No. No thinking of Tuon right now.

Anyway, he had received no reply from Elayne. He would need to be more firm. It was not just Aludra and her dragons now. The bloody gholam was in the city.

He stepped out onto a large, busy street, hands pushed into the pockets of his coat. In his haste, he had left his walking staff back in The Dead Man’s Breath. He grumbled to himself; he was supposed to be spending his days relaxing, his nights dicing in fine inns, and his mornings sleeping late while waiting for Verin’s thirty-day requirement to run out. Now this.

He had a score to settle with that gholam. The innocents it had slaughtered while lurking around Ebou Dar were bad enough, and Mat had not forgotten Nalesean and the five Redarms who had been murdered either. Bloody ashes, it had had enough to answer for already. Then it had taken Tylin.

Mat removed a hand from his pocket, feeling at the foxhead medallion, resting—as always—against his chest. He was tired of running from that monster. A plan started to form in his mind, accompanied by the rattling of dice. He tried to banish the image of the Queen lying in bonds Mat himself had tied, her head ripped free. There would have been so much blood. The gholam lived on fresh blood.

Mat shivered, shoving his hand back into his pocket as he approached the city gate. Despite the darkness, he could pick out signs of the battle that had been fought here. An arrowhead embedded into the doorway of a building to his left, a dark patch on the wall of a guard house, staining the wood beneath the window. A man had died there, perhaps while firing a crossbow out, and had slumped down over the window’s ledge, bleeding his lifeblood down the wood.

That siege was over now, and a new Queen—the right Queen—held the throne. For once, there had been a battle and he had missed it. Remembering that lightened his mood somewhat. An entire war had been fought over the Lion Throne, and not one arrow, blade or spear had entered the conflict seeking Matrim Cauthon’s heart.

He turned right, along the inside of the city wall. There were a lot of inns here. There were always inns near city gates. Not the nicest ones, but almost always the most profitable ones.

Light spilled from doorways and windows, painting the road golden in patches. Dark forms crowded the alleyways except where the inns had hired men to keep the poor away. Caemlyn was strained. The flood of refugees, the recent fighting, the…other matters. Stories abounded of the dead walking, of food spoiling, of whitewashed walls suddenly going grimy.

The inn where Thom had chosen to perform was a steep-roofed, brick-fronted structure with a sign that showed two apples, one eaten down to the core. That made it stark white, the other was stark red—colors of the Andoran flag. The Two Apples was one of the nicer establishments in the area.