“Do what? If you listen to what she says—”
Rand gave him no chance to say they would sit there forever. “Moiraine says! Moiraine says!” Rand jerked erect, squeezing his head between his hands. “Moiraine has something to say about everything! Moiraine says I mustn’t go to the men who are dying in my name. Moiraine says I’ll know what to do next because the Pattern will force me to it. Moiraine says! But she never says how I’ll know. Oh, no! She doesn’t know that.” His hands fell to his sides, and he turned toward Perrin, head tilted and eyes narrowed. “Sometimes I feel as if Moiraine is putting me through my paces like a fancy Tairen stallion doing his steps. Do you ever feel that?”
Perrin scrubbed a hand through his shaggy hair. “I. . . . Whatever is pushing us, or pulling us, I know who the enemy is, Rand.”
“Ba’alzamon,” Rand said softly. An ancient name for the Dark One. In the Trolloc tongue, it meant Heart of the Dark. “And I must face him, Perrin.” His eyes closed in a grimace, half smile, half pain. “Light help me, half the time I want it to happen now, to be over and done with, and the other half. . . . How many times can I manage to. . . . Light, it pulls at me so. What if I can’t. . . . What if I. . . .” The ground trembled.
“Rand?” Perrin said worriedly.
Rand shivered; despite the chill, there was sweat on his face. His eyes were still shut tight. “Oh, Light,” he groaned, “it pulls so.”
Suddenly the ground heaved beneath Perrin, and the valley echoed with a vast rumble. It seemed as if the ground was jerked out from under his feet. He fell—or the earth leaped up to meet him. The valley shook as though a vast hand had reached down from the sky to wrench it out of the land. He clung to the ground while it tried to bounce him like a ball. Pebbles in front of his eyes leaped and tumbled, and dust rose in waves.
“Rand!” His bellow was lost in the grumbling roar.
Rand stood with his head thrown back, his eyes still shut tight. He did not seem to feel the thrashing of the ground that had him now at one angle, now at another. His balance never shifted, no matter how he was tossed. Perrin could not be certain, being shaken as he was, but he thought Rand wore a sad smile. The trees flailed about, and the leatherleaf suddenly cracked in two, the greater part of its trunk crashing down not three paces from Rand. He noticed it no more than he noticed any of the rest.
Perrin struggled to fill his lungs. “Rand! For the love of the Light, Rand! Stop it!”
As abruptly as it had begun, it was done. A weakened branch cracked off of a stunted oak with a loud snap. Perrin got to his feet slowly, coughing. Dust hung in the air, sparkling motes in the rays of the setting sun.
Rand was staring at nothing, now, chest heaving as if he had run ten miles. This had never happened before, nor anything remotely like it.
“Rand,” Perrin said carefully, “what—?”
Rand still seemed to be looking into a far distance. “It is always there. Calling to me. Pulling at me. Saidin. The male half of the True Source. Sometimes I can’t stop myself from reaching out for it.” He made a motion of plucking something out of the air, and transferred his stare to his closed fist. “I can feel the taint even before I touch it. The Dark One’s taint, like a thin coat of vileness trying to hide the Light. It turns my stomach, but I cannot help myself. I cannot! Only sometimes, I reach out, and it’s like trying to catch air.” His empty hand sprang open, and he gave a bitter laugh. “What if that happens when the Last Battle comes? What if I reach out and catch nothing?”
“Well, you caught something that time,” Perrin said hoarsely. “What were you doing?”
Rand looked around as if seeing things for the first time. The fallen leatherleaf, and the broken branches. There was, Perrin realized, surprisingly little damage. He had expected gaping rents in the earth. The wall of trees looked almost whole.
“I did not mean to do this. It was as if I tried to open a tap, and instead pulled the whole tap out of the barrel. It . . . filled me. I had to send it somewhere before it burned me up, but I . . . I did not mean this.”
Perrin shook his head. What use to tell him to try not to do it again? He barely knows more about what he’s doing than I do. He contented himself with, “There are enough who want you dead—and the rest of us—without you doing the job for them.” Rand did not seem to be listening. “We had best get on back to the camp. It will be dark soon, and I don’t know about you, but I am hungry.”
