Rage hit her, and fear, but most of all whitehot anger. I won't be a prisoner. I won't be bound! I won't! She reached for saidar and the pain nearly lifted the top of her head; she barely stifled a moan.
The horse paused for a moment of shouts and the creak of rusty hinges, then went ahead a little further, and the men began to dismount. As they moved apart, she could see something of where they were. A log palisade surrounded them, built atop a large, round earthen mound, and men with bows stood guard on a wooden walk built just high enough for them to see over the roughhewn ends of the logs. One low, windowless log house seemed to be built into the mounded dirt under the wall. There was no other structure beyond a few leanto sheds. Aside from the men and horses that had just entered, the rest of the open space was filled with cook fires, and tethered horses, and more unwashed men. There must have been at least a hundred. Caged goats and pigs and chickens filled the air with squeals and grunts and clucks that blended with coarse shouts and laughter to make a din that pierced her head.
Her eyes found Nynaeve and Elayne, bound head down across saddleless horses as she was. Neither seemed to be stirring; the very end of Nynaeve's braid dragged across the dirt as her horse stirred. A small hope faded; that one of them might be free, to help whoever was held escape. Light, I cannot stand to be a prisoner again. Not again. Gingerly, she tried reaching for saidar again. The pain was not so bad this time — merely as if someone had dropped a rock on her head — but it shattered the emptiness before she could even think of a rose.
“One of them's awake!” a man's panicked voice shouted.
Egwene tried to hang limp and look unthreatening. How in the Light could I look threatening tied up like a sack of meal! Burn me, I have to buy time. I have to! “I will not harm you,” she told the sweatyfaced fellow who came running toward her. Or she tried to tell him. She was not sure how much she had actually said before something crashed into her head again and darkness rolled over her in a wave of nausea.
Waking was easier the next time. Her head still hurt, but not as much as it had, though her thoughts did seem to spin dizzily. At least my stomach isn't... Light, I'd better not think of that. There was a taste of sour wine and something bitter in her mouth. Strips of lamplight showed through horizontal cracks in a crudely made wall, but she lay in darkness, on her back. On dirt, she thought. The door did not seem to fit well either, but it looked all too sturdy.
She pushed herself to her hands and knees, and was surprised to find she was not tied in any way. Except for that one wall of unpeeled logs, the others all seemed to be of rough stone. The light through the cracks was enough to show her Nynaeve and Elayne lying sprawled on the dirt. There was blood on the DaughterHeir's face. Neither of them moved except for the rise and fall of their chests as they breathed. Egwene hesitated between trying to wake them immediately and seeing what lay on the other side of that wall. Just a peek, she told herself. I might as well see what we have guarding us before I wake them.
She told herself it was not because she was afraid she might be unable to waken them. As she put her eye to one of the cracks near the door, she thought of the blood on Elayne's face and tried to remember exactly what it was Nynaeve had done for Dailin.
The next room was large — it had to be all the rest of the log building she had seen — and windowless, but brightly lit with gold and silver lamps hanging from spikes driven into the walls and the logs that made the high ceiling. There was no fireplace. On the packed dirt floor farmhouse tables and chairs mingled with chests covered in giltwork and inlaid with ivory. A carpet woven in peacocks lay beside a huge canopied bed, piled deep with filthy blankets and comforters, with elaborately carved and gilded posts.
A dozen men stood or sat around the room, but all eyes were on one large, fairhaired man who might have been handsome if his face were cleaner. He stood staring down at the top of a table with fluted legs and gilded scrollwork, one hand on his sword hilt, a finger of the other pushing something she could not make out in small circles on the tabletop.
The outer door opened, revealing night outside, and a lanky man with his left ear gone came in. “He has no come, yet,” he said roughly. He was missing two fingers on his left hand, too. “I do no like dealing with that kind.”
The big, fairhaired man paid him no mind, only kept moving whatever it was on the table. “Three Aes Sedai,” he murmured, then laughed. “Good prices for Aes Sedai, if you have the belly to deal with the right buyer. If you're ready to risk having your belly ripped out through your mouth should you try selling him a pig in a sack. Not so safe as slitting the crew's throats on a trader's ship, eh, Coke? Not so easy, wouldn't you say?”
There was a nervous stir among the other men, and the one addressed, a stocky fellow with shifty eyes, leaned forward anxiously. “They are Aes Sedai, Adden.” She recognized that voice; the man who had made the coarse suggestions. “They must be, Adden. The rings prove it, I tell you!” Adden picked up something from the table, a small circle that glinted gold in the lamplight.
Egwene gasped and felt at her fingers. They took my ring!
“I do no like it,” muttered the lanky man with the missing ear. “Aes Sedai. Any one of them could kill us all. Fortune prick me! You do be a stonecarved fool, Coke, and I ought to carve your throat. What if one of them do wake before he does come?”
“They'll not wake for hours.” That was a fat man with hoarse voice and a gaptoothed sneer. “My granny taught me of that stuff we fed them. They'll sleep till sunrise, and he'll come long afore then.”
Egwene worked her mouth around the sour wine taste and the bitterness. Whatever it was, your granny lied to you. She should have strangled you in your cradle! Before this “he” came, this man who thought he could buy Aes Sedai — like a bloody Seanchan! — she would have Nynaeve and Elayne on their feet. She crawled to Nynaeve.
As near as she could tell, Nynaeve seemed to be sleeping, so she began with the simple expedient of shaking her. To her surprise, Nynaeve's eyes shot open.
“Wha—?”
She got a hand over Nynaeve's mouth in time to stop the word. “We are being held prisoner,” she whispered. “There are a dozen men on the other side of that wall, and more outside. A great many more. They gave us something to make us sleep, but it wasn't very successful. Do