Robert Jordan - The Fires of Heaven

Naturally, there was no way that Elayne or Birgitte could vent their bile where he might hear. Rolling eyes and meaningful looks among Thom and the others were bad enough; they at least made some effort to hide them. Neres' open satisfaction at having his ridiculous expectations met — he surely would have seen it so — that would have been unbearable. He left them no choice but to swallow their acid and smile.

For herself, Nynaeve could have done with a little time with Thom and Uno and Juilin away from Neres' eye. They were forgetting themselves again, forgetting they were supposed to do as they were told. The results did not matter; they should wait. And for some reason they had taken to tormenting Neres with darkly smiling comments about cracking heads and slitting throats. But the only place she could be sure of avoiding Neres was in the cabin. They were not particularly large men, though Thom was tall and Uno fairly wide, yet crowded in there, they would have filled the tiny space to where they were looming over her. Hardly conducive to the tongue-lashing she wanted to hand out; give a man the chance to loom, and he had the battle half won. So she put on a pleasant mask, ignored startled frowns from Thom and Juilin, incredulous stares from Uno and Ragan, and enjoyed the outward good temper the other women had been forced to adopt.

She managed to keep smiling when she learned why the sails were so full, the undulating riverbanks rushing by under the afternoon as fast as a trotting horse. Neres had had the sweeps pulled in and stored along the railings; he almost looked happy. Almost. A low clay bluff ran along the Amadicia bank: on the Ghealdan side lay a broad ribbon of reeds between river and trees, mainly brown where water had receded. Samara lay only a few hours upriver.

"You channeled," she said to Elayne through her teeth. Wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, she resisted the urge to dash it to the slowly heaving deck. The other passengers left a clear space for the two of them and Birgitte a few paces across, but she still kept her voice low, and as affable as she could manage. Her stomach seemed to move a heartbeat behind the ship's roll; that hardly improved her temper. "This wind is your doing." She hoped there was enough red fennel in her scrip.

From Elayne's damply glowing countenance and wide eyes, milk and honey should have fountained from her mouth. "You are turning into a frightened rabbit. Pull yourself together. Samara is miles behind us. No one could sense anything useful from that far. She would have to be on the ship with us to know. I was very quick."

Nynaeve thought her own face might crack if she held her smile any longer, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Neres, studying his passengers and shaking his head. Angry as she was at that moment, she could also see the almost faded residue of the other woman's weaving. Working weather was like rolling a stone downhill; it tended to keep going the way you started it. When it bounced away from the path, as it would sooner or later, you just had to twitch it back. Moghedien might have felt a weave of that size from Samara — maybe — but certainly not well enough to say where it had been done. She herself was a match for Moghedien in raw strength, and if she was not strong enough to do something, it seemed safe to say the Forsaken was not either. And she did want to travel as quickly as possible; right then, one day more than necessary in close quarters with the other two held as much attraction for her as sharing the cabin with Neres. For that matter, an extra day on water was nothing to look forward to. How could a ship move in such a fashion when the river looked so flat?

Smiling was beginning to make her lips ache. "You should have asked, Elayne. You always go and do things without asking, without thinking. It's time you realized if you fall into a hole running blindly, your old nurse isn't going to come pick you up and wash your face." By the last word, Elayne's eyes were as round as teacups, and her bared teeth looked ready to bite.

Birgitte put a hand on each of them, leaning close and beaming as though joy had her by the throat. "If you two don't stop this, I'm going to tip you both into the river to cool off. You are both acting like Shago barmaids with winteritch!"

Sweating faces frozen in amiability, the three women stalked in different directions, just as far apart as the ship would allow. Near sunset Nynaeve heard Ragan say that she and the others must really be relieved to be away from Samara, the way they were all but laughing on one another's shoulder, and the other men seemed to be thinking much the same, but the rest of the women aboard watched them with faces much too smooth. They knew trouble when they saw it.

Yet bit by bit, that trouble oozed away. Nynaeve was not exactly sure how. Perhaps the pleasant exteriors Elayne and Birgitte put on just seeped inside in spite of them. Perhaps the ridiculousness of it all, trying to keep a friendly smile on your face while putting a proper bite into your words, struck them more and more. Whatever did it, she could not complain at the outcome. Slowly, day by day, words and tones began to match faces, and now and then one of them even looked embarrassed, plainly remembering how she had been behaving. Neither spoke one word of apology, of course, which Nynaeve quite understood. Had she been as foolish and vicious as they, she certainly would not want to remind anyone.

The children played a part in restoring Elayne and Birgitte to equilibrium, too, though it actually started with Nynaeve looking after the men's wounds that first morning on the river. She brought out her scrip full of herbs, making poultices and ointments, bandaging cuts. Those gashes made her angry enough to Heal — sickness and injury always made her angry — and she did so, for some of the worst, though she had to be careful. Wounds vanishing would have set people talking, and the Light knew what Neres would do if he thought he had an Aes Sedai aboard; very likely sneak a man ashore in Amadicia by night and try to have them arrested. For that matter, the news might have sent some of the refugees over the side.

With Uno, for example, she rubbed a touch of stinging mardroot-oil liniment into his heavily bruised shoulder, dabbed a bit of healall ointment on the fresh slash down his face — no point wasting either — and wrapped his head in bandages until he could hardly move his jaw before Healing him. When he gasped and flailed, she said briskly, "Don't be such a baby. I wouldn't have thought a little pain would bother a big strong man. Now, you leave those alone; if you even touch them in the next three days, I'll dose you with something you won't soon forget."

He nodded slowly, staring at her so uncertainly that it was plain he did not know what she had done. If he realized when he finally took the bandages off, with luck no one else would remember exactly how bad the gash had been, and he should have sense enough to keep his mouth shut.

Once she began, it was only natural to go on to the rest of the passengers. Few of the refugees lacked bruises and scrapes, and some of the children were showing signs of fevers or worms. Those she could Heal without worry; children always made a fuss when they were dosed with anything that did not taste of honey. If they told their mothers it had felt odd, children always had fancies.

She had never really been comfortable around children. True, she wanted to have Lan's babies. Part of her did. Children could make a mess from nothing. They seemed to have the habit of doing the opposite of what you told them as soon as your back was turned, just to see how you would react. Yet she found herself smoothing back the dark hair of a boy no higher than her waist who stared up at her owlishly with bright blue eyes. They looked very like Lan's eyes.