The Wheel of Time, Page 2

22 To Make an Anchor Weep

  23 Call to a Sitting

  24 Honey in the Tea

  25 Attending Elaida

  26 As If the World Were Fog

  27 A Plain Wooden Box

  28 In Malden

  29 The Last Knot

  30 Outside the Gates

  31 The House on Full Moon Street

  32 To Keep the Bargain

  33 Nine Out of Ten

  34 A Cup of Kaf

  35 The Importance of Dyelin

  36 Under an Oak

  37 Prince of the Ravens

  Epilogue: Remember the Old Saying

  Glossary

  THE GATHERING STORM

  Map

  Prologue: What the Storm Means

  1 Tears from Steel

  2 The Nature of Pain

  3 The Ways of Honor

  4 Nightfall

  5 A Tale of Blood

  6 When Iron Melts

  7 The Plan for Arad Doman

  8 Clean Shirts

  9 Leaving Malden

  10 The Last of the Tabac

  11 The Death of Adrin

  12 Unexpected Encounters

  13 An Offer and a Departure

  14 A Box Opens

  15 A Place to Begin

  16 In the White Tower

  17 Questions of Control

  18 A Message in Haste

  19 Gambits

  20 On a Broken Road

  21 Embers and Ash

  22 The Last That Could Be Done

  23 A Warp in the Air

  24 A New Commitment

  25 In Darkness

  26 A Crack in the Stone

  27 The Tipsy Gelding

  28 Night in Hinderstap

  29 Into Bandar Eban

  30 Old Advice

  31 A Promise to Lews Therin

  32 Rivers of Shadow

  33 A Conversation with the Dragon

  34 Legends

  35 A Halo of Blackness

  36 The Death of Tuon

  37 A Force of Light

  38 News in Tel’aran’rhiod

  39 A Visit from Verin Sedai

  40 The Tower Shakes

  41 A Fount of Power

  42 Before the Stone of Tear

  43 Sealed to the Flame

  44 Scents Unknown

  45 The Tower Stands

  46 To Be Forged Again

  47 The One He Lost

  48 Reading the Commentary

  49 Just Another Man

  50 Veins of Gold

  Epilogue: Bathed in Light

  Glossary

  TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT

  Map

  Prologue: Distinctions

  1 Apples First

  2 Questions of Leadership

  3 The Amyrlin’s Anger

  4 The Pattern Groans

  5 Writings

  6 Questioning Intentions

  7 Lighter than a Feather

  8 The Seven-Striped Lass

  9 Blood in the Air

  10 After the Taint

  11 An Unexpected Letter

  12 An Empty Ink Bottle

  13 For What Has Been Wrought

  14 A Vow

  15 Use a Pebble

  16 Shanna’har

  17 Partings, and a Meeting

  18 The Strength of This Place

  19 Talk of Dragons

  20 A Choice

  21 An Open Gate

  22 The End of a Legend

  23 Foxheads

  24 To Make a Stand

  25 Return to Bandar Eban

  26 Parley

  27 A Call to Stand

  28 Oddities

  29 A Terrible Feeling

  30 Men Dream Here

  31 Into the Void

  32 A Storm of Light

  33 A Good Soup

  34 Judgment

  35 The Right Thing

  36 An Invitation

  37 Darkness in the Tower

  38 Wounds

  39 In the Three-fold Land

  40 A Making

  41 An Unexpected Ally

  42 Stronger than Blood

  43 Some Tea

  44 A Backhanded Request

  45 A Reunion

  46 Working Leather

  47 A Teaching Chamber

  48 Near Avendesora

  49 Court of the Sun

  50 Choosing Enemies

  51 A Testing

  52 Boots

  53 Gateways

  54 The Light of the World

  55 The One Left Behind

  56 Something Wrong

  57 A Rabbit for Supper

  Epilogue: And After

  Glossary

  A MEMORY OF LIGHT

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue: By Grace and Banners Fallen