“What? Oh. You go on, Perrin. I will be along. I want to be alone again a while.”
Perrin hesitated, then turned reluctantly toward the crack in the valley wall. He stopped when Rand spoke again.
“Do you have dreams when you sleep? Good dreams?”
“Sometimes,” Perrin said warily. “I don’t remember much of what I dream.” He had learned to set guards on his dreaming.
“They’re always there, dreams,” Rand said, so softly Perrin barely heard. “Maybe they tell us things. True things.” He fell silent, brooding.
“Supper’s waiting,” Perrin said, but Rand was deep in his own thoughts. Finally Perrin turned and left him standing there.
CHAPTER
3
News from the Plain
Darkness shrouded part of the crack, for in one place the tremors had collapsed a part of the wall against the other side, high up. He stared up at the blackness warily before hurrying underneath, but the slab of stone seemed to be solidly wedged in place. The itch had returned to the back of his head, stronger than before. No, burn me! No! It went away.
When he came out above the camp, the bowl was filled with odd shadows from the sinking sun. Moiraine was standing outside her hut, peering up at the crack. He stopped short. She was a slender, dark-haired woman no taller than his shoulder, and pretty, with the ageless quality of all Aes Sedai who had worked with the One Power for a time. He could not put any age at all to her, with her face too smooth for many years and her dark eyes too wise for youth. Her dress of deep blue silk was disarrayed and dusty, and wisps stuck out in her usually well-ordered hair. A smudge of dust lay across her face.
He dropped his eyes. She knew about him—she and Lan alone, of those in the camp—and he did not like the knowing in her face when she looked into his eyes. Yellow eyes. Someday, perhaps, he could bring himself to ask her what she knew. An Aes Sedai must know more of it than he did. But this was not the time. There never seemed to be a time. “He. . . . He didn’t mean. . . . It was an accident.”
“An accident,” she said in a flat voice, then shook her head and vanished back inside the hut. The door banged shut a little loudly.
Perrin drew a deep breath and continued on down toward the cook fires. There would be another argument between Rand and the Aes Sedai, in the morning if not tonight.
Half a dozen trees lay toppled on the slopes of the bowl, roots ripped out of the earth in arcs of soil. A trail of scrapes and churned ground led down to the streamside and a boulder that had not been there before. One of the huts up the opposite slope had collapsed in the tremors, and most of the Shienarans were gathered around it, rebuilding it. Loial was with them. The Ogier could pick up a log it would take four men to lift. Uno’s curses occasionally drifted down.
Min stood by the fires, stirring a kettle with a disgruntled expression. There was a small bruise on her cheek, and a faint smell of burned stew hung in the air. “I hate cooking,” she announced, and peered doubtfully into the kettle. “If something goes wrong with it, it isn’t my fault. Rand spilled half of it on the fire with his. . . . What right does he have to bounce us around like sacks of grain?” She rubbed the seat of her breeches and winced. “When I get my hands on him, I’ll thump him so he never forgets.” She waved the wooden spoon at Perrin as if she intended to start the thumping with him.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Only if you count bruises,” Min said grimly. “They were upset, all right, at first. Then they saw Moiraine staring off toward Rand’s hidey-hole, and decided it was his work.
If the Dragon wants to shake the mountain down on our heads, then the Dragon must have a good reason for it. If he decided to make them take off their skins and dance in their bones, they would think it all right.” She snorted and rapped the spoon on the edge of the kettle.
He looked back toward Moiraine’s hut. If Leya had been hurt—if she were dead—the Aes Sedai would not simply have gone back inside. The sense of waiting was still there. Whatever it is, it hasn’t happened yet. “Min, maybe you had better go. First thing in the morning. I have some silver I can let you have, and I’m sure Moiraine would give you enough to take passage with a merchant’s train out of Ghealdan. You could be back in Baerlon before you know it.”
She looked at him until he began to wonder if he had said something wrong. Finally, she said, “That is very sweet of you, Perrin. But, no.”
