Koe opened one eye to take the room in, slowly. There was little evidence that anything had changed. Yet he felt it had. A sense, a sensation. Intuition. Something had stirred him from his slumber. Something made him open that one eye. A shifting of the curtain. The window was open. He certainly had not opened the window, nor suggested it to Taereme. As soon as he thought it, he realized how foolish the notion was. A locked window would not keep Orb out if he came looking for them. Koe might not have slept if he hadn't felt so weary in his bones. Explaining, trying to believe, struggling with the thought that not all of this was as it should be. Taereme should have been safe. She shouldn't be fearing for her life even more than she had on the darkest street, in the faintest light. Koe should have been able to do something to make her safe. But the power that creature wielded could terrify even so ancient a being as him, and Koe did not want to feel that sensation ever again. Nor the urge to fight, the urge to kill, that it stirred in his chest.

( He'd sworn off such feelings long ago. )

There were candles in the room. He could not recall lighting them, could not recall even finding them, but there they were. Arranged in a circle on the table before them. Koe did not know what had become of the hours in between. His memory, which was normally excellent in such situations, had gone from him. There were tired murmurings to his horse. There were whispered secrets echoing in his mind, calling him back to the days - to the days when he had been young, and the world had been younger than it was today, and all was well. All manner of things were well. Rand had given him destruction in the guise of guidance. Had shown him a path to destruction that could not be matched or equaled. That was the destruction he sought to avoid. There was murder in the heart of one who taught such things. There was murder in the heart of one who knew such things. He did not want to have a killer's heart. If he would die, he would die as what he was. That refrain echoed through his mind. He would not change himself to stay alive.

( But he would be a fool to say he did not fear death. )

They were in a room.

Koe did not remember coming here. The horse. He'd collected his horse, who had been near to panic himself, as ... Koe's thoughts were fractured varied things just then. Smooth in composition and substance, smooth as a song itself, they were the disarrayed noise of a first-time player now. No harmony, no illustrious bardic rhythm to them. Red was safe. Taereme was safe. He was safe. But he did not know for how long. If Orb could read minds. No, stop. That was not the frist question. The first question was how he'd... no, the first question was, what in the hells beneath the earth was Orb? He felt like swearing. He never swore. There had been ancient creatures once, long ago. He'd faced one with his daughter and her allies, at the entrance to what was, just before the Breaking. A behemoth of stone that towered over the tallest of structures in Agethlea. He did not know how long ... Orb was like, but unlike, that creature. Of the same ilk?

( None of it made sense. )

Agethlea was not the city of Koe's birth, and so he was not fond of it in any way. Though its sculpted buildings were impressive and the monoliths that dotted the city were both grand and fitting the egos of the mages who called this place home they were not his sort of city. A city ought to be one joined height, whether great or small. A city ought to feel like a collection of souls and not a place of mystery and suspicion. From the first they knew he was not ordinary - being mages, they had eyes as sharp as any thief's, and more discerning - but they did not know what. So they walked wide, eying him when they were sure he was not looking, and in general making nuisances out of themselves whenever they could. This effect was made somewhat worse by the company he kept. She was riding and he was walking, yet no one would think that she led. Perhaps that, they thought, was the game?

( The game. )

The unknown road unfolded before them in greedy fits and sparks - here a stretch hidden just beyond a bend, there a tiny curling wisp of dirt trail that disappeared over the horizon of the next hill - and Taereme reveled in it. She knew in a distant way that she had traveled before, long ago, before the world had turned cold. Or perhaps it had always been cold. But she'd never traveled like this. Never without the sense of a knife close behind her, never without the sense of true danger. There was a freedom in the open road, a beauty to which she'd never before been witness. Spring was no longer the beginning of a better financial season; it was something... more. Something fresher, something newer than she'd ever seen. For the first time since she could recall, she felt... hopeful. Without desperation. Without the niggling feeling that she would lose if she didn't place her feet correctly. It was true that she had no earthly idea where they were going. But her companion today was an older man who seemed not to have a single harmful bone in his body. Difficult to feel insecure around him. Taereme wondered how he ever had survived in the world she knew. Did he know some different world? It seemed unlikely; he was a traveling minstrel. He had to know the ugliness that Caeleste marinated in. But he didn't seem touched by it. Or rather, it seemed to pass through him instead of cling. An odd sort of man. But one that did not threaten her. One that seemed kind.

