not that she had been willing to talk at first, beyond one more tirade on his supposed ill-treatment of Elayne and later another embarrassing lecture meant to convince him Elayne was the perfect woman. Not until he mentioned to Egwene in passing that if Aviendha would not even speak to him, he wished she would at least stop staring at him. Within the hour a white-robed gai'shain man came for Aviendha.

Whatever the Wise Ones had to say to her, she returned in a quivering fury to demand - demand! - that he let her teach him about Aiel ways and customs. No doubt in hope he would reveal something of his plans by the questions he asked. After the viperish subtleties of Tear, the openness of the Wise Ones' spying was refreshing. Still, it was doubtless wise to learn what he could, and talking with Aviendha could actually be enjoyable, especially on those occasions when she seemed to forget she despised him for whatever reason. Of course, whenever she realized they had begun to talk like two people instead of captor and captive, she did have a tendency to throw one of her white-hot outbursts, as though he had lured her into a trap.

Yet even with that their conversations were pleasurable, certainly by comparison with the rest of the journey. He was even beginning to find her tantrums amusing, though he was wise enough not to let her know. If she saw a man she hated, at least she was too wrapped up in that to see He Who Comes With the Dawn, or the Dragon Reborn. Just Rand al'Thor. At any rate, she knew what she thought of him. Not like Elayne, with one letter that made his ears grow hot and another written the same day that made him wonder if he had grown fangs and horns like a Trolloc.

Min was just about the only woman he had ever met who had not tangled his wits into a ball. But she was off in the Tower - safe there, at least - and that was one place he meant to avoid. Sometimes he thought life would be simpler if he could just forget women altogether. Now Aviendha had started creeping into his dreams, as if Min and Elayne were not bad enough. Women tied his emotions in knots, and he had to be clearheaded now. Clearheaded and cold.

He realized he was looking at Isendre again. She wriggled slender fingers at him past Kadere's ear; he was sure those full lips curved into a smile. Oh, yes. Dangerous. I have to be cold and hard as steel. Sharp steel.

Eleven days and nights into the twelfth, and nothing else had changed. Days and nights of odd rock formations and flat-topped stone spires and buttes thrusting up from a broken, blistered land crisscrossed by mountains seemingly stuck in at random. Days of baking sun and searing winds, nights of bone-shaking cold. Whatever grew seemed to have thorns or spines, or else a touch itched like fury. Some Aviendha said were poisonous; that list seemed longer than the one of those edible. The only water was in hidden springs and tanks, though she pointed out plants that meant a deep hole would fill with slow seepage, enough to keep one or two men alive, and others that could be chewed for a sour, watery pulp.

One night lions killed two of the Shaido packhorses, roaring in the darkness as they were driven from their prey to vanish into the gullies. A wagon driver disturbed a small brown snake as they were making camp the fourth evening. A two-step, Aviendha called it later, and it proved its name. The fellow screamed and tried to run for the wagons despite seeing Moiraine hurrying toward him; he fell on his face at his second stride, dead before the Aes Sedai could dismount from her white mare. Aviendha listed venomous snakes, spiders and lizards. Poisonous lizards! Once she found one for him, two feet long and thick, with yellow stripes running down its bronze scales. Casually pinning it under a soft-booted foot, she drove hey knife into the thing's wide head, then held it up where he could see the clear, oily fluid oozing over sharp bony ridges in its mouth. A gara, she explained, could bite through a boot; it could also kill a bull. Others were worse, of course. The gara was slow, and not really dangerous unless you were stupid enough to step on it. When she flung the huge lizard off of her blade, the yellow and bronze faded right into the cracked clay. Oh, yes. Just do not be stupid enough to step on it.

Moiraine divided her time between the Wise Ones and Rand, usually attempting, in that Aes Sedai way, to bully him into revealing his plans. "The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills," she had told him just that morning, voice coolly calm, ageless face serene, but dark eyes hot as she stared at him over Aviendha's head, "but a fool can strangle himself in the Pattern. Have a care you do not weave a noose for your neck." She had acquired a pale cloak, almost gai'shain white, that shimmered in the sun and beneath the wide hood she wore a damp, snowy scarf folded around her forehead.

"I make no nooses for my neck." He laughed, and she wheeled Aldieb so quickly the mare nearly knocked Aviendha down, galloping back to the Wise Ones' party, cloak streaming behind her.

"It is stupid to anger Aes Sedai," Aviendha muttered, rubbing her shoulder. "I did not think you were a stupid man."

"We will just have to see whether I am or not," he told her, not feeling like laughing anymore. Stupid? There were some risks you had to take. "We will just have to see."