  1 Eastward the Wind Blew

  2 The Choice of an Ajah

  3 A Dangerous Place

  4 Advantages to a Bond

  5 To Require a Boon

  6 A Knack

  7 Into the Thick of It

  8 That Smoldering City

  9 To Die Well

  10 The Use of Dragons

  11 Just Another Sell-sword

  12 A Shard of a Moment

  13 What Must Be Done

  14 Doses of Forkroot

  15 Your Neck in a Cord

  16 A Silence Like Screaming

  17 Older, More Weathered

  18 To Feel Wasted

  19 The Choice of a Patch

  20 Into Thakan’dar

  21 Not a Mistake to Ignore

  22 The Wyld

  23 At the Edge of Time

  24 To Ignore the Omens

  25 Quick Fragments

  26 Considerations

  27 Friendly Fire

  28 Too Many Men

  29 The Loss of a Hill

  30 The Way of the Predator

  31 A Tempest of Water

  32 A Yellow Flower-Spider

  33 The Prince’s Tabac

  34 Drifting

  35 A Practiced Grin

  36 Unchangeable Things

  37 The Last Battle

  38 The Place That Was Not

  39 Those Who Fight

  40 Wolfbrother

  41 A Smile

  42 Impossibilities

  43 A Field of Glass

  44 Two Craftsmen

  45 Tendrils of Mist

  46 To Awaken

  47 Watching the Flow Writhe

  48 A Brilliant Lance

  49 Light and Shadow

  Epilogue: To See the Answer

  Copyright

  Also by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

  About the Authors

  Preview: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

  Copyright

  NEW SPRING

  ROBERT JORDAN

  For Harriet

  Now and forever

  Chapter

  1

  The Hook

  A cold wind gusted through the night, across the snow-covered land where men had been killing one another for the past three days. The air was crisp, if not so icy as Lan expected for this time of year. It was still cold enough for his steel breastplate to carry the chill through his coat, and his breath to mist in front of his face when the wind did not whip it away. The blackness in the sky was just beginning to fade, the thousands of stars like the thick-scattered dust of diamonds slowly dimming. The fat sickle of the moon hung low, giving barely light to make out the silhouettes of the men guarding the fireless camp in the sprawling copse of oak and leatherleaf. Fires would have given them away to the Aiel. He had fought the Aiel long before this war began, on the Shienaran marches, a matter of duty to friends. Aielmen were bad enough in daylight. Facing them in the night was as close to staking your life on the toss of a coin as made no difference. Of course, sometimes they found you without fires.

  Resting a gauntleted hand on his sword in its scabbard, he pulled his cloak b
ack around himself and continued his round of the sentries through calf-deep snow. It was an ancient sword, made with the One Power before the Breaking of the World, during the War of the Shadow, when the Dark One had touched the world for a time. Only legends remained of that Age, except perhaps for what the Aes Sedai might know, yet the blade was hard fact. It could not be broken and never needed sharpening. The hilt had been replaced countless times over the long centuries, but not even tarnish could touch the blade. Once, it had been the sword of Malkieri kings.

  The next sentry he came to, a short stocky fellow in a long dark cloak, was leaning back against the trunk of a heavy-limbed oak, his head slumped on his chest. Lan touched the sentry’s shoulder, and the man jerked upright, almost dropping the horn-and-sinew horsebow gripped in his gloved hands. The hood of his cloak slid back, revealing his conical steel helmet for an instant before he hastily pulled the cowl up again. In the pale moonlight, Lan could not make out the man’s face behind the vertical bars of his faceguard, but he knew him. Lan’s own helmet was open, in the style of dead Malkier, supporting a steel crescent moon above his forehead.

  “I wasn’t sleeping, my Lord,” the fellow said quickly. “Just resting a moment.” A copper-skinned Domani, he sounded embarrassed, and rightly so. This was not his first battle, or even his first war.

  “An Aiel would have wakened you by slitting your throat or putting a spear through your heart, Basram,” Lan said in a quiet voice. Men listened closer to calm tones than to the loudest shouts, so long as firmness and certainty accompanied the calm. “Maybe it would be better without the temptation of the tree so near.” He refrained from adding that even if the Aiel did not kill him, the man risked frostbite standing in one place too long. Basram knew that. Winters were nearly as cold in Arad Doman as in the Borderlands.