“I thought you wanted to go. You’re always carrying on about having to stay here.”
“I knew an old Illianer woman; once,” she said slowly. “When she was young, her mother arranged a marriage for her with a man she had never even met. They do that down in Illian, sometimes. She said she spent the first five years raging against him, and the next five scheming to make his life miserable without his knowing who was to blame. It was only years later, she said, when he died, that she realized he really had been the love of her life.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with this.”
Her look said he obviously was not trying to understand, and her voice became overly patient. “Just because fate has chosen something for you instead of you choosing it for yourself doesn’t mean it has to be bad. Even if it’s something you are sure you would never have chosen in a hundred years. ‘Better ten days of love than years of regretting,’ ” she quoted.
“I understand that even less,” he told her. “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”
She hung the spoon on a tall forked stick stuck in the ground, then surprised him by rising on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “You are a very nice man, Perrin Aybara. Even if you don’t understand anything.”
Perrin blinked at her uncertainly. He wished that he could be certain Rand was in his right mind, or that Mat were there. He was never sure of his ground with girls, but Rand always seemed to know his way. So did Mat; most of the girls back home in Emond’s Field had sniffed that Mat would never grow up, but he had seemed to have a way with them.
“What about you, Perrin? Don’t you ever want to go home?”
“All the time,” he said fervently. “But I . . . I do not think I can. Not yet.” He looked off toward Rand’s vale. We are tied together, it seems, aren’t we, Rand? “Maybe not ever.” He thought he had said that too softly for her to hear, but the look she gave him was full of sympathy. And agreement.
His ears caught faint footsteps behind him, and he looked back up toward Moiraine’s hut. Two shapes were making their way down through the deepening twilight, one a woman, slender and graceful even on the rough, slanting ground. The man, head and shoulders taller than his companion, turned off toward where the Shienarans were working. Even to Perrin’s eyes he was indistinct, sometimes seeming to vanish altogether, then reappear in midstride, parts of him fading into the night and fading back as the wind gusted. Only a Warder’s shifting cloak could do that, which made the larger figure Lan, just as the smaller was certainly Moiraine.
Well behind them, another shape, even dimmer, slipped between the trees. Rand, Perrin thought, going back to his hut. Another night when he won’t eat because he can’t stand the way everybody looks at him.
“You must have eyes in the back of your head,” Min said, frowning toward the approaching woman. “Or else the sharpest ears I have ever heard of. Is that Moiraine?”
Careless. He had grown so used to the Shienarans knowing how well he could see—in daylight at least; they did not know about the night—that he was beginning to slip about other things. Carelessness might kill me yet.
“Is the Tuatha’an woman all right?” Min asked as Moiraine came to the fire.
“She is resting.” The Aes Sedai’s low voice had its usual musical quality, as if speaking were halfway to singing, and her hair and clothes were back in perfect order again. She rubbed her hands over the fire. There was a golden ring on her left hand, a serpent biting its own tail. The Great Serpent, an even older symbol for eternity than the Wheel of Time. Every woman trained in Tar Valon wore such a ring.
For a moment Moiraine’s gaze rested on Perrin, and seemed to penetrate too deeply. “She fell and split her scalp when Rand. . . .” Her mouth tightened, but in the next instant her face was utter calm again. “I Healed her, and she is sleeping. There is always a good deal of blood with even a minor scalp wound, but it was not serious. Did you see anything about her, Min?”
Min looked uncertain. “I saw. . . . I thought I saw her death. Her own face, all over blood. I was sure I knew what it meant, but if she split her scalp. . . . Are you sure she is all right?” It was a measure of her discomfort that she asked. An Aes Sedai did not Heal and leave anything wrong that could be Healed. And Moiraine’s Talents were particularly strong in that area.
Min sounded so troubled that Perrin was surprised for a moment. Then he nodded to himself. She did not really like doing what she did, but it was a part of her; she thought she knew how it worked, or some of it, at least. If she was wrong, it would almost be like finding out she did not know how to use her own hands.
Moiraine considered her for a moment, serene and dispassionate. “You have never been wrong in any reading for me, not one about which I had any way of knowing. Perhaps this is the first time.”
