The apprentices barely straightened enough to follow him, gazing round-eyed at Rand even more than at the Aiel as they vanished down the ladder. Cail was a year older than he, Jol two. Both had been born in bigger towns than he had imagined before leaving the Two Rivers, had visited Cairhien and seen the king and the Amyrlin Seat, if at a distance, while he was still tending sheep. Very likely, they still knew more of the world than he in some ways. Shaking his head, he bent to the new looking glass.

Cairhien leaped into view. The forests, never particularly thick to one used to Two Rivers’ woods, stopped completely well short of the city, of course. High gray, square-towered walls in a perfect square against the river mocked the hills’ flowing curves. Within, more towers rose in a precise pattern, marking the points of a grid, some twenty times as high as the walls or more, yet all surrounded by scaffolding. The legendary topless towers were still being rebuilt after their burning in the Aiel War.

When last he had seen the city, another city had surrounded it from riverbank to riverbank—Foregate, a rabbit warren as raucous as Cairhien was solemn, all in wood. Now only a wide stretch of ash and charred timbers bordered the walls. How that fire had been kept from spreading into Cairhien itself, he could not understand.

Banners decked every tower in the city, too distant to make out clearly, but scouts had described them to him. Half bore the Crescents of Tear; the other half, perhaps not surprisingly, duplicated the Dragon banner he had left flying over the Stone of Tear. Not one bore the Rising Sun of Cairhien.

Moving the looking glass only a little swept the city from his sight. On the far side of the river still stood the blackened stone shells of the granaries. Some of the Cairhienin Rand had talked to claimed the torching of the granaries had led to riots and then King Galldrian’s death, and thus to the civil war. Others said Galldrian’s assassination had caused the riots and the burning. Rand doubted that he would ever know which was the truth, or whether either was.

A number of burned-out hulks dotted both banks of the wide river, but none lay close to the city. Aiel had an uneasiness—fear might be too strong a word—about bodies of water they could not step across or wade, but Couladin had managed to put barriers of floating logs across the Alguenya both above and below Cairhien, along with enough men to see they were not cut. Fire-arrows had done the rest. Nothing except rats and birds could get into or out of Cairhien without Couladin’s leave.