Mat shook his head. “Might break our bargain.”

“Will they keep it?” Thom asked.

“Not if they can wiggle out of it,” Mat said, then winced again. Light, but his head hurt! Well, he could not sit around and cry like he had lost his favorite foal. “Let’s go.”

They made their way out of the grand hall. Noal carried a torch, though he had reluctantly left his staff behind, favoring his shortsword.

There were no openings in the hallway this time, and Mat heard Noal muttering at that. It felt right. He had demanded a straight pathway back. The Eelfinn were liars and cheats, but they seemed to be liars and cheats like the Aes Sedai. Mat had made his demands carefully this time, rather than spouting out whatever occurred to him.

The hallway went on for a long while. Noal was growing more and more nervous; Mat kept on forward, footsteps in time with his throbbing skull. How would missing an eye change how he fought? He would have to be more careful of that left side. And he would have trouble judging distance now. In fact, he had that trouble now—walls and floor were disturbingly hard to judge.

Thom clutched Moiraine close to his chest, like a miser holding his gold. What was she to him, anyway? Mat had assumed that Thom was along for the same reason that Mat was—because it felt as if it needed to be done. That tenderness in Thom’s face was not what Mat had expected to see.

The hallway ended abruptly in a five-sided arch. The room beyond appeared to be the one with the melted slag on the floor. No signs of the fight before were visible, no blood on the floor.

Mat took a deep breath and led the way through. He tensed as he saw Eelfinn here, crouching or standing in the shadows, hissing and growling. They did not move, did not strike, though some yipped quietly. Shadows made them seem even more like foxes. If Mat looked right at one, he could almost mistake them for ordinary men and women, but the way they moved in darkness, sometimes on all fours…No man walked like that, with the anxious tension of a chained predator. Like an angry hound, separated from you by a fence and fiercely eager to get to your throat.

But they held to their bargain. None attacked, and Mat began to feel right good about himself once they reached the other side of the room. He had beaten them. Last time, they had gotten the better end, but that was only because they had fought like cowards, punching a man who did not know the fight had started.

This time he had been ready. He had shown them that Matrim Cauthon was no fool.

They entered a corridor with the faintly glowing white steam at the top. The floor was of those black, interlocking triangles, curved on the sides like scales. Mat began to breathe easier as they entered one of the rooms with the twisting steam rising from the corners, though his eye socket still hurt like the nethers of a freshly gelded stallion.