He looked at Mat, hobbling up the slope with the aid of his spear, head down and eyes squinted in pain. The Creator could not have been thinking, to set the future on the shoulders of three farmboys. I can't drop it. I have to carry the load, whatever the cost.

At the Wise Ones' low, wallless tents, the women ducked inside with murmurs about water and shade. They all but pulled Mat with them; as evidence of how his head and throat hurt, he not only obeyed, he did so silently.

Rand started to follow, but Lan laid a hand on his shoulder. “Did you see her in there?” the Warder asked.

“No, Lan. I'm sorry; I did not. She'll come out safe if anyone can.”

Lan grunted and took his hand away. “Watch out for Couladin, Rand. I have seen his kind before. Ambition burns in his belly. He would sacrifice the world to achieve it.”

“Aan'allein speaks the truth,” Rhuarc said. “The Dragons on your arms will not matter if you are dead before the clan chiefs learn of them. I will make sure some of Heirn's Jindo are always near you until we reach Cold Rocks. Even then, Couladin will probably try to make trouble, and the Shaido, at least, will follow him. Perhaps others, too. The Prophecy of Rhuidean said you would be raised by those not of the blood, yet Couladin may not be the only one to see only a wetlander. ”

“I will try to watch my back,” Rand said dryly. In the stories, when somebody fulfilled a prophecy, everyone cried “Behold!” or some such, and that was that except for dealing with the villains. Real life did not seem to work that way.

When they entered the tent, Mat was already seated on a goldtasseled red cushion with his coat and shirt off. A woman in a cowled white robe had finished washing the blood from his face and was just beginning on his chest. Amys gripped a stone mortar between her knees, blending some ointment with a pestle, while Bair and Seana had their heads together over herbs brewing in a pot of hot water.

Melaine grimaced at Lan and Rhuarc then fixed Rand with cool green eyes. “Strip to the waist,” she said curtly. “The cuts on your head do not seem too bad, but let me see what has you hunched over.” She struck a small brass gong, and another whiterobed woman ducked in at the back of the tent, a steaming silver basin in her hands and cloths over her arm.

Rand took a seat on a cushion, making himself sit up straight. “That's nothing to worry yourself about,” he assured her. The second woman in white knelt gracefully by his side and, resisting his efforts to take the damp cloth she wrung out in the basin, began gently washing his face. He wondered who she was. She looked Aiel, but she certainly did not act it. Her gray eyes held a determined meekness.

“It is an old injury,” Egwene told the sunhaired Wise One. “Moiraine has never been able to Heal it properly.” The look she gave Rand said common courtesy should have made him tell as much. From the glances that passed among the Wise Ones, though, he thought she had said more than enough already. A wound Aes Sedai could not Heal; that was a puzzle to them. Moiraine seemed to know more about him than he knew about himself, and he had a hard time dealing with her. Maybe it would go easier with the Wise Ones if they had to guess about him.

Mat winced as Amys began rubbing her ointment into the slashes on his chest. If it felt anything like it smelled, Rand thought he had cause to wince. Bair shoved a silver cup at Mat. “Drink, young man. Timsin root and silverleaf will help your headaches if anything can.”

He did not hesitate before gulping it down; a shudder and a twisted face followed. “Tastes like the inside of my boots.” But he gave her a seated bow, formal enough for a Tairen except for his being shirtless, and only spoiled a bit by his sudden grin. “I thank you, Wise One. And I won't ask if you added anything just to give it that... memorable... taste.” Bair and Seana's soft laughter might have come because they had or because they had not, but it seemed that as usual Mat had found a way to get on the good of side of the women. Even Melaine gave him a brief smile.

“Rhuarc,” Rand said, “if Couladin thinks to make difficulties, I need to jump ahead of him. How do I go about telling the other clan chiefs? About me. About these.” He shifted his Dragontwined arms. The whiterobed woman at his side, cleaning the long gash in his hair now, deliberately avoided looking at them.

“There is no set formality,” Rhuarc said. “How could there be, for a thing that will happen only once? When there must be a meeting between clan chiefs, there are places where something like the Peace of Rhuidean holds. The closest to Cold Rocks, the closest to Rhuidean, is Alcair Dal. You could show proofs to the clan and sept chiefs there.”

“Al'cair Dal?” Mat said, giving it a subtly different sound. “The Golden Bowl?”

Rhuarc nodded. “A round canyon, though there is nothing golden about it. There is a ledge at one end, and a man who stands there can be heard by anyone in the canyon without raising his voice.”

Rand frowned at the Dragons on his forearms. He was not the only one to have been marked in some way in Rhuidean. Mat no longer spoke a few words of the Old Tongue now and then without knowing what he was saying. He understood, since Rhuidean, though he did not appear to realize it. Egwene was watching Mat. Thoughtfully. She had spent too much time with Aes Sedai.

“Rhuarc, can you send messengers out to the clan chiefs?” he said. “How long will it take to ask them all to Alcair Dal? What will it take to make sure they come?”