“When I know, I know,” Min whispered obstinately. “Light help me, I do.”
“Or perhaps it is yet to come. She has a long way yet to travel, to return to her wagons, and she must ride through unsettled lands.”
The Aes Sedai’s voice was a cool song, uncaring. Perrin made an involuntary sound in his throat. Light, did I sound like that? I won’t let a death matter that little to me.
As if he had spoken aloud, Moiraine looked at him. “The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, Perrin. I told you long ago that we were in a war. We cannot stop just because some of us may die. Any of us may die before it is done. Leya’s weapons may not be the same as yours, but she knew that when she became part of it.”
Perrin dropped his eyes. That’s as may be, Aes Sedai, but I will never accept it the way you do.
Lan joined them across the fire, with Uno and Loial. The flames cast flickering shadows across the Warder’s face, making it seem more carved from stone even than it normally did, all hard planes and angles. His cloak was not much easier to look at in the firelight. Sometimes it seemed only a dark gray cloak, or black, but the gray and black appeared to crawl and change if you looked too closely, shades and shadows sliding across it, soaking into it. Other times, it looked as if Lan had somehow made a hole in the night and pulled darkness ’round his shoulders. Not at all an easy thing to watch, and not made any easier by the man who wore it.
Lan was tall and hard, broad-shouldered, with blue eyes like frozen mountain lakes, and he moved with a deadly grace that made the sword on his hip seem a part of him. It was not that he seemed merely capable of violence and death; this man had tamed violence and death and kept them in his pocket, ready to be loosed in a heartbeat, or embraced, should Moiraine give the word. Beside Lan, even Uno appeared less dangerous. There was a touch of gray in the Warder’s long hair, held back by a woven leather cord around his forehead, but younger men stepped back from confronting Lan—if they were wise.
“Mistress Leya has the usual news from Almoth Plain,” Moiraine said. “Everyone fighting everyone else. Villages burned. People fleeing in every direction. And Hunters have appeared on the plain, searching for the Horn of Valere.” Perrin shifted—the Horn was where no Hunter on Almoth Plain would find it; where he hoped no Hunter ever would find it—and she gave him a cool look before continuing. She did not like any of
them to speak of the Horn. Except when she chose to, of course.
“She brought different news, as well. The Whitecloaks have perhaps five thousand men on Almoth Plain.”
Uno grunted. “That’s flamin’—uh, pardon, Aes Sedai. That must be half their strength. They’ve never committed so much to one place before.”
“Then I suppose all those who declared for Rand are dead or scattered,” Perrin muttered. “Or they soon will be. You were right, Moiraine.” He did not like the thought of Whitecloaks. He did not like the Children of the Light at all.
“That is what is odd,” Moiraine said. “Or the first part of it. The Children have announced that their purpose is to bring peace, which is not unusual for them. What is unusual is that while they are trying to force the Taraboners and the Domani back across their respective borders, they have not moved in any force against those who have declared for the Dragon.”
Min gave an exclamation of surprise. “Is she certain? That does not sound like any Whitecloaks I ever heard of.”
“There can’t be many blood—uh—many Tinkers left on the plain,” Uno said. His voice creaked from the strain of watching his language in front of an Aes Sedai. His real eye matched the frown of the painted one. “They don’t like to stay where there’s any kind of trouble, especially fighting. There can’t be enough of them to see everywhere.”
“There are enough for my purposes,” Moiraine said firmly. “Most have gone, but some few remained because I asked them to. And Leya is quite certain. Oh, the Children have snapped up some of the Dragonsworn, where there were only a handful gathered. But though they proclaim they will bring down this false Dragon, though they have a thousand men supposedly doing nothing but hunting him, they avoid contact with any party of as many as fifty Dragonsworn. Not openly, you understand, but there is always some delay, something that allows those they chase to slip away.”
“Then Rand can go down to them as he wants.” Loial blinked uncertainly at the Aes Sedai. The whole camp knew of her arguments with Rand. “The Wheel weaves a way for him.”
The Wheel of Time Page 211
