The Dragon Reborn (The Wheel of Time #3)

The Dragon Reborn (The Wheel of Time #3)
Pedron Niall's aged
gaze
wandered about his private audience chamber, but dark eyes hazed with thought saw nothing. Tattered wall hangings, once battle banners of the enemies of his youth, faded into dark wood paneling laid over stone walls, thick even here in the heart of the Fortress of the Light. The single chair in the room — heavy, highbacked, and almost a throne — was as invisible to him as the few scattered tables that completed the furnishings. Even the whitecloaked man kneeling with barely restrained eagerness on the great sunburst set in the wide planks of the floor had vanished from Niall's mind for the moment, though few would have dismissed him so lightly.
Jaret Byar had been given time to wash before being brought to Niall, but both his helmet and his
breastplate
were dulled from travel and battered from use. Dark, deepset eyes shone with a feverish, urgent light in a face that seemed to have had every spare scrap of flesh boiled away. He wore no sword — none was allowed in Niall's presence — but he seemed poised on the edge of violence, like a hound awaiting the loosing of the leash.
Twin
fires
on long hearths at either end of the room held off the late winter cold. It was a plain, soldier's room, really, everything well made but nothing extravagant — except for the sunburst. Furnishings came to the audience chamber of the Lord Captain Commander of the Children of the Light with the man who rose to the office; the flaring sun of
coin gold
had been worn smooth by generations of petitioners, replaced and worn smooth again. Gold enough to buy any estate in Amadicia, and the patent of nobility to go with it. For ten years Niall had walked across that gold and never thought of it twice, any more than he thought of the sunburst embroidered across the chest of his white tunic. Gold held little interest for Pedron Niall.