Nearby, Laras— the stout mistress of the kitchens at Tar Valon—came out of the warehouse, wagging a finger at several of the serving girls. The woman walked to Faile, trailed by a lanky youth with a limp who was carrying a beat-up chest.
“Something for you, my Lady.” Laras gestured to the trunk. “The Amyrlin herself added it to your shipment as an afterthought. Something about a friend of hers, from back home?”
“It’s Matrim Cauthon’s tabac,” Faile said with a grimace. “When he found that the Amyrlin had a store of Two Rivers leaf left, he insisted upon purchasing it.”
“Tabac, at a time like this.” Laras shook her head, wiping her fingers on her apron. “I remember that boy. I’ve known a youth or two in my day like him, always skulking around the kitchens like a stray wanting scraps. Someone ought to find something useful for him to do.”
“We’re working on it,” Faile said as Laras’ servant placed the trunk in Faile’s own wagon. She winced as he let it thump down, then dusted off his hands.
Laras nodded, walking back into her warehouse. Faile rested her fingers on the chest. Philosophers claimed the Pattern did not have a sense of humor. The Pattern, and the Wheel, simply were; they did not care, they did not take sides. However, Faile could not help thinking that somewhere, the Creator was grinning at her. She had left home with her head full of arrogant dreams, a child thinking herself on a grand quest to find the Horn.
Life had knocked those out from under her, leaving her to haul herself back up. She had grown up, had started paying mind to what was really important. And now… now the Pattern, with almost casual indifference, dropped the Horn of Valere into her lap.
She removed her hand and pointedly refusing to open the chest. She had the key, delivered to her separately, and she would check to see that the Horn was really in the chest. Not now. Not until she was alone and reasonably certain she was safe.
She climbed into the wagon and rested her feet on the chest.
“I still don’t like it,” Mandevwin was saying beside the warehouse.
“You don’t like anything,” Vanin said. “Look, the work we’re doing is important. Soldiers have to eat.”
“I suppose that is true,” Mandevwin said.
“It is!” a new voice added. Harnan, another Redarm, joined them. Not one of the three, Faile noticed, jumped to help the servants load the caravan. “Eating is wonderful,” Harnan said. “And if there is an expert on the subject, Vanin, it is certainly you.”
Harnan was a sturdily built man with a wide face and a hawk tattooed on his cheek. Talmanes swore by the man, calling him a veteran survivor of both “the Six-Story Slaughter” and Hinderstap, whatever those were.
“Now, that wounds me, Harnan,” Vanin said from behind. “That wounds me badly.”
“I doubt it,” Harnan said with a laugh. “To wound you badly, an attack would first have to penetrate through fat to reach the muscle. I’m not sure Trolloc swords are long enough for that!”
Mandevwin laughed, and the three of them moved off. Faile went over the last few pages of the ledger, then began to climb down, to call for Setalle Anan. The woman had been acting as her assistant for these caravan runs. As she was climbing down, however, Faile noticed that not all three members of the Band had moved off. Only two of them had. Portly Vanin still stood back there. She saw him, and paused.
Vanin immediately lumbered off toward some of the other soldiers. Had he been watching her?
“Faile! Faile! Aravine says she has finished checking over the manifests for you. We can go, Faile.”
Olver scrambled eagerly into the wagon seat. He had insisted on joining the caravan, and the members of the Band had persuaded her to allow it. Even Setalle had suggested it would be wise to bring him. Apparently, they worried that Olver would find his way to the fighting somehow if he wasn’t constantly under their watch. Faile had reluctantly set him to running errands.
“All right, then,” Faile said, climbing back into the wagon. “I suppose we can be off.”
The wagons lumbered into motion. She spent the entire trip out of the city trying not to look at the chest.
She tried to distract herself from thinking about it, but that only brought her mind to another pressing concern. Perrin. She had seen him only briefly during a supply run to Andor. He’d warned her he might have another duty, but had been reluctant to tell her about it.
