A Crown of Swords (18 page)

“Chiad, of course. Have you not been listening? She avoids me, but every time I see her, she pauses long enough to make sure I have seen her. I do not know how you wetlanders do it, but with us, that is one of the ways a woman uses. When you least expect her, she is in your eyes, then gone. I did not even know she was with the Maidens until this morning.”

“You mean she’s here?” Perrin whispered. That icicle was back, now a blade, hollowing him out. “And Bain? Here, too?”

Gaul shrugged. “One is seldom far from the other. But it is Chiad’s interest I want, not Bain’s.”

“Burn their bloody interest!” Perrin shouted. The Wise Ones turned to look at him. In fact, people all over the hillside did. Kiruna and Bera were staring, faces entirely too thoughtful. With an effort he managed to lower his voice. He could do nothing about the intensity, though. “They were supposed to be protecting her! She’s in the city, in the Royal Palace, with Colavaere—with Colavaere!—and they were supposed to be protecting her.”

Scratching his head, Gaul looked at Loial. “Is this wetlander humor? Faile Aybara is out of short skirts.”

“I know she’s not a child!” Perrin drew a deep breath. It was very hard keeping a level tone with his belly full of acid. “Loial, will you explain to this . . . to Gaul, that our women don’t run around with spears, that Colavaere wouldn’t offer to fight Faile, she’d just order somebody to cut her throat or throw her off a wall or. . . .” The images were too much. He was going to empty his stomach in a moment.

Loial patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “Perrin, I know you’re worried. I know how I’d feel if I thought anything happened to Erith.” The tufts on his ears quivered. He was a fine one to talk; he would run as hard as he could to avoid his mother and the young Ogier woman she had chosen for him. “Ah. Well. Perrin, Faile is waiting for you, safe and sound. I know it. And you know she can care for herself. Why, she could care for herself and you and me, and Gaul, as well.” His booming laugh sounded forced, and it quickly faded to grave seriousness. “Perrin. . . . Perrin, you know you can’t always be there to protect Faile, however much you want to. You are
ta’veren
; the Pattern spun you out for a purpose, and it will use you for that purpose.”

“Burn the Pattern,” Perrin growled. “It can all burn, if it keeps her safe.” Loial’s ears went rigid with shock, and even Gaul looked taken aback.

What does that make me?
Perrin thought. He had been scornful of those
who scribbled and scrabbled for their own ends, ignoring the Last Battle and the Dark One’s shadow creeping over the world. How was he different from them?

Rand reined the black in beside him. “Are you coming?”

“I’m coming,” Perrin said bleakly. He had no answer for his own questions, but he knew one thing. To him, Faile
was
the world.

Perrin would have set a harder pace than Rand did, though he knew the horses could not have stood it long. Half the time they rode at a trot, the other half ran alongside their animals. Rand seemed unaware of anyone else, except that he always had a hand for Min if she stumbled. For the rest, he was lost in some other world, blinking in surprise when he noticed Perrin, or Loial. Truth to tell, nobody was any better. Dobraine’s men and Havien’s stared straight ahead, chewing their own worries over what they would find. The Two Rivers men had soaked in Perrin’s dark mood. They liked Faile—truth be told, some worshipped her—and if she had been hurt in any way. . . . Even Aram’s eagerness grew bleak once he realized that Faile might be in danger. Every man focused on the leagues before them, toward the city ahead. Except for the Asha’man, anyway; close behind Rand like a cluster of ravens, they studied the country the column crossed, still wary of an ambush. Dashiva slumped in his saddle like a sack, and muttered darkly to himself when he had to run; he glared as if he hoped there was an ambush.

Small chance of that. Sulin and a dozen
Far Dareis Mai
trotted ahead of the column in Perrin’s sight, with as many more farther ahead, probing the way, and an equal number on the flanks. Some had thrust their short spears into the harnesses that held their bow cases on their backs, so the spearheads bobbed above their heads; the short horn bows were out, arrows
nocked. They kept equally sharp watch for anything that might threaten the
Car’a’carn
and on Rand himself, as though they suspected he might vanish again. If any trap waited, any danger approached, they would find it.

Chiad was one of the Maidens with Sulin, a tall woman with dark reddish hair and gray eyes. Perrin stared at her back, willing her to drop behind the others and speak to him. Now and then she spared him a glance, but she avoided him as if he had three diseases, all catching. Bain was not with the column; most of the Maidens followed much the same route with Rhuarc and the
algai’d’siswai
, but moving more slowly because of the wagons and prisoners.

Faile’s black mare trotted behind Stepper, her reins tied to his saddle. The Two Rivers men had brought Swallow from Caemlyn when they joined him before Dumai’s Wells. Every time he looked at the mare prancing along behind him, his wife’s face swelled in his thoughts, her bold nose and generous mouth, flashing dark eyes tilted above high cheekbones. She loved the animal, maybe almost as much as she did him. A woman as proud as she was beautiful, as fiery as she was proud. Davram Bashere’s daughter would not hide, or even hold her tongue, not for the likes of Colavaere.

