The Gathering Storm

Rand frowned. What was the madman babbling about? He glanced around. The wide hallway’s floor was tiled in red and black patterns. A few tapestries fluttered on the walls. With shock, Rand realized that several of them depicted him, taking the Stone, holding Callandor, killing Trollocs.

Fighting the Seanchan wasn’t our first failure, Lews Therin whispered. No, our first failure happened here. In this hallway.

Exhausted, following the battle with the Trollocs and Myrddraal. His side throbbing. The Stone still ringing with the cries of the wounded. Feeling he could do anything. Anything.

Standing above the corpse of a young girl. Just a child. Callandor glowing in his fingers. The body suddenly jerked.

Moiraine had stopped him. Bringing life to the dead was beyond him, she’d said.

How I wish she was still here, Rand thought. He had often been frustrated with her, but she—more than anyone else—had seemed to grasp just what it was he was expected to do. She’d made him more willing to do it, even when he’d been angry with her.

He turned away. Moiraine had been right. He could not bring life to those who were dead. But he was very good at bringing death to those who lived. “Gather your spear-sisters,” Rand called over his shoulder to his Aiel guards. “We are going to battle.”

“Now?” one of them asked. “It is nightfall!”

Rave I been walking that long?

Rand thought with surprise. “Yes,” he said. “The darkness won’t matter; I shall create light enough.” He fingered the access key, feeling a thrill and a horror at the same time. He had driven the Seanchan back into the ocean once. He would do so again. Alone.

Yes, he would drive them back—at least, the ones he left alive.

“Go!” he shouted at the Maidens. They left him, loping down the hallway. What had happened to his control? The ice had grown thin lately.

He walked back to the stairway and climbed a few flights up toward his rooms. The Seanchan would know his fury. They dared to provoke the Dragon Reborn? He offered them peace, and they laughed at him?

He threw open the door to his rooms, silencing the eager Defenders on guard outside with a sharply upraised hand. He was not in the mood for their prattle.

He stormed inside, and was annoyed to find that the guards had allowed someone inside. An unfamiliar figure stood with his back to Rand, looking out the open balcony doors. “What—” Rand began.

The man turned. It was not a stranger. Not a stranger at all.

It was Tam. His father.

Rand stumbled back. Was this an apparition? Some twisted trick of the Dark One? But no, it was Tam. There was no mistaking the man’s kindly eyes. Though he was a head shorter than Rand, Tam had always seemed more solid than the world around him. His broad chest and steady legs could not be moved, not because he was strong—Rand had met many men of greater strength during his travels. Strength was fleeting. Tam was real. Certain and stable. Just looking at him brought comfort.

But comfort clashed with who Rand had become. His worlds met—the person he had been, the person he had become—like a jet of water on a white-hot stone. One shattering, the other turning to steam.

Tam stood, hesitant, in the balcony doorway, lit by two flickering lamps on stands in the room. Rand understood Tarn’s hesitation. They were not blood father and son. Rand’s blood father had been Janduin, clan chief of the Taardad Aiel. Tam was just the man who had found Rand on the slopes of Dragonmount.

Just the man who had raised him. Just the man who had taught him everything he knew. Just the man Rand loved and revered, and always would, no matter what their blood connection.

“Rand.” Tarn’s voice was awkward.

“Please,” Rand said through his shock. “Please sit.”

Tam nodded. He closed the balcony doors, then walked forward and took one of the chairs. Rand sat, too. They stared across the room at one another. The stone walls were bare; Rand preferred them unornamented with tapestries or paintings. The rug was yellow and red, and so large it reached to all four walls.

The room felt too perfect. A vase of freshly cut dara lilies and calima blossoms sat there, right where it should. Chairs in the center, arranged too correctly. The room didn’t look lived m. Like so many places he stayed, it wasn’t home. He hadn’t truly had a home since he’d left the Two Rivers.

Tam sat in one chair, Rand in another. Rand realized he still had the access key in his hand, so he set it on the sun-patterned rug before him. Tam glanced at Rand’s stump, but said nothing. He clenched his hands together, probably wishing he had something to work on. Tam was always more comfortable talking about uncomfortable things when he had something to do with his hands, whether it be checking the straps on a harness or shearing a sheep.