Kind in the way that the matron in the cottages at Oisea had been. Taereme thoughtfully looked down at her sleeve. Over the freshly laundered green dress, she wore a hand-me-down jacket with very little give to the threads - newer despite its previous use. Gloves now covered her hands. Gloves. She'd never worn gloves in her life; never had enough to spend to get them. And even more surprising than all this, a small purse of coins nestled reassuringly against her waist where it hung on a new belt. She didn't understand why the matron had been so kind, and didn't understand why there'd been a ... fondness.... in the woman's eyes when she'd taken her leave with Koe. She didn't understand a lot of things these days.

But she found that it was... tolerable. There was still a part of her that held itself aside, that warned Taereme that it could never last, that soon her benefactors would ask her for payment or somehow turn on her in other ways. But it hadn't happened, and it hadn't happened, and more and more, that voice began to fade. She felt... trepidation... and hope. Hope. Such a strange feeling....

She almost didn't notice when, for the fifth time today, the horse on which she rode decided to nap under the willow tree at the side of the road. The beast knelt, nickered, and set its massive head on its curled forelegs. Only Koe's exclamation drew Taereme back from her thoughts just in time to remember to grab on tightly to the horse's mane -- but not to pull, for everything that she cherished in life! The last time she'd done that, the result had been painful.

"Silly beast!" Taereme whispered in the horse's ear, as she leaned over his neck to secure herself from the inevitable lurch upward again.

"You," Koe pointed out reasonably. "Bargain very hard."

"Next," the innkeeper said lazily.

Oisea was not a city of the arts. In fact, Koe thought rather rudely, it was a city in the main oif farmers and soldiers. Only he'd never known such a sour group of farmers in all his life. Not only were they entirely oblivious to music - not one coin fell into the bowl of leather and bone which he'd acquired for the purpose - but none of the city's innkeepers seemed particularly enticed by the idea of having a true bard performing in their midst. Might scare off the patrons, they said. Or it might put a stop to business and we's can't be having that now can we? Koe mouthed the words silently as he stepped onto the gravel road, and met the rain with the bulk of his fortitude. Ten inns and not a single yes. Oisea not only deserved the torrential downpour that was coating it but every piece of foul luck that followed. Such unkind thoughts were usually not in his nature. He was angry only because one innkeeper had taken him by the scruff of his neck when he'd begun to sing. The intention was to show what a talent he had.

( There was no appreciation of music in them. )

Eithne was first and foremost a fool for believing in anything besides herself now. He hadn't replied, but she knew he'd heard her. His choice was made, his move being played. Eithne could do no more. Left with duty, a stupid thing that she may or may not have believed in now. Duty to the White riders, to their guests, maybe eventually to herself when she found her room. Not till then, when she finally did find the time to rest her head she didn't know what she'd do. She hadn't failed herself yet though, not a tear to cry, or the remnants of one to show. Her eyes were dry though, perhaps that was in it's own way showing her exactly how upset she was. She didn't bust the door in or throw a chair, she simply walked inside and closed the door ever so gently behind her.

If they had been listening, or watching what unfolded, none of them seemed to move just yet to show her they had. All of them seemed to still be in place, save for where they were looking. Which wasn't at her, or the door Eragos had left out of. He couldn't be what she wanted. He couldn't send Vera away, he couldn't stop. Ha indeed. Everything else was up to her? What had ever been up to her? Ever since she was born the world had tossed her from here to there. No real decision on her part. Maybe she'd joined the white riders out of choice, but it was more out of there was nothing else to save her. She would have been dead, or at least missing a few body parts.

( Or perhaps her soul. )

Eithne would have enjoyed herself more in Oisea if there were different circumstances. Her hands still felt raw even after Cols had healed them days ago. She couldn't stop feeling tired even if she had all the rest in the world. Sleeping Tiger and Cols were there, all waiting for the same thing. For Eragos, for whatever it was that was coming to come. Maybe she was a little excited about it, hard not to be, action was action and whether it brought them all death or glory it was something besides guarding the Dragon another weekend.

( She really didn't like guarding the dragon. )

The mid-day marketplace bustled with a life of its own. Taereme had seen it many times, but her own participation in it had been limited -- at least, her own legitimate participation. There was enough in the purse she'd taken to buy a pair boots and a jacket that was a little too large for her. It could be lined later, perhaps if she managed to catch rabbits somewhere, or foxes. No, that was foolishness. She wouldn't have known the first thing in how to do such a thing.