  Mumbling an apology, the Domani respectfully touched his helmet and moved three paces out from the tree. He held himself erect, now, and peered into the darkness. He shifted his feet, too, guarding against blackened toes. Rumor said Aes Sedai were offering Healing, closer to the river, injuries and sickness gone as if they had never been, but without that, amputation was the usual way to stop a man losing his feet to black-rot, and maybe his legs as well. In any case, it was best to avoid becoming involved with Aes Sedai more than absolutely necessary. Years later you could find one of them had tied strings to you just in case she might have need. Aes Sedai thought far ahead, and seldom seemed to care who they used in their schemes or how. That was one reason Lan avoided them.

  How long would Basram’s renewed alertness last? Lan wished he had the answer, but there was no point in taking the Domani to task further. All of the men he commanded were bone-weary. Likely every man in the army of the grandly named Great Coalition—sometimes it was called the Grand Coalition, or the Grand Alliance, or half a dozen other things, some worse than uncomplimentary—likely every last man was near exhaustion. A battle was hot work, snow or no snow, and tiring. Muscles could knot from tension even when they had the chance to stop for a time, and the last few days had offered small chance to stop very long.

  The camp held well over three hundred men, a full quarter of them on guard at any given time—against Aiel, Lan wanted as many eyes as he could manage—and before he had gone another two hundred paces, he had had to wake three more, one asleep on his feet without any support at all. Jaim’s head was up, and his eyes open. That was a trick some soldiers learned, especially old soldiers like Jaim. Cutting off the gray-bearded man’s protests that he could not have been asleep, not standing up straight, Lan promised to let Jaim’s friends know if he found him sleeping again.

  Jaim’s mouth hung open for a moment; then he swallowed hard. “Won’t happen again, my Lord. The Light sear my soul if it does!” He sounded sincere to his bones. Some men would have been afraid that their friends would drub them senseless for putting the rest in danger, but given the company Jaim kept, more likely he dreaded the humiliation of having been caught.

  As Lan walked on, he found himself chuckling. He seldom laughed, and it was a fool thing to laugh over, but laughter was better than worrying over what he could not change, such as weary men drowsing on guard. As well worry about death. What could not be changed must be endured.

  Abruptly, he stopped and raised his voice. “Bukama, why are you sneaking about? You’ve been following me since I woke.” A startled grunt came from behind him. Doubtless Bukama had thought he was being silent, and in truth, very few men would have heard the faint crunching of his boots in the snow, yet he should have known Lan would. After all, he had been one of Lan’s teachers, and one of the first lessons had been to be aware of his surroundings at all times, even in his sleep. Not an easy lesson for a boy to learn, but only the dead could afford oblivion. The oblivious soon became the dead, in the Blight beyond the Borderlands.

  “I’ve been watching your back,” Bukama announced gruffly, striding up to join him. “One of these black-veiled Aiel Darkfriends could sneak in and cut your throat for all the care you’re taking. Have you forgotten everything I taught you?” Bluff and broad, Bukama was almost as tall as he, taller than most men, and wearing a Malkieri helmet without a crest, though he had the right to one. He had more concern for his duties than his rights, which was proper, but Lan wished he would not spurn his rights so completely.

  When the nation of Malkier died, twenty men had been given the task of carrying the infant Lan Mandragoran to safety. Only five had survived that journey, to raise Lan from the cradle and train him, and Bukama was the last left alive. His hair was solid gray now, worn cut at the shoulder as tradition required, but his back was straight, his arms hard, his blue eyes clear and keen. Tradition infused Bukama. A thin braided leather cord held his hair back, resting in the permanent groove across his forehead it had made over the years. Few men still wore the hadori. Lan did. He would die wearing it, and go into the ground wearing that and nothing else. If there was anyone to bury him where he died. He glanced north, toward his distant home. Most people would have thought it a strange place to call home, but he had felt the pull of it ever since he came south.