Egwene rarely left the Wise Ones, walking with them as often as she rode Mist, sometimes taking one of them up behind her on the gray mare for a time. He had finally figured out that she was passing for full Aes Sedai again. Amys and Bair, Seana and Melaine, seemed to accept it as readily as the Tairens had, though not at all in the same way. At times one or another of them argued with her so loudly he could almost make out what they were shouting more than a hundred paces away. It was almost the manner they used with Aviendha, though her they seemed to bully rather than argue with, but then, sometimes they held what appeared to be rather heated discussions with Moiraine, too. Especially sun-haired Melaine.

The tenth morning Egwene had finally stopped wearing her hair in those two braids, though it was the oddest thing. The Wise Ones talked to her for the longest time, off by themselves, while the gai'shain were folding their tents and Rand was saddling Jeade'en. Had he not known her better, he might have thought Egwene's head-down stance was an attempt at meekness, but that word could only be applied to her in comparison with Nynaeve. And maybe Moiraine. Suddenly Egwene clapped, her hands, laughing and hugging each of the Wise Ones in turn before hurriedly unraveling the plaits.

When he asked Aviendha what was going on - she had been sitting outside his tent when he woke - she muttered sourly, "They have decided she has grown -" Cutting off abruptly, she gave him a level look, folding her arms, and went on in a cool voice, "It is Wise Ones' business, Rand al'Thor. Ask them, if you wish, but be prepared to hear that it is no concern of yours."

Egwene had grown what? Her hair? It made no sense. Aviendha would not say another word on the matter; instead she scraped a bit of grayish lichen from a rock and began describing how to poultice a wound with it. The woman was learning a Wise One's ways too quickly to suit him. The Wise Ones themselves paid him little apparent attention; of course, they did not need to, with Aviendha perched on his shoulder in a manner of speaking.

The rest of the Aiel, the Jindo at any rate, became a bit less standoffish each day, perhaps a little less uneasy about what He Who Comes With the Dawn meant for them, but Aviendha was the only one who spoke to him at any length. Each evening Lan came to practice the sword, and Rhuarc to teach him the spears and the Aiel's odd way of fighting with both hands and feet. The Warder knew something of that, and joined the practice sessions. Most others avoided Rand, especially the wagon drivers, who had learned he was the Dragon Reborn, a man who could channel; when he caught one of those rough-faced men looking at him, the fellow might as well have been staring at the Dark One. Not Kadere, though, or the gleeman.

Almost every morning as they started out, the peddler rode over on one of the mules from the wagons the Trollocs had burned, his face seeming even darker for the long white scarf tied about his head and hanging down his neck. With Rand he was all diffidence, but his cold, unchanging eyes made his hooked nose look an eagle's beak in truth.

"My Lord Dragon," he had begun the morning after the attack, then wiped sweat from his face with his ever-present handkerchief and shifted uncomfortably on the battered old saddle he had found somewhere for the mule. "If I may call you that?"

The charred wreckage of the three wagons was dwindling in the distance to the south, and with them the graves of two of Kadere's men and a good many more Aiel. The Trollocs had been dragged from the camps and left for the scavengers, yipping, big-eared creatures - Rand did not know whether they were large foxes or small dogs; they looked like bits of each - and vultures with red-tipped wings, some still circling in the sky as if fearful of landing in the melee among their fellows.

"Call me as you will," Rand told him.

"My Lord Dragon. I have been thinking of what you said yesterday." Kadere looked around as if he feared being overheard, though Aviendha was with the Wise Ones, and his own train of wagons, fifty paces or more away, held the nearest ears. He dropped his voice near a whisper anyway, and wiped his face nervously. His eyes never altered, though. "What you said about knowledge being valuable, paving the way to greatness. It is true."

Rand looked at him for a long moment, not blinking, keeping his face blank. "You said that, not I," he said finally.

"Well, perhaps I did. But it is true, is it not, my Lord Dragon?" Rand nodded, and the peddler went on, still whispering, eyes still shifting for eavesdroppers. "Yet there can be danger in knowledge. In giving more than receiving. A man who sells knowledge must have not only his price, but safeguards. Assurances and sureties against... repercussions. Would you not agree?"

"Do you have knowledge you want to... sell, Kadere?"

The heavyset man frowned at his train. Keille had dropped down to walk awhile despite the growing heat, her bulk sheathed in white and a white lace shawl on the ivory combs in her coarse dark hair. Every so often she glanced at the two men riding together, her expression unreadable at this distance. It still seemed odd, someone so large moving so lightly. Isendre had climbed out onto the driver's seat of the first wagon and was watching more openly, hanging on to lean around the corner of the white-painted wagon as it swayed and lurched.

"That woman may be the death of me yet," Kadere muttered. "Perhaps we can talk again later, my Lord Dragon, if it please you." Booting the mule hard, he trotted to the lead wagon and swung himself onto the driver's seat with surprising nimbleness, tying the mule's reins to an iron ring at the corner of the big wagonbox. He and Isendre disappeared inside and did not emerge again until they stopped for the night.

