Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan Read Free Book Online

help her mood in the slightest. Worry over being caught in a tangle of roses, even if the thorns might kill you eventually, was a luxury when you had a knife point pressed to your ribs.
    “Every time she’s left the Tower in the last ten years, it has been on her own affairs, so there are no recent records to check,” her companion murmured. “It’s difficult to learn exactly when she
has
been out of the Tower and remain . . . discreet.” Her dark golden hair held back by ivory combs, Meidani was tall, and slender enough to look overbalanced by her bosom, an effect emphasized by both the fit of her dark silver embroidered bodice and the way she walked in a stoop to put her mouth more on the level of Yukiri’s ear. Her shawl was caught on her wrists, the long gray fringe dragging the floor tiles.
    “Straighten your backbone,” Yukiri growled quietly. “My ears aren’t clogged with dirt.”
    The other woman jerked herself upright, faint splashes of color in her cheeks. Pulling her shawl higher on her arms, Meidani half glanced over her shoulder toward her Warder Leonin, who was following at a discreet distance. If they could barely hear the faint tinkle of the silver bells in the lean man’s black braids, though, he could hear nothing said in a moderate tone. The man knew no more than necessary—precious little, in fact, except that his Aes Sedai wanted certain things of him; that was enough for any good Warder—and he might cause problems if he learned too much, but there was no need for whispering. People who saw whispering wanted to know what the secret was.
    The other Gray was no more the source of her irritation than the outside world, however, even if the woman was a jackdaw in swan’s feathers. Not the main source, anyway. A disgusting thing, a rebel pretending loyalty, yet Yukiri was actually glad that Saerin and Pevara had convinced her that they should not yet turn Meidani and her sister jackdaws over to Tower law. Their wings were clipped, now, and they were useful. They might even gain a measure of clemency, for when they did face justice. Of course, when the oath that had clipped Meidani’s wings came out, Yukiri might easily findherself wishing for clemency herself. Rebels or not, what she and the others had done with Meidani and her confederates was as far outside the law as murder. Or treason. An oath of personal obedience—sworn on the Oath Rod itself; sworn under duress—was all too close to Compulsion, which was clearly prohibited if not really defined. Still, sometimes you had to smudge the plaster to smoke out hornets, and the Black Ajah were hornets with venomous stings. The law would have its course in due time—without the law, there was nothing—but she needed to be more concerned with whether she would survive the smoking out than with what penalties the law would exact. Corpses had no need to worry about punishment.
    She motioned curtly for Meidani to go on, but no sooner had the other woman opened her mouth than three Browns rounded a corner from another hallway right in front of them, flaunting their shawls like Greens. Yukiri knew Marris Thornhill and Doraise Mesianos slightly, in the manner Sitters knew sisters from other Ajahs who spent long periods in the Tower, which was to say enough to attach names to faces and not much more. Mild and absorbed in their studies was how she would have described them, if pressed. Elin Warrel was so newly raised to the shawl, she still should have been bobbing curtsies on instinct. Instead of offering courtesies to a Sitter, though, all three stared at Yukiri and Meidani the way cats stared at strange dogs. Or maybe dogs at strange cats. No mildness, there.
    “May I ask about a point of Arafellin law, Sitter?” Meidani said, as smoothly as if that were what she had been intending to say all along.
    Yukiri nodded, and Meidani began rambling about fishing rights on rivers versus lakes, hardly an inspired choice. A magistrate might ask an Aes