  “I remembered enough to hear you,” he replied. There was too little light to make out Bukama’s weathered face, yet he knew it wore a glower. He could not recall seeing any other expression from his friend and teacher even when he spoke praise. Bukama was steel clothed in flesh. Steel his will, duty his soul. “Do you still believe the Aiel are pledged to the Dark One?”

  The other man made a sign to ward off evil, as if Lan had spoken the Dark One’s true name. Shai’tan. They had both seen the misfortune that followed speaking that name aloud, and Bukama was one of those who believed that merely thinking it drew the Dark One’s attention. The Dark One and all the Forsaken are bound in Shayol Ghul, Lan recited the catechism in his head, bound by the Creator at the moment of creation. May we shelter safe beneath the Light, in the Creator’s hand. He did not believe thinking that name was enough, but better safe than sorry when it came to the Shadow.

  “If they aren’t, then why are we here?” Bukama said sourly. And surprisingly. He liked to grumble, but always about inconsequential things or prospects for the future. Never the present.

  “I gave my word to stay until the end,” Lan replied mildly.

  Bukama scrubbed at his nose. His grunt might have been abashed this time. It was hard to be sure. Another of his lessons had been that a man’s word must be as good as an oath sworn beneath the Light or it was no good at all.

  The Aiel had indeed seemed like a horde of Darkfriends when they suddenly spilled across the immense mountain range called the Spine of the World. They had burned the great city of Cairhien, ravaged the nation of Cairhien, and, in the two years since, had fought through Tear and then Andor before reaching these killing fields, outside the huge island city of Tar Valon. In all the years since the nations of the present day had been carved out of Artur Hawkwing’s empire, the Aiel had never before left the desert called the Waste. They mig
ht have invaded before that; no one could be sure, except maybe the Aes Sedai in Tar Valon, but, as so often with the women of the White Tower, they were not saying. What Aes Sedai knew, they held close, and doled out by dribbles and drops when and if they chose. In the world outside of Tar Valon, though, many men had claimed to see a pattern. A thousand years had passed between the Breaking of the World and the Trolloc Wars, or so most historians said. Those wars had destroyed the nations that existed then, and no one doubted that the Dark One’s hand had been behind them, imprisoned or not, as surely as it had been behind the War of the Shadow, and the Breaking, and the end of the Age of Legends. A thousand years from the Trolloc Wars until Hawkwing built an empire and that, too, was destroyed, after his death, in the War of the Hundred Years. Some historians said they saw the Dark One’s hand in that war, too. And now, close enough to a thousand years after Hawkwing’s empire died, the Aiel came, burning and killing. It had to be a pattern. Surely the Dark One must have directed them. Lan would never have come south if he had not believed that. He no longer did. But he had given his word.

  He wriggled his toes in his turned-down boots. Whether or not it was as cold as he was used to, iciness burrowed into your feet if you stood too long in one place in snow. “Let’s walk,” he said. “I don’t doubt I’ll have to wake a dozen more men if not two.” And make another round to wake others.

  Before they could take a step, however, a sound brought them up short, and alert: the sound of a horse walking in the snow. Lan’s hand drifted to his sword hilt, half consciously easing the blade in its sheath. A faint rasp of steel on leather came from Bukama doing the same. Neither feared an attack; Aiel rode only at great need, and reluctantly even then. But a lone horseman at this hour had to be a messenger, and messengers rarely brought good news, these days. Especially not in the night.

  Horse and rider materialized out of the darkness following a lean man afoot, one of the sentries by the horsebow he carried. The horse had the arched neck of good Tairen bloodstock, and the rider was plainly from Tear as well. For one thing, the scent of roses came ahead of him on the wind, from the oils glistening on his pointed beard, and only Tairens were fool enough to wear scent, as if the Aiel had no noses. Besides, no one else wore those helmets with a high ridge across the top and a rim that cast the man’s narrow face in shadow. A single short white plume on the helmet marked him an officer, an odd choice for a messenger, albeit an officer of low rank. He huddled in his high-cantled saddle and held his dark cloak tightly around him. He seemed to be shivering. Tear lay far to the south. On the coast of Tear, it never snowed so much as a single flake. Lan had never quite believed that, whatever he had read, until he had seen it for himself.