“We brought you some soup,” Somara said, nodding her flaxen head toward a silver tray covered with a striped cloth, sitting on the dais that held the Lion Throne. Carved and gilded, with huge lion’s paws at the ends of its legs, the throne was a massive chair at the top of four white marble stairs, with a strip of red carpet leading up to it. The Lion of Andor, picked out in moonstones on a field of rubies, would have stood above Morgase’s head whenever she occupied that seat. “Aviendha says you have not eaten yet today. It is the soup Lamelle used to make for you.”

“I suppose none of the servants have come back,” Rand sighed. “One of the cooks, maybe? A helper?” Enaila shook her head scornfully. She would serve her time as gai’shain with a good grace, if it ever came to that, but the idea of anyone spending their entire life serving someone else disgusted her.

Climbing the stairs, he squatted to twitch the cloth aside. His nose twitched, too. By the smell, whichever of them had made it was no better a cook than Lamelle had been. The sound of a man’s boots coming up the hall gave him an excuse to turn his back on the tray. With any luck, he would not have to eat it.

The man approaching up the long, red-and-white-tiled floor was certainly no Andorman, in his short gray coat and those baggy trousers stuffed into boots turned down at the knee. Slender and only a hand taller than Enaila, he had a hooked beak of a nose and dark tilted eyes. Gray streaked his black hair and a thick mustache like down-curved horns around his wide mouth. He paused to make a leg and bow slightly, handling the curved sword at his hip gracefully despite the fact that incongruously he carried two silver goblets in one hand and a sealed pottery jar in the other.

“Forgive my intrusion,” he said, “but there was no one to announce me.” His clothes might be plain and even travel-worn, but he had what appeared to be an ivory rod capped with a golden wolf’s head thrust behind his sword belt. “I am Davram Bashere, Marshal-General of Saldaea. I am here to speak with the Lord Dragon, who rumors in the city say is here in the Royal Palace. I assume that I address him?” For an instant his eyes went to the glittering Dragons twining red-and-gold around Rand’s arms.

“I am Rand al’Thor, Lord Bashere. The Dragon Reborn.” Enaila and Somara had moved between Rand and the man, each with a hand on the hilt of her long-bladed knife, poised to veil. “I am surprised to find a Saldaean lord in Caemlyn, much less wanting to speak to me.”