As he was turning to go, Nynaeve caught his sleeve. "Remember the storm, Mat. It’s going to break soon; I know it. You take care of yourself, Mat Cauthon. Do you hear me? Tylin has directions for the farm, when you get back with Olver."

Nodding, he made his escape, the dice in his head like echoes of his running boots. Was it during the search that he was supposed to take care of himself, or while getting the directions from Tylin? Nynaeve and her Listening to the Wind. Did she think a little rain was going to melt him? Come to think, once they used the Bowl of the Winds, it would rain again. It seemed years since rain last fell. Something tugged at his thoughts, something about the weather, and Elayne, which made no sense, but he shrugged it off. One thing at a time, and the one thing right now was Olver.

The men were all waiting in the Redarms’ long room near the stables, everyone on their feet except Vanin, who lay sprawled on one of the beds with his fingers laced over his belly. Vanin said a man had to take rest when he could. He swung his boots over and sat up when Mat entered, though. He cared about Olver as much as any of the others; Mat was just afraid the man was going to start teaching him how to steal horses and poach pheasants. Seven sets of eyes focused on Mat intently.

"Riselle said Olver’s wearing his red coat," he told them. "He gives them away, sometimes, but any urchin you see in a good red coat probably knows where Olver last was. Everybody goes in a different direction. Make loops out from the Mol Hara, and try to be back after about an hour. Wait till everybody is back before you go out again. That way, if somebody finds him, the rest of us won’t still be looking tomorrow. Does everybody understand?" They nodded.

Sometimes it amazed him. Lanky Thom with his white hair and mustaches, who had been a Queen’s lover once, and more willingly than himself, not to mention more than a lover, if you believed half he said. Square-jawed Harnan with that tattoo on his cheek and more elsewhere, who had been a soldier all his life. Juilin with his bamboo staff and his sword-breaker on his hip, who thought himself as good as any lord even if the idea of carrying a sword himself still made him uneasy, and fat Vanin, who made Juilin look a bootlicker by comparison. Skinny Fergin, and Gorderan, nearly as wide in the shoulders as Perrin, and Metwyn, whose pale Cairhienin face still looked like a boy’s despite being years older than Mat. Some of them followed Mat Cauthon because they thought he was lucky, because his luck might keep them alive when the swords were out, and some for reasons he was not really sure of, but they followed. Not even Thom had ever more than protested an order of his. Maybe Renaile had been more than luck. Maybe his being ta’verendid more than dump him in the-middle of trouble. Suddenly he felt... responsible... for these men. It was an uncomfortable feeling. Mat Cauthon and responsibility did not go together. It was unnatural.

"Take care of yourselves, and look sharp," he said. "You know what’s out there. There’s a storm coming." Now why had he said that? "Move. We’re wasting light."

The wind still blew strongly, sweeping dust across the Mol Hara Square with its statue of a long-dead queen posing above the fountain, but there was no other sign of a storm. Nariene had been noted for her honesty, but not enough to have been depicted completely bare-chested. The afternoon sun burned high in a sky without a cloud, but people rushed through the square as quickly as they had in the morning cool. That was gone, wind or no, down here on the ground. The paving stones seemed a griddle under his boots.

Glaring across the square at The Wandering Woman, Mat headed toward the river. Olver had not gone off with the street urchins half as often while they were staying at the inn; he had been too content ogling the serving girls and Setalle Anan’s daughters. So much for the dice telling him he had to move into the palace. Anything he had done since leaving — anything he wanted to do, he amended, thinking of Tylin and her eyes; and her hands — any of it could have been done just as well from there. Those dice spun now, and he wished they would just go away.

He tried to move quickly, dodging impatiently around trundling carts and wagons, cursing at lacquered sedan chairs and coaches that nearly ran him down, eyes darting in search of a red coat close to the ground, but the bustle in the streets slowed him to a meander. Which was just as well, in truth. No point dashing by the boy without seeing him. Wishing he had brought Pips out of the palace stables, he frowned at the people streaming past; a man on horseback could have moved no faster in the throng, but up in the saddle, he could have seen farther. Then again, asking questions from a saddle would have been awkward; not many folk actually rode inside the city, and some people had a tendency to shy away from anyone on a horse.

Always the same question. The first time he asked was at a bridge just below the Mol Hara, of a fellow selling honey-baked apples from a tray hanging from a strap around his neck. "Have you seen a boy, about so high, in a red coat?" Olver liked sweets.

"Boy, my Lord?" the fellow said, sucking his few remaining teeth. "Seen a thousand boys. Don’t remember no coat, though. Would my Lord like one apple, or two?" He scooped up two with bony fingers and pushed them at Mat; the way they gave under his fingers, they were softer than any baking could account for. "Did my Lord hear about the riot?"

"No," Mat said sourly, and pushed on. At the other end of the bridge, he stopped a plump woman with a tray of ribbons. Ribbons held no fascination for Olver, but her red petticoats flashed beneath a skirt sewn up nearly to her left hip, and the cut of her bodice revealed rounded cleavage to equal Riselle’s. "Have you seen a boy...?"

He heard about the riot from her, too, and from half the people he asked. That rumor, he suspected had begun with events at a certain house in the Rahad that very morning. A wagon driver with her long whip coiled around her neck even told him the riot had been across the river, once she allowed as how she never noticed boys unless they ran under her mules. A square-faced man who sold honeycomb — incredibly dry-looking honeycomb — said the riot had been down near the light tower at the end of the Bay Road, on the eastern side of the mouth of the bay, which was about as likely a place for rioting as the middle of the bay itself. There were always a thousand rumors in any city, if you listened, and he was forced to listen to snatches of all of them, it seemed. One of the most remarkably pretty women he had ever seen, standing outside a tavern — Maylin was a serving girl at The Old Sheep, but her only task seemed to be standing outside to attract customers, which she certainly did — told him there had been a battle that morning, in the Cordese Hills west of the city, she thought. Or maybe in the Rhannon Hills, across the bay. Or maybe... Remarkably pretty, Maylin, but not very bright; Olver might have watched her for hours, so long as she never opened her mouth. But she could not remember seeing any boy in a... What color coat had he said, again? He heard about riots and battles, he heard about enough strange things seen in the sky or the hills to populate the Blight. He heard that the Dragon Reborn was about to descend on the city with thousands of men who could channel, that the Aiel were coming, an army of Aes Sedai — no, it was an army of Whitecloaks; Pedron Niall was dead, and the Children intended to avenge him, though why in Ebou Dar was not exactly clear. You might have thought the city would be hip-deep in panic with all the tales floating around, but the fact was, even those who told a tale usually only half-believed it. So, he heard all sorts of nonsense, but not a word about any boy in a red coat.