” ‘I,’ ” Kara said. “Remember what I told you? I call you Jillari, but you call yourself ‘I’ or ‘me.’ Try it. And look at me. You can do it.” She sounded as though she were encouraging a child.
The Seanchan woman wet her lips, giving Kara a sidelong look. “I,” she said softly. And promptly began weeping, tears rolling down her cheeks faster than she could wipe them away with her fingers. Kara enveloped her in a hug and made soothing noises. She seemed about to cry, too. Aviendha shifted uncomfortably. It was not the tears—men or women, Aiel wept unashamed when they felt the need—but for them, touching hands was a great display in public.
“Why don’t you two walk on alone for a while,” Reanne told the pair with a comforting smile that deepened the fine lines at the corners of her blue eyes. Her voice was high and lovely, suitable for singing. “I’ll catch you up, and we can eat together.” They offered her curtsies, too, Jillari still weeping, and turned away with Kara’s arm around the smaller woman’s shoulders. “If you care to, my Lady,” Reanne said before they had gone two steps, “we could talk on the way to your apartments.”
The woman’s face was calm, and her tone put no special freight on the words, yet Elayne’s jaw tightened. She forced it to relax. There was no point in being stubborn stupid. She was wet. And beginning to shiver, though the day could hardly be called cold. “An excellent suggestion,” she said, gathering her sodden gray skirts. “Come.”
“We could walk a little faster.” Birgitte muttered, not quite far enough under her breath.
“We could run,” Aviendha said, without trying to keep her voice low at all. “We might get dry from the exertion.”
Elayne ignored them and glided at a suitable pace. In her mother, it would have been called regal. She was not sure she managed that, but she was not about to run through the palace. Or even hurry. The sight of her rushing would start a dozen rumors if not a hundred, each one of some dire event worse than the one before. Too many rumors floated on every breath of air as it was. The worst was that the city was about to fall, that she planned to flee before it did. No, she would be seen to be utterly unruffled. Everyone had to believe her completely confident. Even if that was a false facade. Anything else, and she might as well yield to Arymilla. Fear of defeat had lost as many battles as weakness had, and she could not afford to lose a single one. “I thought the Captain-General had you out scouting, Reanne.”
Birgitte had been using two of the Kin for scouts, women who could not make a gateway large enough to admit a horse cart, but with circles of Kinswomen available to make gateways, for trade as well as moving soldiers, she had coopted the remaining six who could Travel on their own. An encircling army was no impediment to them. Yet Reanne’s well-cut, fine blue wool, though unadorned save for a red-enameled circle pin on the high neck, was decidedly unsuited for skulking about the countryside.
“The Captain-General believes her scouts need rest. Unlike herself,” Reanne added blandly, raising an eyebrow at Birgitte. The bond carried a brief flash of annoyance. Aviendha laughed for some reason: Elayne still did not understand Aiel humor. “Tomorrow, I go out again. It takes me back to the days long ago when I was a pack-peddler with one mule.” The Kin all followed many crafts during their long lives, always changing location and craft before anyone took note of how slowly they aged. The oldest among them had mastered half a dozen crafts or more, shifting from one to another easily. “I decided to use my freeday helping Jillari settle on a surname.” Reanne grimaced. “It’s custom in Seanchan to strike a girl’s name from her family’s rolls when she’s collared, and the poor woman feels she has no right to the name she was born with. Jillari was given with the collar, but she wants to keep that.”
“There are more reasons to hate the Seanchan than I can count,” Elayne said heatedly. Then, belatedly, she caught up to the import of it all. Learning to curtsy. Choosing a new surname. Burn her, if pregnancy was making her slow-witted on top of everything else. . . ! “When did Jillari change her mind about the collar?” There was no reason to let everyone know she was being dense today.
The other woman’s expression did not alter a whit, but she hesitated just long enough to let Elayne know her deception had failed. “Just this morning, after you and the Captain-General left, or you’d have been informed.” Reanne hurried on so the point had no time to fester. “And there’s other news as good. At least, it’s somewhat good. One of the sul’dam, Marli Noichin—you recall her?—has admitted seeing the weaves.”
“Oh, that is good news,” Elayne murmured. “Very good. Twenty-eight more to go, but they might be easier now that one of them has broken.” She had watched an attempt to convince Marli that she could learn to channel, that she could already see weaves of the Power. The plump Seanchan woman had been stubbornly defiant even after she began trying.
“Somewhat good, I said.” Reanne sighed. “In Marli’s opinion, she might as well have admitted she kills children. Now she insists that she must be collared. She begs for the a’dam. It makes my skin creep. I don’t know what to do with her.”
“Send her back to the Seanchan as soon as we can,” Elayne replied.
Reanne stopped dead in shock, her eyebrows climbing. Birgitte cleared her throat loudly—impatience filled the bond before being stifled—and the Kinswoman gave a start, then began walking again, at a faster pace than before. “But they’ll make her a damane. I can’t condemn any woman to that.”
Elayne gave her Warder a look that slid off like a dagger sliding off good armor. Birgitte’s expression was . . . bland. To the golden-haired woman, being a Warder contained strong elements of older sister. And worse, sometimes mother.
“I can,” she said emphatically, lengthening her own stride. Well, it would not hurt to get dry a little sooner rather than later. “She helped hold enough others prisoner that she deserves a taste of it herself, Reanne. But that’s not why I mean to send her back. If any of the others wants to stay and learn, and make up for what she’s done, I certainly won’t hand her to the Seanchan, but Light’s truth, I hope they all feel like Marli. They’ll put an a’dam on her, Reanne, but they won’t be able to keep secret who she was. Every one-time sul’dam I can send the Seanchan to collar will be a mattock digg