The remaining amount she spent buying dried deer meat and some bread. The soft kind, the kind that she didn't have to knife open or soak in ale before she could chew it. These things, seemingly normal things, were treasures to her. She slid behind a shop, lifted her fine skirt high over her hips, and in the privacy there, tied the venison in its muslin wrapper tightly against her stomach. She was thin enough that the extra bulk around her middle didn't seem out of place to anyone who didn't already know what she looked like. After she tucked the bread into her jacket's inner pocket, she laced her new boots on her feet, and started back toward the Wild Wheel Tavern on the other side of the marketplace.

( But amid her practical concerns, a single hand kept on raising itself in her memory. )

It was his turn to sit in an empty room. Eragos wondered at that; at the strangeness of the situation. The oddness of it all. Talon. Talon was alive. The man had known his name, hadn't he? The man had been able to tell a name that Eragos had not spoken aloud in nearly twenty years. As though not speaking it aloud would somehow protect him. Somehow defend him from the pain of the memory. He still remembered a child carrying a wooden chest too heavy for him to properly manage. A chest that contained the scales Eragos had collected over his years. There was no reason to think he was the same boy. A multitude of reasons to think he was changed, different now, more monster than man. Yet he still saw that image of his brother crystallized by time and distance. A sweet boy who would never be very good at killing. That deficiency, if one saw it as such, never troubled Eragos. His brother had always been a lighter half of his life, something to help him remember that not everything in the world was grim and deathly.

( Now that something was gone. )

"Eithne, take Taereme to the Golden Lantern and pay whatever they ask."

Eithne wished she was deaf, not knowing what Eragos had said would have made her feel a hell of a lot better. Instead shed been ordered to take this traitor of a woman to a fine inn and pay for the room. Did Eragos assume she had money in the dress? When there was room for nothing in it besides her body as it was. Eithne had pulled Taereme down the street by her elbow, retrieved her stashed pack from her horse which was tied down the street, and then pulled her to the inn. The only money she had was her own, which made this even harder to part with. But she paid the gold all the while holding onto Taereme and pretending to be the woman's very best friend.

( She wanted to slit her throat, and then kill herself because of this. )

Four White Riders. One near the curve in the street, to watch for oncoming foot traffic. One at the opposite end, to monitor the intersection. And two close to the subject of their protection. In another time and place he would have thought it odd to provide so much security for one person if that person was not royalty. Those times had since passed him by. Whatever his feeling on this mission, whatever his thoughts on the Captain's intent, Eragos had his duty. It was something he clung to no matter what the situation. Duty. Duty kept him here when he received the Lady Vera's letter. Read so many times now that he doubted there was a crease undiscovered on the parchment. She should have come looking for him. Should have found him, and taken him with her. Not because she was helpless but because... he wanted to make her safe. In the old times, under the old code, knights had sworn to a single person. A king or queen, a lord or lady. He would have sworn to her but for the fact that she loved the land more than... she would not have that oath, so he'd given it where it seemed to matter, and now he was forgotten. It wasn't the only reason he'd joined. Just the most important. Now it seemed the very least.

( And wasn't that a strange thing? )

The sky told her that there was still time before the meeting time with those White Riders. She'd be a fool to go without having given thought to how she would protect herself against them, should they decide to go back on their word. It was not Taereme's desire to find herself at the bottom of a gaol, rats her only companions, until her bones rotted through her skin or until the white-clad keepers of the law of Simanel decided to toss her leagues away from civilization. If she danced this dangerous twisting of feet and limbs with them, she needed protection.

She thought she knew someone who may just be honor-bound enough to keep to his word if he gave it. The one she'd met before, the stranger, Sleeping Tiger, had no reason or need to feed her, but he'd done it all the same. He had a keenness to his eyes, but they had been neither lustful nor cruel nor judgmental when he turned them toward her. Such a man was a rare thing. The more she considered him, the more she believed that she would have the best of luck with him -- if there was any luck left to accord to a woman such as herself.

When she shouldered deftly through the doorway of the Wild Wheel Tavern, some looked up. Some didn't. Rosetta saw her from across the room, then turned away. Strange... the bar wench hardly ever passed up a chance to sneer at her - even if it was over the heads of a score of drunken lechers. Could it be that she'd earned some modicum of respect from her, for having tried to look after Grokken? Taereme looked over to where the tavern keeper typically sat. He was there tonight as well, and he nodded his head at her, once, gruffly. So someone had told him.