He returned the next day, and other days when he saw that Rand was alone, always hinting at knowledge he might sell for the proper price, if the proper safeguards were set. Once he went so far as to say that anything - murder, treason, anything at all - could be forgiven in return for knowledge, and seemed increasingly nervous when Rand would not agree with him. Whatever he wanted to sell, he apparently wanted Rand's blanket protection for every misdeed he might ever have done.

"I don't know that I want to buy knowledge," Rand told him more than once. "There's always the question of price, isn't there? Some prices I might not want to pay."

Natael drew Rand aside that first evening, after the fires were lit and cooking smells began to drift among the low tents. The gleeman seemed almost as nervous as Kadere. "I have thought a good deal about you," he said, peering at Rand sideways, head tilted to one side. "You should have a grand epic to tell your tale. The Dragon Reborn. He Who Comes With the Dawn. Man of who knows how many prophecies, in this Age and others." He drew his cloak around him, the colorful patches fluttering in the breeze. Twilight was short in the Waste; night and cold came on quickly and together. "How do you feel about your prophesied destiny? I must know, if I am to compose this epic."

"Feel?" Rand looked around the camp, at the Jindo moving among the tents. How many of them would be dead before he was done? "Tired. I feel tired."

"Hardly a heroic emotion," Natael murmured. "But to be expected, given your destiny. The world riding on your shoulders, most people willing to kill you given the chance, the rest fools who think to use you, ride you to power and glory."

"Which are you, Natael?"

"I? I am a simple gleeman." The man lifted an edge of his patch-covered cloak as if for proof. "I would not take your place for all the world, not with the fate that accompanies it. Death or madness, or both. 'His blood on the rocks of Shayol Ghul...' That is what The Karaethon Cycle, the Prophecies of the Dragon, says, is it not? That you must die to save fools who will heave a sigh of relief at your death. No, I would not accept that for all your power and more."

"Rand," Egwene said, stepping out of the deepening darkness with her pale cloak wrapped around her, the hood well up, "we have come to see how you have held up after your Healing, and a day in that heat." Moiraine was with her, face shrouded in the deep cowl of her white cloak, and Bair and Amys, Melaine and Seana, heads swathed in dark shawls, all watching him, calm and cold as the night. Even Egwene. She did not have the Aes Sedai agelessness yet, but she had Aes Sedai eyes.

He did not notice Aviendha at first, trailing behind the others. For a moment he thought he saw compassion on her face, but if it was there, it vanished as soon as she saw him looking. Imagination. He was tired.

"Another time," Natael said, speaking to Rand but looking at the women in that peculiar sidelong manner. "We will talk another time." With the slightest of bows he strode away.

"Does the future chafe you, Rand?" Moiraine said quietly when the gleeman was gone. "Prophecies speak in flowery, hidden language. They do not always mean what they seem to say."

"The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills," he told her. "I will do what I must. Remember that, Moiraine. I will do what I must." She seemed satisfied; with Aes Sedai, it was hard to tell. She would not be satisfied when she learned everything.

Natael returned the next evening, and the next, and the next, always talking about the epic he would compose, but he displayed a morbid streak, digging for how Rand meant to face madness and death. His tale was meant to be a tragedy, it appeared. Rand certainly had no desire to root his fears out into the open; what was in his heart and head could remain buried there. Finally the gleeman seemed to tire of hearing him say "I will do what I must," and stopped coming. It seemed that he did not want to compose his epic unless it could be full of pained emotion. The man looked frustrated when he stalked off for the last time, cloak fluttering furiously behind him.

The fellow was odd, but going by Thom Merrilin, so were all gleemen. Natael certainly demonstrated other gleeman's traits. For instance, he certainly had a fine opinion of himself. Rand did not care whether the man called him by titles, but Natael addressed Rhuarc, and Moiraine, the few times he was around her, as if he was plainly their equal. That was Thom to perfection. And he gave up performing for the Jindo at all, beginning to spend most of every night at the Shaido camp. There were more of the Shaido, he explained to Rhuarc as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. A larger audience. None of the Jindo liked it, but there was nothing even Rhuarc could do. In the Three-fold Land, a gleeman was allowed anything short of murder without being called down for it.

Aviendha spent her nights among the Wise Ones, and sometimes walked with them for an hour or so during the day, all of them gathered around her, even Moiraine and Egwene. At first Rand thought they must be advising her on how to handle him, how to pull what they wanted to know out of his head. Then one day, with the sun molten overhead, a ball of fire as big as a horse suddenly burst into being ahead of the Wise Ones' party and went spinning and tumbling away, blazing a furrow across the sere land, until it finally dwindled and winked out.

