Beslan turned a frown on him. "You aren't returning with us? Mat, if you try to buy passage on a ship again. . . . You know she won't go easy on you this time."

Mat matched the Queen's son scowl for scowl. "I just want to walk around a little," he lied. As soon as he returned to the Palace, Tylin would start cosseting and petting him. It would not have been that bad, really—not really—except that she did not care who saw her caress his cheeks and whisper endearments in his ear, even her son. Besides, what if the dice in his head stopped when he reached her? Possessive was hardly the word for Tylin these days. Blood and ashes, the woman might have decided to marry him! He did not want to marry, not yet, but he knew who he was going to marry, and it was not Tylin Quintara Mitsobar. Only, what could he do if she decided differently?

Suddenly he remembered Thorn's murmur of "risky business." He knew Thorn, and he knew Beslan. Olver was gaping at the Seanchan as hard as they themselves were at everything around them. He started to dart away for a closer look, and Mat seized his shoulder just in time and pushed him, protesting, into Thorn's hands. "Take the boy back to the Palace and give him his lessons when Riselle is done with him. And forget whatever madness you have in mind. You could put your heads on display outside the gate, and Tylin’s, too." And his own. Never let that be forgotten!

The two men stared back at him without any expression, as good as confirming his suspicions.

"Perhaps I should walk with you," Thorn said at last. "We could talk. You're remarkably lucky, Mat, and you have a certain flair for, shall we say, the adventurous?" Beslan nodded. Olver squirmed in Thom's grip, trying to stare at all the strange people at once and unconcerned with what his elders were talking about.

Mat grunted sourly. Why did people always want him to be a hero? Sooner or later that sort of thing was going to get him killed. "I don't need to talk about anything. They are here, Beslan. If you couldn't stop them getting in, sure as morning, you won't be able to push them out. Rand will deal with them, if the rumors are anything to go by." Again, those whirling colors spun through his head, almost obliterating the sound of the dice for an instant. "You took that bloody oath to wait on the Return; we all did." Refusal had meant being put in chains and set to work on the docks, or clearing the canals in the Rahad. Which made it no oath at all, in his book. "Wait on Rand." The colors came once more and vanished. Blood and ashes! He just had to stop thinking about. . . . About certain people. Again they swirled. "It might come out right yet, if you give it time."

"You don't understand, Mat," Beslan said fiercely. "Mother still sits on the throne, and Suroth says she will rule all of Altara, not just what we hold around Ebou Dar, and maybe more besides, but mother had to lie down on her face and swear fealty to some woman on the other side of the Aryth Ocean. Suroth says I should marry one of their Blood and shave the sides of my head, and mother is listening to her. Suroth might pretend they are equals, but she has to listen when Suroth speaks. No matter what Suroth says, Ebou Dar isn't really ours anymore, and the rest won't be either. Maybe we can't push them out by force of arms, but we can make the country too hot to hold them. The Whitecloaks found out. Ask them what they mean by 'the Altaran Noon.' "

Mat could guess without asking anyone. He bit his tongue to keep from pointing out that there were more Seanchan soldiers in Ebou Dar than there had been Whitecloaks in all of Altara during the Whitecloak War. A street full of Seanchan was no place for a flapping tongue, even if most did appear to be farmers and crafts-folk. "I understand you're hot to put your head on a spike," he said quietly. As quietly as he could and still be heard in that din of voices and cattle lowing and geese honking. "You know about their Listeners. That fellow over there who looks like a stableman could be one, or that skinny woman with the bundle on her back."

Beslan glowered so hard at the pair Mat had pointed out that if they really were Listeners, they might report him for that alone. "Maybe you'll sing a different song when they reach Andor," he growled, and pushed his way into the throng, shoving anyone who got in his way. Mat would have been unsurprised to see a fight break out. He suspected that was what the man was looking for.

Thorn turned to follow with Olver, but Mat caught his sleeve. "Cool his temper if you can, Thom. And cool your own while you're about it. I would think by this time you'd have had enough of shaving blind."

"My head is cool and I'm trying to cool his," Thom said dryly. "He can't just sit, though; it is his country." A faint smile crossed his leathery face. "You say you won't take risks, but you will. And when you do, you'll make anything Beslan and I might try look like an evening stroll in the garden. With you around, even the barber is blind. Come along, boy," he said, swinging Olver up onto his shoulders. "Riselle might not let you rest your head if you're late for your lesson."

Mat frowned after him as he strode away, making much better progress with Olver straddling his neck than Beslan had. What did Thom mean? He never took risks unless they were forced on him. Never. He glanced casually toward the skinny woman, and the fellow with dung on his boots. Light, they could be Listeners. Anybody could be. It was enough to set a prickle between his shoulders, as if he were being watched.

He inched a goodly distance along streets that actually grew thicker with people and animals and wagons the nearer he came to the docks. The stalls on the bridges over the canals had their shutters down, the street peddlers had picked up their blankets, and the tumblers and jugglers that usually entertained at every street crossing would have had no room to perform if they had not gone away, too. There were too many Seanchan, that was how many there were, and maybe one in five a soldier, plain enough by their hard eyes and the set of their shoulders, so different from farmer or craftsman, even when they were not wearing armor. Now and then a group sui'dam and damane moved along the street in a little eddy of clear space, more even than soldiers got. It was not given out of fear, at least not by the Seanchan. They bowed respectfully to the women with lightning-marked red panels on the blue dresses, and smiled with approval as the pairs passed by. Beslan was out of his mind. The Seanchan were not going to be driven off by anyone except an army with Asha'man, like the one rumor said had fought them to the east a week ago. Or one armed with the Illuminator's secrets. What in the Light could Aludra want with a bellfounder?

He took pains not to come in sight of the docks. He had learned his lesson on that. What he really wanted was a game of dice, one that would last well into the night. Preferably late enough that Tylin would be asleep when he returned to the Palace. She had taken away his dice, claiming she did not like him gambling, though she did it after he talked her into wagering forfeits, while he was still confined to bed. Fortunately, dice could always be found, and with his luck, it was always better to use the other men's dice anyway. Unfortunately, once he discovered she was not about to pay a forfeit of letting him go—the woman pretended not to know what he was talking about!—he had used them to give her back a bit other own medicine. A grave mistake, however much fun it had been at the time. Since the forfeits ran out, she had been twice as bad as before.

The taverns and common rooms he entered were as packed as the streets, though, with barely room to lift a mug, much less toss dice, full of Seanchan laughing and singing, and glum-faced Ebou Dari who eyed the Seanchan in sullen silence. He still queried the innkeepers and tapsters on the chance they might have a cubby hole he could rent, but one and all they shook their heads. He had not really expected anything else. There had been nothing available even before all the new arrivals. Still, he began to feel as gloomy as the foreign merchants he saw peering into their wine and wondering how they were to get their goods out of the city with no horses. He had gold to pay whatever Luca wanted, and more, but it was all in a chest in the Tarasin Palace, and he was not about to try taking enough out in one go, not after Palace servants had carried him back from the docks like a stag taken in hunt. All he had been doing then was talking to ship captains; if Tylin learned, and she would, that he was trying to leave the Palace with more gold than he needed for an evening of gambling. . . . Oh, no! He had to have a room, a garret in some inn's attic the size of a wardrobe, anything, where he could hide away gold a little at a time, or he had to have a chance with the dice, one or the other. Luck or no luck, though, he eventually realized that he was going to find neither today. And those bloody dice were still tumbling in his head, tumbling.