Strange to be well-received anywhere but a back alley. She smiled, uncertainly, then looked back at the crowd. A quick scan of the back tables had her moving through the seated crowd of chairs and tables and sweating, stinking flesh. When she sat down, uninvited, it was with a smile. "Sleeping Tiger," she greeted quietly, knowing very well the sensitivity of the name of a stranger. Not everyone wanted his name shouted in such a place as this.

They came like grim ghosts, quiet as the moonlight and as eager to haunt the less fortunate. The Wild Wheel Tavern was rarely visited by the White Riders despite its rowdy existence. When it was, it was at the owner's behest. Grokken was a rough, gruff man and his arms were strong, strong enough to throw most of the worst out of the tavern at the end of the night, but when he encountered the truly belligerent, it was only then that the White Riders were called. It gave Taereme enough time to clear out, herself. But the night had a few good hours still left in her, and Grokken hadn't even begun to toss men out on their ears yet. So he hadn't called them. And that meant that they'd come on their own. They'd come for something. Someone?

There were two at the back door. She could see them from the corner of her eye, all white-robed and ghastly. Taereme hadn't seen them passing by the window above the table where she sat, but then again, she would probably only see such a thing if the White Riders wanted her to. She hated them. She hated them for taking away her only true friend, and she hated them for threatening her lifestyle, if not her life. Most of all, she hated the sick, oily feeling that crept up her windpipe then exploded down her spine when she saw the second pair enter from the front door.

Rosetta was glaring hard at her, and any moment she was sure the tavern bitch was going to open her wide, red yap and cry "Harlot!" at the top of her lungs. When that happened, Taereme had best not be sitting at the table where she was. Most people didn't bother to notice a scrap of a woman such as she, unless she'd drawn attention to herself. She hadn't tonight, so there was the hope - the very delicate and slender hope - that the others around her wouldn't pair her with Sleeping Tiger. The irony, the brutal, ugly irony was that Sleeping Tiger hadn't once seemed interested in what Taereme usually sold. For all her intentions when she first approached the strange man, the most intimate they'd been was when they'd both tangled themselves in each other's laughter. But Rosetta wouldn't care about that. Rosetta would turn her in as soon as she could, if Rosetta had her way.

The sound of the door closing shut was enough to draw the eyes of everyone - even Rosetta - and Taereme used the distraction to carefully, quietly rise from where she'd been sitting. As she pressed her back against the wall and did her best to blend into the dull brown of the dirty stone, she herself gave them a once-over.

They were rather eye-catching...

Cloaked head to foot in their white garments, their forms were only vaguely recognizable as man and woman. Their hoods were up, their faces wholly covered by those horrific masks, and the only true sign of their humanity were their eyes from deep within the hollows of those white face shields. Imposing... If she let her imagination get the best of her, Taereme was certain she could see the skeletons they'd decayed out of countless bodies trailing behind them - ghosts to their ghostly figures, clinging like blood on a sword.

As near as she knew, Simanel didn't kill prostitutes. The worst sentence was to clap them up in the gaol, then import them out of the city in batches. That was good as dead, wasn't it? With no money and no supplies in the wilderness where a growing number of bandits who would take whatever you had - money or not - it was good enough to a hanging as they could manage without wasting the rope to tie around the necks of her and her nighttime sisters. She swallowed and eased her way against the wall. There would be no escape through either the back door or the front, but the window... Her back was against it now, her hands grappling at the closed lip of it, and the window...

... The window, her fingers found out, was nailed shut. Blasted Grokken! That slippery feeling of fear was giving way to panic. How many of her kind had disappeared from the streets these last months? Would she now join the number? Swallowing again, she ducked her head and tried for all her piteous worth to look like anything other than what she was.

Money was a simple thing until there was no more of it. Perching on a low branch across the street from the Wild Wheel Tavern, Taereme watched the slow dribble of bodies sludge in and out of the squat building. By now she knew most of them by name or by face; by now she knew who she could approach and who would never be worth it. Unfortunately for her, there were a lot of the latter and none of the former tonight. None, at least, that she would get enough from in order to do anything useful about the hollow in her stomach. If there were one good thing that the White Riders had done for her, it was to clear the streets of much of her competition. The hiding and the running when they thundered down the stone roads was hard on her, but as long as the other girls were... away... (and she couldn't think of them in prison, no matter how good business would be because of it) ...as long as the other girls were away, there was a better chance for her to eat. But tonight, she was beginning to think she'd picked the wrong place to watch.

( Easier, sure, to stay here... )