Now he’d vanished. He’d made Tam steward in his place, had taken a gateway to Shayol Ghul and had vanished. She’d asked those who’d been there, but nobody had seen him since his conversation with Rand.
All would be well with him, wouldn’t it? She was a soldier’s daughter and a soldier’s wife; she knew not to worry overly much. But a person could not help but worry a little. Perrin had been the one to suggest her as the keeper of the Horn.
She wondered, idly, if he had done it to keep her off the battlefield. She wouldn’t mind terribly if he’d done so, though she would never tell him that. In fact, once this was all said and done, she would insinuate that she was offended and see how he reacted. He needed to know that she would not sit back and be coddled, even if her true name implied otherwise.
Faile pulled her wagon, which was first in the caravan, onto the Jualdhe Bridge out of Tar Valon. About halfway across, the bridge trembled. The horses stomped and tossed their heads as Faile slowed them and glanced over her shoulder. The sight of swaying buildings in Tar Valon proved to her that the trembling wasn’t just the bridge, but an earthquake.
The other horses danced and whinnied, and the shaking rattled carts.
“We need to move off the bridge, Lady Faile!” Olver cried.
“The bridge is much too long for us to get to the other side before this ends,” Faile said calmly. She had suffered earthquakes in Saldaea before. “We’d be more in danger of hurting ourselves in the scramble than we will be here. This bridge is Ogier work. We’re probably safer here than we’d be on solid ground.”
Indeed, the earthquake passed without so much as a stone being loosed from the bridge. Faile brought her horses under control and started ahead again. The Light willing, the damage to the city wasn’t too bad. She didn’t know if earthquakes were common here. With Dragonmount nearby, there would at least be occasional rumblings, wouldn’t there?
Still, the earthquake worried her. People spoke of the land becoming unstable, the groanings of the earth coming to match the breaking of the sky by lightning and thunder. She had heard more than one account of the spiderweb cracks that appeared in rocks, pure black, as if they extended on into eternity itself.
Once the rest of the caravan left the city, Faile pulled her wagons up beside some mercenary bands waiting their turn at an Aes Sedai for Traveling. Faile could not afford to insist on preference; she had to avoid attention. So, nerve-racking though it was, she settled down to wait.
Her caravan was last in line for the day. Eventually, Aravine came up to Faile’s wagon, and Olver scooted over to make room for her. She patted him on the head. A lot of women responded that way to Olver, and he did seem so innocent much of the time. Faile wasn’t convinced; she narrowed her eyes at Olver as he snuggled up beside Aravine. Mat seemed to have had a strong influence on the child.
“I’m pleased with this shipment, my Lady,” Aravine said. “With this canvas, we should have enough material to put tents over the heads of most men in the army. We are still going to need leather. We know that Queen Elayne marched her men hard, and we will be getting requests for new boots.”
Faile nodded absently. A gateway ahead opened to Merrilor, and she could see the armies, still gathering. Over the last couple of days, they’d slowly limped back to lick their wounds. Three battlefronts, three disasters of varying degrees. Light. The arrival of the Sharans was devastating, as was the betrayals of the great captains, including Faile’s own father. The armies of the Light had lost well over a third of their forces.
On the Field of Merrilor, commanders deliberated and thei
r soldiers repaired armor and weapons, awaiting what would come. A final stand.
“… will also need some more meat,” Aravine said. “We should suggest some quick hunting trips using gateways over the next few days to see what we can find.”
Faile nodded. It was a comfort, having Aravine. Though Faile still reviewed reports and visited the quartermasters, Aravine’s careful attention made the job much easier, like a good sergeant who had made certain his men were in shape before an inspection.
“Aravine,” Faile said. “You haven’t ever taken one of the gateways to check on your family in Amadicia.”
“There is nothing for me there any longer, my Lady.”
Aravine stubbornly refused to admit that she’d been a noble before being taken by the Shaido. Well, at least she didn’t act as some of the former gai’shain did, docile and submissive. If Aravine was determined to leave her past behind her, then Faile would gladly give her the chance. It was the least she owed the woman. As they talked, Olver climbed down to go chat with some of his “uncles” among the Redarms. Faile glanced to the side as Vanin rode past with two of the Band’s other scouts. He spoke jovially to them.