“Messengers will take weeks, and more weeks for everyone to gather.” Rhuarc's gesture took in all four Wise Ones. “They can speak to every clan chief in his dreams in one night, to every sept chief. And every Wise One, to make sure no man takes it for just a dream. ”

“I appreciate your confidence that we can move mountains, shade of my heart,” Amys said wryly, settling herself beside Rand with her ointment, “but that does not make it so. It would take several nights to do what you suggest, with little rest in them.”

Rand caught her hand as she started to rub the sharpsmelling mixture on his cheek. “Will you do it?”

“Are you so eager to destroy us?” she demanded, then bit her lip vexedly as the whitecowled woman on Rand's other side started.

Melaine clapped her hands twice. “Leave us,” she said sharply, and the women in white bowed their way out with their basins and cloths.

“You goad me like a needleburr next to the skin,” Amys told Rand bitterly. “Whatever they are told, those women will talk now of what they should not know.” She pulled her hand free, began rubbing in the ointment with perhaps more energy than was necessary. It stung worse than it smelled.

“I do not mean to goad you,” Rand said, “but there is no time. The Forsaken are loose, Amys, and if they find out where I am, or what I plan... ” The Aiel women did not seem surprised. Had they known already? “Nine still live. Too many, and those that don't want to kill me think they can use me. I have no time. If I knew a way to bring all the clan chiefs here now, and make them accept me, I'd use it.”

“What is it you plan?” Amys voice was as stony as her face.

“Will you ask — tell — the chiefs to come to Alcair Dal?”

For a long moment she met his stare. When she finally nodded, it was grudging.

Begrudged or not, some of the tension went out of him. There was no way to win back seven lost days, but perhaps he could avoid losing more. Moiraine, still in Rhuidean with Aviendha, held him here yet, though. He could not simply abandon her.

“You knew my mother,” he said. Egwene leaned forward, as intent as he, and Mat shook his head.

Amys's hand paused on his face. “I knew her.”

“Tell me about her. Please.”

She shifted her attention to the slash above his ear; if a frown could have Healed, he would not have needed her ointment. Finally she said, “Shaiel's story, as I know it, begins when I was still Far Dareis Mai, more than a year before I gave up the spear. A number of us had ranged almost to the Dragonwall together. One day we saw a woman, a goldenhaired young wetlander, in silks, with packhorses and a fine mare to ride. A man we would have killed, of course, but she had no weapon beyond a simple knife at her belt. Some wanted to run her back to the Dragonwall naked... ” Egwene blinked; she seemed continually surprised at how hard the Aiel were. Amys continued without pause. “. . . she seemed to be searching determinedly for something. Curious, we followed, day by day, without letting her see. Her horses died, her food ran out, her water, but she did not turn back. She stumbled on afoot, until finally she fell and could not rise. We decided to give her water, and ask her story. She was near death, and it was a full day before she could speak.”

“Her name was Shaiel?” Rand said when she hesitated. “Where was she from? Why did she come here?”

“Shaiel,” Bair said, “was the name she took for herself. She never gave another in the time I knew her. In the Old Tongue it would mean the Woman Who Is Dedicated.” Mat nodded agreement, not seeming to realize what he had done; Lan eyed him thoughtfully over a silver cup of water. “There was a bitterness in Shaiel, in the beginning,” she finished.

Sitting back on her heels beside Rand, Amys nodded. “She spoke of a child abandoned, a son she loved. A husband she did not love. Where, she would not say. I do not think she ever forgave herself for leaving the child. She would tell little beyond what she had to. It was for us she had been searching, for Maidens of the Spear. An Aes Sedai called Gitara Moroso, who had the Foretelling, had told her that disaster would befall her land and her people, perhaps the world, unless she went to dwell among the Maidens of the Spear, telling no one of her going. She must become a Maiden, and she could not return to her own land until the Maidens had gone to Tar Valon.”

She shook her head wonderingly. “You must understand how it sounded, then. The Maidens go to Tar Valon? No Aiel had crossed the Dragonwall since the day we first reached the Threefold Land. It would be another four years before Laman's crime brought us into the wetlands. And certainly no one not Aiel had ever become a Maiden of the Spear. Some of us thought her mad from the sun. But she had a stubborn will, and somehow we found ourselves agreeing to let her try.”

Gitara Moroso. An Aes Sedai with the Foretelling. Somewhere he had heard that name, but where? And he had a brother. A halfbrother. Growing up, he had wondered what it would be like to have a brother or a sister. Who, and where? But Amys was going on.

“Almost every girl dreams of becoming a Maiden, and learns at least the rudiments of bow and spear, of fighting with hands and feet. Even so, those who take the final step and wed the spear discover they know nothing. It was harder for Shaiel. The bow she knew well, but she had never run as far as a mile, or lived on what she could find. A tenyearold girl could beat her, and she did not even know what plants indicate water. Yet she persevered. In a year she had spoken her vows to the spear, become a Maiden, adopted into the Chumai s