If I could find a way to escape my destiny, do I deserve to? That was his own thought, not Lews Therin’s.

Shifting shoulders that suddenly seemed to ache dully, he kept his voice light. “Forgive me, Bashere. Something odd just occurred to me, but I have been listening. You were saying Caemlyn is filling up. For every man who ran away because he was afraid of the false Dragon, two have come because I’m not, and he isn’t. You see?”

Bashere grunted, which might have meant anything.

“How many have come for other reasons, Rand al’Thor?” Bael was the tallest man Rand had ever seen, a good hand taller than Rand himself. He made an odd contrast with Bashere, who stood shorter than any of the Maidens except Enaila. Gray streaked thickly through Bael’s dark reddish hair, but his face was lean and hard, his blue eyes sharp. “You have enemies enough for a hundred men. Mark me, they will try to strike at you again. There could even be Shadowrunners among them.”

“Even if there are no Darkfriends,” Bashere put in, “trouble brews in the city like tea left on the boil. A number of people have been severely beaten, evidently for doubting you’re the Dragon Reborn, and one poor fellow was hauled from a tavern into a barn and hanged from the rafters for laughing at your miracles.”

“My miracles?” Rand said incredulously.

A wrinkled, white-haired serving man in a too-large coat of livery, with a large vase in his hands, trying to bow and step out of the way at the same time, tripped on his heel and fell backward. The pale green vase, paper-thin Sea Folk porcelain, flew over his head and went tumbling end-over-end across the dark red floor tiles, spinning and bouncing until it came to rest, upright, thirty or so paces down the hall. The old man scrambled to his feet with surprising spryness and ran to snatch up the vase, running his hands over it and exclaiming in disbelief as much as relief when he found not a chip or a crack. Other servants stared with just as much incredulity, before abruptly coming to themselves and hurrying on about their tasks. They avoided looking at Rand so hard that several forgot to bow or curtsy.

Bashere and Bael exchanged looks, and Bashere blew out his thick mustaches.

“Strange occurrences, then,” he said. “Every day there’s another story about a child falling headfirst onto paving stones from a window forty feet up, without so much as a single bruise. Or a grandmother getting in the way of two dozen runaway horses, only somehow they don’t even buffet her, much less knock her down and trample her. Some fellow threw five crowns twenty-two times straight at dice the other day, and they lay that at your feet, too. Luckily for him.”