Jangai Pass

Under the looming Spine of the World, Rand guided Jeade’en up the stony slope from the foothills that began the foot of Jangai Pass. The Dragonwall pierced the sky, dwarfing all other mountains, its snowcapped peaks defying the baking afternoon sun. The tallest thrust well above clouds that mocked the Waste with promises of rain that had never come. Rand could not imagine why a man would want to climb a mountain, but it was said that men who had tried to scale these heights turned back, overcome with fear and unable to breathe. He could well believe that a man might grow too afraid to breathe, attempting to climb so high.

“. . . yet though the Cairhienin are consumed with the Game of Houses,” Moiraine was saying at his shoulder, “they will follow you so long as they know that you are strong. Be firm with them, but I would ask you to be fair also. A ruler who gives true justice . . .”

He tried to ignore her, as he did the other riders, and the creak and rumble of Kadere’s wagons, making heavy going further back. The broken gorges and gullies of the Waste were behind them, but these rugged rising hills, nearly as barren, were little better for wagons. No one had traveled this path in over twenty years.

Moiraine talked at him that way from daybreak to sunset whenever he let her. Her lectures could be on small things—details of court behavior, say, in Cairhien or Saldaea or somewhere else—or on large: the political influence of the Whitecloaks, or perhaps the effects of trade on rulers’ decisions to go to war. It was as if she meant to see him educated, as a noble would be, or should be, before he reached the other side of the mountains. It was surprising how often what she said reflected what anyone back in Emond’s Field would have called simple common sense. And also how often it did not.

Occasionally she came out with something startling; for instance, that he should trust no woman of the Tower except herself, Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve, or the news that Elaida was now the Amyrlin Seat. Oath to obey or no, she would not tell him how she knew that. She said it was someone else’s place to tell if she chose, someone else’s secret, and she could not usurp it. He suspected the Wise One dreamwalkers, though they had stared him right in the eye and refused to say aye or nay. He wished he could make them swear Moiraine’s oath; they interfered between him and the chiefs continually, as if they wanted him to go through them to reach the chiefs.