You’re misreading that look of his, Faile told herself. There’s nothing suspicious about the man; you’re merely jumpy because of the Horn.
Still, when Harnan came to ask if she needed anything—a member of the Band did that every half-hour—she asked him about Vanin.
“Vanin?” Harnan said from horseback. “Good fellow. He can chew your ear off griping at times, my Lady, but don’t let that sour you. He’s our best scout.”
“I can’t imagine how,” she said. “I mean, he can’t move quickly or quietly with that bulk, can he?”
“He’d surprise you, my Lady,” Harnan said with a laugh. “I like to rib him, but he really is skilled.”
“Has he ever presented any disciplinary problems?” Faile asked, trying to choose her words. “Fighting? Lifting things from other men’s tents?”
“Vanin?” Harnan laughed. “He’ll borrow your brandy if you let him, then return the flask mostly empty. And truth be told, he might have had a bit of thieving in his past, but I’ve never known him to fight. He’s a good man. You don’t need to worry about him.”
Some thieving in his past? Harnan, though, looked like he didn’t want to talk about it any further. “Thank you,” she said, but she remained worried.
Harnan raised a hand to his head in a kind of salute, then rode off. It was three more hours before an Aes Sedai came to process them. Berisha strolled over, giving the caravan a critical inspection. She was hard of features and lean of figure. The other Aes Sedai working the Traveling ground had already returned to Tar Valon by this point, and the sun was dipping toward the horizon.
“Caravan of foodstuffs and canvas,” Berisha said, examining Faile’s ledger. “Bound for the Field of Merrilor. We’ve sent them seven caravans today so far. Why another? I suspect the Caemlyn refugees could use this as much.”
“The Field of Merrilor is soon going to be a site of great battle,” Faile said, keeping her temper with difficulty. Aes Sedai did not like to be snapped at. “I doubt we can oversupply it.”
Berisha sniffed. “I say it’s too much.” The woman seemed chronically dissatisfied, as if annoyed at being left out of the fighting.
“The Amyrlin disagrees with you,” Faile replied. “A gateway, please. The hour grows late.” And if you want to talk about a waste, why not consider how you made me march all the way out of the city and wait, instead of sending me straight from the White Tower grounds?
The Hall of the Tower wanted a single Traveling ground for large troop or supply movements to keep better control over who entered and left Tar Valon. Faile could not blame them for the precaution, even if it was frustrating sometimes.
Bureaucracy was bureaucracy, and Berisha finally adopted a look of concentration in preparation for making a gateway. Before she could weave the gateway, however, the ground started to rumble.
Not again, Faile thought with a sigh. Well, there were commonly smaller quakes after an—
A series of sharp black crystal spikes split the ground nearby, jutting upward some ten or fifteen feet. One speared a Redarm’s horse, splashing blood into the air as the spike went straight through both beast and man.
“Bubble of evil!” Harnan called from nearby.
Other crystalline spikes—some thin as a spear, others wide as a person—ripped up through the ground. Faile frantically tried to control her horses. They danced to the side, spinning her cart, nearly toppling it as she pulled on the reins.
Around her, madness ruled. The spikes punched up through the ground in groups, each sharp as a razor. One wagon splintered as crystals destroyed its left side. Foodstuffs spilled to the dead grass. Some horses went wild and other wagons overturned. The crystal spikes continued to rise, appearing all over the empty field. Shouts rose from the nearby village at the end of the bridge from Tar Valon.
“Gateway!” Faile screamed, still fighting her horses. “Do it!”
Berisha jumped back as spikes jutted out of the ground near her feet. She threw a pale-faced glance at them, and only then did Faile realize that something was moving inside the shadowy crystals. It seemed like smoke.
A crystal spike came up through Berisha’s foot. She cried out, kneeling, just as a line of light split the air. Thank the Light, the woman held her weave, and—with what seemed glacial slowness—the line of light rotated and opened a hole large enough for a wagon.
