Corman, one of the Aiel on the coping, looked up at him as he cut off singing. A white scar slanted across his nose. “You are nearly as good with knives as you are with dice, Matrim Cauthon. Shall we call it an end? The light is failing.”

“There’s plenty of light.” Mat squinted at the sky; pale shadows covered everything here in the valley of Rhuidean, but the sky was still light enough to see against, at least. “My grandmother could make the throw in this. I could make it blindfolded.”

Jenric, the other squatting Aiel, peered around the onlookers. “Are there women here?” Built like a bear, he considered himself a wit. “The only time a man talks like that is when there are women to impress.” The Maidens scattered through the crowd laughed as hard as anyone else, and maybe harder.

“You think I can’t?” Mat muttered, ripping off the dark scarf he wore around his neck to hide the scar where he had once been hung. “Just you shout ‘now’ when you throw it up, Corman.” Hastily he tied the scarf around his eyes and drew one of his knives from his sleeve. The loudest sound was the watchers breathing. Not drunk? I’m juicier than a fiddler’s whelp. And yet, he suddenly felt his luck, felt that surge the way he did when he knew which spots would show before the dice stopped tumbling. It seemed to clear his head a little. “Throw it,” he murmured calmly.

“Now,” Corman called, and Mat’s arm whipped back, then forward.

In the stillness, the thunk of steel stabbing wood was as loud as the clatter of the target on the pavement.

No one said a word as he pulled the scarf back down around his neck. A piece of a chair arm no bigger than his hand lay in the open space, his blade stuck firmly in the middle. Corman had tried to shave the odds, it appeared. Well, he had never specified the target. He suddenly realized he had not even made a wager.

Finally one of Kadere’s men half-shouted, “The Dark One’s own luck, that!”

“Luck is a horse to ride like any other,” Mat said to himself. No matter where it came from. Not that he knew where his luck came from; he only tried to ride it as best he could.

As quietly as he had spoken, Jenric frowned up at him. “What was that you said, Matrim Cauthon?”

Mat opened his mouth to repeat himself, then closed it again as the words came clear in his mind. Sene sovya caba’donde ain dovienya. The Old Tongue. “Nothing,” he muttered. “Just talking to myself.” The onlookers were beginning to drift away. “I guess the light really is fading too much to go on.”