This part of the town had not been burned, yet it had a look of desolation. Broken dishes and pottery crunched beneath their soft white boots. Bits of clothing, cut off men and women made gai’shain, still littered the gray paving stones. Those sorry, bedraggled rags had lain first in the snow and then in the rain for well over a month, and she doubted any ragpicker would have gathered them, now. Here and there lay children’s toys, a wooden horse or a doll whose paint was beginning to flake, dropped by the very young who had been allowed to flee, like the very old, the ill and infirm. Slate-roofed buildings of wood or stone along the street showed gaping holes where their doors and windows had been. Along with anything the Shaido considered valuable or useful, the town had been stripped of every easily removable piece of wood, and only the fact that tearing down houses was less efficient than cutting firewood in the surrounding forests had spared the wooden structures themselves. Those openings minded Faile of eye sockets in skulls. She had walked along this street countless times, yet this morning, they seemed to be watching her. They made her scalp crawl.
Halfway across the town, she looked back toward the gates, no more than a hundred and fifty paces behind. The street was still empty for the moment, but soon the first white-clad men and women would materialize with their water buckets. Fetching water was a task that began early and lasted all day. They had to hurry, now. Turning down a narrower side street, she started to walk faster, although she had trouble keeping her basket balanced. The others must have been having the same difficulty, yet no one complained. They had to be out of sight before those gai’shain appeared.
There was no reason for any gai’shain entering the town to leave the main street until they reached the cistern below the fortress. An attempt to curry favor or just a careless word could send Shaido into the town hunting for them, and there was only one way out, short of climbing onto the walls and dropping ten paces to the ground hoping that no one broke a leg.
At a now signless inn, three stories of stone and empty windows, she darted into the common room followed by the others. Lacile set down her basket and pressed herself against the doorframe to keep watch up the street. The beam-ceilinged room was bare to the dusty floorboards, and the stone fireplaces were missing their andirons and firetools. The railing had been stripped from the staircase at the back of the room, and the door to the kitchen was gone, too. The kitchen was just as empty. She had checked. Pots and knives and spoons were useful.
Faile lowered her basket to the floor and hurried to the side of the staircase. It was a sturdy piece of work, of heavy timbers and made to last for generations. Tearing it down would have been nearly as hard as tearing down a house. She felt underneath, along the top of the wide outer support, and her hand closed on the wrist-thick, not quite glassy rod. It had seemed as good a hiding place as she could find, a place no one would have any reason to look, but she was surprised to find she had been holding her breath.
Lacile remained by the doorway, but the others hurried to Faile without their baskets.
“At last,” Alliandre said, gingerly touching the rod with her fingertips. “The price of our freedom. What is it?”
“An angreal,” Faile said, “or perhaps a ter’angreal. I don’t know for certain, except that Galina wants it very badly, so it must be one or the other.”
Maighdin put her hand on the rod boldly. “It could be either,” she murmured. “They often have an odd feel. So I’ve been told, anyway.” She claimed never to have been to the White Tower, but Faile was not so sure as she once had been. Maighdin could channel, but so weakly and with so much difficulty that the Wise Ones saw no danger in letting her walk free. Well, as free as any gai’shain was. Her denials might well be a matter of shame. Faile had heard that women who had been put out of the Tower because they could not become Aes Sedai sometimes denied ever having gone in order to hide their failure.
Arrela gave a shake of her head and backed away a step. She was Tairen, and despite traveling with Aes Sedai, she was still uncomfortable over the Power or anything to do with it. She looked at the smooth white rod as if at a red adder and licked her lips. “Galina might be waiting on us. She might get angry if we make her wait long.”
“Is the way still clear, Lacile?” Faile asked as she stuck the rod far down into her basket. Arrela exhaled heavily, clearly as relieved at having the thing out of her sight as she had been to see Faile earlier.
“Yes,” the Cairhienin replied, “but I do not understand why.” She still stood so that one eye could peek around the corner of the doorframe. “The first gai’shain should be coming for water by now.”
“Maybe something has happened in the camp,” Maighdin said. Suddenly, her face was grim and her knife was in her hand, a wooden-handled affair with a chipped and pitted blade.
Faile nodded slowly. Maybe something such as Dairaine having been found already. She could not tell where Faile and the others had been going, but she might have recognized some among the waiting gai’shain. How long would they hold out if put to the question? How long would Alvon hold out if Theril were? “There’s nothing we can do about it, in any case. Galina will get us out.”
Even so, when they left the inn, they ran, carrying the baskets in front of them and trying to hold up their long robes so they did not trip. Faile was not the only one to look over her shoulder frequently and stumble. She was not sure whether or not she was relieved to finally see gai’shain carrying buckets on yokes drift across the crossing of the town’s main street. She certainly did not slow down.
They did not have far to run. In moments, the smell of charred wood that had faded from the rest of Maiden began to grow. The southern end of Maiden was a ruin. They halted at the edge of the devastation and edged around a corner so they would not be seen by anyone glancing down the street. From where they stood to the southern wall, near two hundred paces, marched roofless shells with blackened stone walls interspersed with piles of charred beams washed clean of ash by the rains. In places, not even the heaviest timbers remained. Only on the south side of this street were there any structures even close to whole. This was where the fire that raged after the Shaido took the city had been finally stopped. Half a dozen buildings stood without roofs, though the lower floors looked intact, and twice as many were leaning piles of black timbers and half-burned boards that appeare