The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time #5)

The Fires of Heaven (The Wheel of Time #5) Page 101

When they slipped out through a small side gate, Morgase did not look very much like herself. A bit of soot had darkened her redgold hair, taken its sheen away and made it lank. Sweat rolling down her face helped, as well. No one believed that queens sweated. A shapeless dress of rough — very rough — gray wool, with divided skirts, completed her disguise. Even her shift and stockings were coarse wool. She looked a farm woman who had ridden the cart horse to market and now wanted to see a little of the city. Lini looked herself, straightbacked and nononsense, in a green woolen riding dress, well cut but ten years out of fashion.

Wishing she could scratch, Morgase also wished that the other woman had not taken her so to heart about the dress not fitting very well. Stuffing the lownecked gown away under the bed, her old nurse had muttered some saying about displaying wares you did not mean to sell, and when Morgase claimed she had just made it up, her reply was At my age, if I make it up, it's still an old saying. Morgase more than halfsuspected that her itchy, illdraped dress was punishment for that gown.

The Inner City was built on hills, streets following the natural curve of the land and planned to give sudden views of parks full of trees and monuments, or tilecovered towers glittering a hundred colors in the sun. Sudden rises hurled the eye across Caemlyn entire, to the rolling plains and forests beyond. Morgase saw none of it as she hurried through the crowds thronging the streets. Usually she would have tried to listen to the people, to gauge their mood. This time she heard only the hum and babble of a great city. She had no thought of trying to rouse them. Thousands of men armed mainly with stones and rage could overwhelm the Guards in the Royal Palace, but if she had not known it before, the riots in the spring that had brought Gaebril to her attention, and the near riots the year before, had shown what mobs could do. She meant to rule again in Caemlyn, not see it burned.

Beyond the white walls of the Inner City, the New City had its own beauties. Tall slender towers, and domes gleaming white and gold, huge expanses of redtiled roofs, and the great, towered outer walls, pale gray streaked with silver and white. Broad boulevards, split down the middle by wide expanses of trees and grass, were jammed with people and carriages and wagons. Except to notice in passing that the grass was dying for lack of rain, Morgase kept her mind on what she was hunting.

From the experience of her annual forays, she chose the people she questioned carefully. Men, mostly. She knew how she looked, even with soot in her hair, and some women would give wrong directions from jealousy. Men, on the other hand, racked their brains to be right, to impress her. None with too smug a face, or too rough. The first were often offended at being approached, as though they were not afoot themselves, and the others were likely to think a woman asking directions had something else on her mind.

One fellow with a chin too big for his face, hawking a tray of pins and needles, grinned at her and said, “Did anyone ever tell you you look a mite like the Queen? Whatever mess she's made of us, she's a pretty one.”

She gave him a raucous laugh that earned a stern look from Lini. “You save your flattery for your wife. The second turn to the left, you say? I thank you. And for the compliment, too.”

As she pushed on through the crowd, a frown settled on her face. She had heard too much of that. Not that she looked like the Queen, but that Morgase had made a mess of things. Gaebril had raised taxes heavily to pay for his levies, it seemed, but she took the blame, and rightly so. The responsibility was the Queen's. Other laws had come out of the Palace, as well, laws that made little sense, but did make people's lives more difficult. She heard whispers about herself, that maybe Andor had had queens long enough. Only murmurs, but what one man dared speak in a low voice, ten thought. Perhaps it would not have been as easy as she had thought to rouse mobs against Gaebril.

Eventually she found her goal, a broad stone inn, the sign over the door bearing a man kneeling before a goldenhaired woman in the Rose Crown, one of her hands on his head. The Queen's Blessing. If it was meant to be her, it was not a good likeness. The cheeks were too fat.

Not until she stopped in front of the inn did she realize that Lini was puffing. She had set a quick pace, and the woman was far from young. “Lini, I am sorry. I should not have walked so —”

“If I can't keep up with you, girl, how will I be able to tend Elayne's babes? Do you mean to stand there? 'Dragging feet never finish a journey.' He said he would be in the stable.”

The whitehaired woman stalked off, muttering to herself, and Morgase followed her around the inn. Before stepping into the stone stable, she shaded her eyes to look at the sun. No more than two hours until dusk; Gaebril would be looking by then, if he was not already.

Tallanvor was not alone in the stalllined stable. When he went to one knee on the strawcovered floor, in a green wool coat with his sword belted over it, two men and a woman knelt with him, if a bit hesitantly, unsure of her as she was. The stout man, pinkfaced and balding, must be Basel Gill, the innkeeper. An old leather jerkin, studded with steel discs, strained around his girth, and he wore a sword at his hip, too.

“My Queen,” Gill said, “I've not carried a sword in years — not since the Aiel War — but I'd count it an honor if you allowed me to follow you.” He should have looked ridiculous, but he did not.

Morgase studied the other two, a hulking fellow in a rough gray coat, with heavylidded eyes, an oftbroken nose, and scars on his face, and a short, pretty woman approaching her middle years. She seemed to be with the street tough, but her highnecked blue wool dress appeared too finely woven for one like him to have bought.

The fellow sensed her doubts, for all his lazyeyed appearance. “I am Lamgwin, my Queen, and a good Queen's man. 'Tisn't right, what's been done, and it has to be put straight. I want to follow you, too. Me and Breane, both.”

“Rise,” she told them. “It may be some days yet before it is safe for you to acknowledge me as your queen. I will be glad of your company, Master Gill. And yours, Master Lamgwin, but it will be safer for your woman if she remains in Caemlyn. There are hard days ahead.”

Brushing straw from her skirts, Breane gave her a sharp look, and Lini a sharper. “I have known hard days,” she said in a Cairhienin accent. Nobly born, unless Morgase missed her guess; one of the refugees. “And I never knew a good man until I found Lamgwin. Or until he found me. The loyalty and love he bears for you, I bear for him tenfold. He follows you, but I follow him. I wi