Four times they stopped to rest the mounts, and he ground his teeth at the delay. Taking good care of horses was second nature to him; he checked Stepper absently, gave the stallion a little water by rote. Swallow he was more careful with. If Swallow reached Cairhien safely. . . . A notion had planted itself in his mind. If he brought her mare to Cairhien, Faile would be all right. It was ludicrous, a boy’s fancy, a
small
boy’s
foolish
fancy, and it would not go away.

At each of those stops, Min tried to reassure him. With a bantering grin, she said he looked like death on a winter morning, just waiting for somebody to shovel his grave full. She told him if he approached his wife with a face like that, Faile would slam the door on him. But she had to admit that none of her viewings promised that Faile was unharmed.

“Light, Perrin,” she said at last in exasperated tones, snugging her gray riding gloves, “if anyone tries to harm the woman, she’ll make him wait out in the hall till she has time for him.” He very nearly growled at her. It was not that the two disliked each other, exactly.

Loial reminded Perrin that Hunters for the Horn could take care of themselves, that Faile had survived Trollocs unscathed. “She is well, Perrin,” he boomed heartily, trotting beside Stepper with his long axe across his shoulders. “I know she is.” But he said the same twenty times, and each time he sounded a little less hearty.

The Ogier’s final attempt at heartening went further than Loial intended. “I am sure Faile can look after herself, Perrin. She is not like Erith. I can hardly wait for Erith to make me her husband so I can tend her; I think I’d die if she changed her mind.” At the end of that, his mouth remained open, and his huge eyes popped; ears fluttering, he stumbled over his own boots and nearly fell. “I never meant to say that,” he said hoarsely, striding along beside Perrin’s horse once more. His ears still trembled. “I am not sure I want to—I’m too young to get—” Swallowing hard, he gave Perrin an accusing look, and spared one for Rand up ahead, too. “It is hardly safe to open your mouth with
two ta’veren
about. Anything at all might come out!” Nothing that might not have come off his tongue anyway, as he well knew, though it might have happened one time in a thousand, or a thousand times a thousand, without
ta’veren
there. Loial knew that also, and the fact of it seemed to frighten him as much as anything Perrin had ever seen. Some considerable time passed before the Ogier’s ears stopped shaking.

Faile filled Perrin’s mind, but he was not blind, not completely. What he at first saw without seeing, as they rode south and west, began to seep in at the edges. The weather had been hot when he headed north from Cairhien, less than two weeks ago, yet it seemed the Dark One’s touch had gained a harder hold, grinding the land more desperately than before. Brittle grass crackled beneath the horses’ hooves, shriveled brown creepers spiderwebbed rocks on the hillsides, and naked branches, not merely leafless but dead, cracked when the arid wind gusted. Evergreen pine and leatherleaf stood brown and yellow often as not.

Farms had begun appearing after a few miles, plain structures of dark stone laid out in squares, the first in isolated clearings in the forest, then coming more thickly as the woodland thinned to trees hardly deserving the name. A cart road straggled there, running over the shoulders and crests of hills, accommodating stone-walled fields more than the terrain. Most of those early farms looked deserted, here a ladderback chair lying on its side in front of a farmhouse, there a rag doll by the roadside. Slat-ribbed cattle and lethargic sheep dotted pastures where frequently ravens squabbled over carcasses; hardly a pasture but had a carcass or two. Streams ran in trickles down channels of dried mud. Cropland that should have been blanketed with snow looked ready to crumble to dust, where it was not dust already, blowing away.

A tall plume of dust marked the passage of the column, until the narrow dirt way joined the broad stone-paved road that led from Jangai Pass. Here there were people, though few, and those often lethargic, dull-eyed.
With the sinking sun almost halfway down to the horizon now, the air was an oven. The occasional ox-cart or horse-drawn wagon hurried off the road, down narrow tracks or even into fields, out of the way. The drivers, and the handful of farm folk in the open, stood blank-faced as they watched the three banners pass.

Close to a thousand armed men was reason enough to stare. A thousand armed men, heading somewhere in a hurry, with a purpose. Reason enough to stare, and be thankful when they passed out of sight.

At last, when the sun had less than twice its own height yet to fall, the road topped a rise, and there two or three miles before them lay Cairhien. Rand drew rein, and the Maidens, all together now, dropped to their heels where they were. They kept those sharp eyes out, though.

Nothing could be seen moving on the nearly treeless hills around the city, a great mass of gray stone sinking toward the River Alguenya on the west, square-walled, square-towered and stark. Ships of all sizes lay anchored in the river, and some tied to the docks of the far bank, where the granaries were; a few vessels moved under sail or long sweeps. They gave an impression of peace and prosperity. With not a cloud in the sky, the light was sharp, and the huge banners flying from the city’s towers stood plain enough to Perrin when the wind unfurled them. The scarlet Banner of Light and the white Dragon Banner with its serpentine creature scaled scarlet and gold, the wavy-rayed Rising Sun of Cairhien, gold on blue. And a fourth, given equal prominence with the rest. A silver diamond on a field checked yellow and red.