“Through the gateway!” Faile shouted, but her voice was lost in the commotion. Crystals burst from the ground very near her left, tossing earth across her face. Her horses danced, then started to gallop. Rather than risking complete loss of control, Faile steered them toward the gateway. Right before they went through, however, she pulled them to a rearing halt.
“The gateway!” she shouted at the others. Again her voice was lost. Fortunately, the Redarms took up the call, riding down the disordered line, grabbing the reins of horses and steering wagons toward the gateway. Other men picked up those who had been tossed to the ground.
Harnan thundered past, carrying Olver. He was followed by Sandip with Setalle Anan clinging to him from behind. The frequency of the crystals increased. One jutted up near Faile, and with horror, she realized that the smoky movements inside had form. Figures of men and women, screaming, as if trapped inside.
She drew back, aghast. Nearby, the last working wagon rattled through the gateway. Soon the field would be nothing but crystals. Some straggling members of the Band helped the wounded onto horses, but two fell as the crystals started budding growths that shot out to the sides. It was time to go. Aravine passed by, grabbing Faile’s reins to pull them to safety.
“Berisha!” Faile said. The Aes Sedai knelt beside the opening, sweat trickling down her pale face. Faile leaped from her wagon seat, grabbing the woman’s shoulder as Aravine pulled the wagon through the gateway.
“Let’s move!” Faile said to Berisha. “I’ll carry you.”
The woman teetered, then fell to the side, holding her stomach. Faile realized with a start that blood streamed around the woman’s fingers. Berisha stared at the sky, mouth working, but no sounds came out.
“My Lady!” Mandevwin galloped up. “I don’t care where it leads! We must get through!”
“What—”
She cut off as Mandevwin grabbed her by the waist and hauled her up, crystals exploding nearby. He galloped through the opening, holding her.
The gateway snapped shut a moment later.
Faile panted as Mandevwin let her down. She stared at where the gateway had been.
His words finally caught up with her. I don’t care where it leads… He had seen something she, in her panic over getting everyone to safety, had not.
The gateway hadn’t led to the Field of Merrilor.
“Where…” Faile whispered, joining the others, who stared at the horrid landscape. A sweltering he
at, plants covered in spots of darkness, a scent of something awful in the air.
They were in the Blight.
Aviendha chewed on her rations, crunchy rolled oats that had been mixed with honey. They tasted good. Being near Rand meant that their food stores had stopped spoiling.
She reached for her water flask, then hesitated. She’d been drinking a lot of water lately. She rarely stopped to think about its value. Had she already forgotten the lessons she’d learned during her return to the Three-fold Land to visit Rhuidean?
Light, she thought, raising the flask to her lips. Who cares? It’s the Last Battle!
She sat on the floor of a large Aiel tent in the valley of Thakan’dar. Melaine chewed on her own rations close by. The woman was near to term now with her twins, her belly bulging beneath her dress and shawl. Much as a Maiden was forbidden to fight while with child, Melaine was forbidden dangerous activity. She had voluntarily gone to work in Berelain’s Healing station in Mayene—but she regularly checked on the progress of the battle. Many of the gai’shain had found their way through gateways to help as they could, though all they could do was carry water or soil for the earthen mounds Ituralde had ordered cast up to give the defenders some kind of protection.
A group of Maidens ate nearby, chatting with handtalk. Aviendha could have read it, but didn’t. It would only make her wish she could join them. She’d become a Wise One and had forsaken her old life. That didn’t mean she had purged herself of every bit of envy. Instead, she wiped out her wooden bowl and stowed it in her pack, stood up and slipped out of the tent.
Outside, the night air was cool. It was about an hour before dawn, and felt almost like the Three-fold Land at night. Aviendha looked up at the mountain that dominated the valley; despite the dark of early morning, she could see the pit leading inward.
It had been many days since Rand had entered. Ituralde had wandered back into camp the night before with a tale of being held by wolves and a man who claimed Perrin Aybara had sent him to kidnap the great captain. Ituralde had been taken into custody, and had not complained.