Some of the wagon drivers pulled their startled, snorting teams to a halt and stood to watch, calling to each other in a blend of fear, confusion and coarse curses. Murmurs rippled through the Jindo, and they stared, as did the Shaido, but the two columns of Aiel kept moving with barely a pause. It was among the Wise Ones that real excitement was evident. The four of them clustered around Aviendha, all apparently talking at once, with considerable arm-waving. Moiraine and Egwene, leading their horses, tried to get in a word; even without hearing, Rand knew that Amys told them in no uncertain terms, shaking a furiously admonishing finger, to stay out of it.

Staring at the blackened gouge stretching arrow-straight for half a mile, Rand sat back down in his saddle. Teaching Aviendha to channel. Of course. That was what they were doing. He scrubbed sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand; the sun had nothing to do with it. When that fireball leaped out into existence, he had instinctively reached for the True Source. It had been like trying to dip water with a torn sieve. All his clawing at saidin might as well have been clawing at air. One day that could happen when he needed the Power desperately. He had to learn, too, and he had no teacher. He had to learn not just because the Power would kill him before he had to worry about going mad if he did not; he had to learn because he had to use it. Learn to use it; use it to learn. He began laughing so hard that some of the Jindo looked at him uneasily.

He would have enjoyed Mat's company any time during those eleven days and nights, but Mat never came near for more than a minute or two, the broad brim of his flat-crowned hat pulled down to shade his eyes, the black-hafted spear lying across the pommel of Pips's saddle, with its odd raven-marked, Power-wrought point, like a short, curving sword blade.

"If your face darkens from the sun any more, you will turn into an Aielman," he might say, laughing or, "Do you mean to spend the rest of your life here? There's a whole world the other side of the Dragonwall. Wine? Women? You remember these things?"

But Mat looked plainly uneasy, and he was even more reluctant than the Wise Ones to speak of Rhuidean, or what had happened to them there. His hand tightened on that black haft at the very mention of the fog-domed city, and he claimed not to remember anything of his journey through the ter'angreal - then proceeded to contradict himself by saying, "You stay out of that thing, Rand. It isn't like the one in the Stone at all. They cheat. Burn me, I wish I'd never seen it!"

The one time Rand mentioned the Old Tongue, he snapped, "Burn you, I don't know anything about the bloody Old Tongue!" and galloped straight back to the peddlers' wagons.

That was where Mat spent most of his time, dicing with the drivers - until they realized he won a very great deal more often than he lost, no matter whose dice he used - engaging Kadere or Natael in long talks at every opportunity, pursuing Isendre. It was clear what was on his mind from the first time he grinned at her and straightened his hat, the morning after the Trolloc attack. He spoke to her nearly every evening for as long as he could, and pricked himself so badly plucking white blossoms from a spiky-thorned bush that he could barely handle his reins for two days, though he refused to allow Moiraine to Heal him. Isendre did not precisely encourage him, but her slow, sultry smile was hardly calculated to drive him away, either. Kadere saw - and said not a word, though sometimes his eyes followed Mat like a vulture's. Others did comment.

Late one afternoon as the mules were being unhitched and the tents going up, and Rand was unsaddling Jeade'en, Mat was standing with Isendre in the meager shade of one of the canvas-topped wagons. Standing very close. Shaking his head, Rand watched as he wiped the dapple down. The sun burned low on the horizon, and tall spires stretched long shadows across the camp.

Isendre fiddled with her diaphanous scarf as if idly thinking of removing it, smiling, full lips half pouting, ready for a kiss. Encouraged, Mat grinned confidently and moved closer still. She dropped her hand, and slowly shook her head, but that inviting smile never faded. Neither of them heard Keille approach, so light on her feet despite her size.

"Is that what you want, good sir? Her?" The pair jumped apart at the sound of her mellifluous voice, and she laughed just as musically, just as oddly out of that face. "A bargain for you, Matrim Cauthon. A Tar Valon mark, and she is yours. A chit like that cannot be worth more than two, so it is a clear bargain."

Mat grimaced, looking as though he wished he were anywhere else but there.

Isendre, however, turned slowly to face Keille, a mountain cat facing a bear. "You go too far, old woman," she said softly, eyes hard above the veiling scarf. "I will put up with your tongue no longer. Have a care. Or perhaps you would like to remain here in the Waste."

Keille smiled broadly, yet mirth never touched the obsidian eyes glittering behind her fat cheeks. "Would you?"

Nodding decisively, Isendre said, "A Tar Valon mark." Her voice was iron. "I will see you have a Tar Valon mark when we leave you. I only wish I could see you trying to drink it." Turning her back, she strode to the lead wagon, not swaying seductively at all, and vanished inside.

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."