He continued to dine with her every midday, if they were halted, and began arriving for his nightly games of stones early, so she had to feed him then, too. Light’s truth, if you got a woman to feed you on a regular basis, she was halfway won. At least, he dined with her when she would let him into the wagon. One night he found the latch down, and no amount of talking would make her or Selucia open the door. It seemed a bird had managed to get inside during the day, an extremely bad omen apparently, and the pair of them had to spend the night in prayer and contemplation to avert some evil or other. They seemed to run half their lives according to strange superstitions. Tuon or Selucia either one would make odd signs with their hands if they saw a torn spiderweb with the spider in it. and Tuon explained to him, just as serious as if she were making sense, that the sure result of clearing away a spiderweb before shooing the spider out of it was the death of someone close to you within the month. They would see a flight of birds circle more than once and predict a storm, or draw a finger through a line of marching ants, count how long it took for the ants to rejoin their line, and predict how many days of fair weather lay ahead, and never mind that it did not work out that way. Oh, there was rain three days after the birds-crows, disturbingly enough-but it was nowhere near a storm, just a gray, drizzling day.

“Obviously, Selucia miscounted with the ants,” Tuon said, placing a white stone on the board with that oddly graceful arching of her fingers. Selucia, watching over her shoulder in a white blouse and divided brown skirts, nodded. As usual, she wore a head scarf over her short golden hair even indoors, a length of red-and-gold silk that day. Tuon was all in brocaded blue silk, a coat of odd cut that covered her hips and divided skirts so narrow they seemed to be wide trousers. She spent considerable time giving the seamstresses detailed instructions on what she wanted sewn, and little of it was much like anything he had ever seen before. It was all in Seanchan styles, he suspected, though she had had a few riding dresses sewn that would not draw comment, for when she went outside. Rain pattered softly on the roof of the wagon. “Obviously, what the birds told us was modified by the ants. It is never simple, Toy. You must learn these things. I will not have you ignorant.”

Mat nodded as if that made sense and placed his black stone. And she called his uneasiness about crows and ravens superstition! Knowing when to keep your mouth shut was a useful skill around women. Around men, too, but more so around women. You could be pretty certain what would set a man’s eyes on fire.

Talking with her could be dangerous in other ways, too. “What do you know of the Dragon Reborn?” she asked him another evening.

He choked on a mouthful of wine, and the whirling colors in his brain dissipated in a fit of coughing. The wine was near enough vinegar; but even Nerim had a hard time finding good wine these days. “Well, he’s the Dragon Reborn,” he said when he could speak, wiping wine from his chin with one hand. For a moment, he saw Rand eating at a large dark table. “What else is there to know?” Selucia refilled his cup smoothly.

“A great deal, Toy. For one thing, he must kneel to the Crystal Throne before Tarmon Gai’don. The Prophecies are clear on that, but I haven’t even been able to learn where he is. It becomes still more urgent if he is the one who sounded the Horn of Valere, as I suspect.”

“The Horn of Valere?” he said weakly. The Prophecies said what} “It’s been found, then?”

“It must have been, mustn’t it, if it was sounded?” she drawled dryly. “The reports I’ve seen from the place where it was blown, a place called Falme, are very disturbing. Very disturbing. Securing whoever blew the Horn, man or woman, may be as important as securing the Dragon Reborn himself. Are you going to play a stone or not, Toy?”

He played his stone, but he was so shaken that the colors whirled and faded without forming any image. In fact, he was barely able to eke out a draw from what had seemed a clear winning position.

“You played very poorly toward the end.” Tuon murmured, frowning thoughtfully at the board, now divided evenly between the control of black stones and white. He could all but see her start trying to work out what they had been talking about when his poor play began. Talking with her was like walking a crumbling ledge across the face of a cliff. One misstep, and Mat Cauthon would be as dead as last year’s mutton. Only, he had to walk that ledge. He had no bloody choice. Oh, he enjoyed it. In a way. The longer he spent with her, the more opportunity to memorize that heart-shaped face, to get it down so he could see her just by closing his eyes. But there was always that misstep waiting ahead. He could almost see that, too.

For several days after giving her the little bunch of silk flowers, he brought her no presents, and he thought he was beginning to detect hints of disappointment when he appeared empty-handed. Then, four days out of Jurador, just as the sun was peeking over the horizon into a nearly cloudless sky, he got her and Selucia out of the purple wagon. Well, he just wanted Tuon, but Selucia might as well have been her shadow when it came to trying to separate them. He had commented on that once, making a joke, and both women went on talking as if he had not spoken. It was a good thing he knew Tuon could laugh at a joke, because sometimes she seemed to have no sense of humor at all. Selucia, wrapped in a green wool cloak with the cowl all but hiding her red headscarf, eyed him suspiciously, but then, she nearly always did. Tuon never bothered with a scarf, yet the shortness of her black hair was not so apparent with the hood of her blue cloak up.

“Cover your eyes, Precious,” he said. “I have a surprise for you.”

“I like surprises,” she replied, placing her hands over her big eyes. For an instant, she smiled in anticipation, but only for an instant. “Some surprises, Toy.” That had the sound of a warning. Selucia stood hard by her shoulder, and though the bosomy woman appeared completely at her ease, something told him she was as tense as a cat ready to leap. He suspected she did not like surprises.

“Wait right there,” he said, and ducked around the side of the purple wagon. When he returned, he was leading Pips and the razor, both saddled and bridled. The mare stepped lively, frisking at the prospect of an outing. ‘You can look now. I thought you might like a ride.” They had hours; the show might as well have been deserted for all the evidence of life among the wagons. Only a handful had smoke rising from their metal chimneys. “She’s yours!’ he added, and stiffened as the words nearly froze in his throat.

There was no doubt this time. He had said the horse was hers, and suddenly the dice were not beating so loudly in his head. It was not that they had slowed: he was sure of that. There had been more than one set rattling away. One had stopped when he made his agreement with Aludra, and another when he told Tuon the horse was hers. That was odd in itself-how could giving her a horse be fateful for him?- but Light, it had been bad enough when he had to worry about one set of dice giving warning at a time. How many sets were still bouncing off the inside of his skull? How many more fateful moments were waiting to crash down on him?

Tuon went immediately to the razor, all smiles as she examined the animal as thoroughly as he had himself. She did train horses for fun, after all. Horses and damane, the Light help him. Selucia was studying him, he realized, her face an expressionless mask. Because of the horse, or because he had gone stiff as a post?

“She’s a razor,” he said, patting Pips’ blunt nose. The gelding had been getting plenty of exercise, but the razor’s eagerness seemed to have infected him. “Domani bloodborn favor razors, and it’s not likely you’ll ever see another one outside of Arad Doman. What will you name her?”