Crossroads of Twilight

## Chapter 8

#### Whirlpools of Color

Perrin did not realize he had moved until he found himself crouched over Stepper’s neck, streaking after Arganda. The snow was no less deep, the ground no smoother, the light no better, but Stepper raced through the shadows, unwilling to let the roan stay in the lead, and Perrin urged him to run faster. The approaching rider was Elyas, his beard fanned out over his chest, a broad-brimmed hat casting his face in shadows and his fur-lined cloak hanging down his back. The Aiel was one of the Maidens, with a dark shoufa wrapped around her head and a white cloak, used for hiding against the snow, worn over her coat and breeches of grays and browns and greens. Elyas and one Maiden, without the others, meant Faile had been found. It had to.

Arganda ran his horse without a care for whether he broke the roan’s neck or his own, leaping stone outcrops, splashing through the snow at a near-gallop, but Stepper overtook him just as he reached Elyas and demanded in a harsh voice, “Did you see the queen, Machera? Is she alive? Tell me, man!” The Maiden, Elienda, her sun-darkened face expressionless, raised a hand to Perrin. It might have been meant for a greeting, or sympathy, but she never broke her skimming stride. With Elyas to make his report to Perrin, she would carry hers to the Wise Ones.

“You’ve found her?” Perrin’s throat was suddenly dry as sand. He had waited so long for this. Arganda snarled soundlessly through the steel bars of his helmet’s faceguard, knowing that Perrin was not asking after Alliandre.

“We found the Shaido we’ve been following,” Elyas said carefully, both hands on the pommel of his saddle. Even Elyas, the fabled Long Tooth who had lived and run with wolves, was showing the strain of too many miles and not enough sleep. His whole face sagged with a weariness emphasized by the golden-yellow glow of his eyes beneath his hat brim. Gray streaked his thick beard and the hair that he wore hanging to his waist and tied with a leather cord at the nape of his neck, and for the first time since Perrin had known him, he looked old. “They’re camped around a fair-sized town they took, in ridge country near forty miles from here. They’ve got no sentries to speak of close in, and those further out seem to be watching for prisoners trying to escape more than anything else, so we got near enough for a good look. But Perrin, there are more of them than we thought. At least nine or ten septs, the Maidens say. Counting gai’shain—folks in white, anyway—there could be as many people in that camp as in Mayene or Ebou Dar. I don’t know how many spear fighters, but ten thousand might be on the low side from what I saw.”

Knots of desperation twisted and tightened in Perrin’s stomach. His mouth was so dry he could not have spoken had Faile miraculously appeared in front of him. Ten thousand algai’d’siswai, and even weavers and silversmiths and old men who passed their days reminiscing in the shade would pick up a spear if they were attacked. He had fewer than two thousand lancers, and they would have been overmatched against an equal number of Aiel. Fewer than three hundred Two Rivers men, who could wreak havoc with their bows at a distance but not stop ten thousand. That many Shaido would shred Masema’s murderous rabble like a cat slaughtering a nest of mice. Even counting the Asha’man and the Wise Ones and Aes Sedai . . . Edarra and the other Wise Ones were hardly generous in what they told him about Wise Ones, but he knew ten septs might have fifty women who could channel, maybe more. Maybe fewer, too—there was no set number—but not enough fewer to make a difference.

With an effort, he strangled the despair welling up in him, squeezed until only writhing filaments remained for his anger to burn up. A hammer had no place in it for despair. Ten septs or the whole Shaido clan, they still had Faile, and he still had to find a way.

“What does it matter how many there are?” Aram demanded. “When Trollocs came to the Two Rivers, there were thousands, tens of thousands, but we killed them just the same. Shaido can’t be worse than Trollocs.”

Perrin blinked, surprised to find the man right behind him, not to mention Berelain and Gallenne and the Aes Sedai. In his haste to reach Elyas, he had shut out everything else. Dimly visible through the trees, the men Arganda had brought out to confront Masema still held their rough lines, but Berelain’s bodyguard was forming a loose ring centered on Elyas and facing outward. The Wise Ones stood outside the circle, listening to Elienda with grave faces. She spoke in a low murmur, sometimes shaking her head. Her view of matters was no brighter than Elyas’s. He must have lost the basket in his haste, or thrown it away, because it hung from Berelain’s saddle now. There was a look of . . . could it be sympathy, on her face? Burn him, he was too tired to think straight. Only, now more than ever, he had to think straight. His next mistake might be the last, for Faile.

“Way I heard it, Tinker,” Elyas said quietly, “the Trollocs came to you in the Two Rivers, and you managed to catch them in a vise. You have any fancy plans for catching the Shaido in a vise?” Aram glared at him sullenly. Elyas had known him before he picked up a sword, and Aram disliked being reminded of that time, despite his brightly colored clothes.

“Ten septs or fifty,” Arganda growled, “there must be some way to free the Queen. And the others, of course. And the others.” His hard-bitten face was creased in a scowl of anger, yet he smelled frantic, a fox ready chew off its own leg to escape a trap. “Will . . . ? Will they accept a ransom?” The Ghealdanin looked around until he found Marline coming through the Winged Guards. She managed a steady stride in spite of the snow, not staggering in the least. The other Wise Ones were no longer anywhere to be seen among the trees, nor Elienda. “Will these Shaido take a ransom . . . Wise One?” Arganda’s honorific had the sound of an afterthought. He no longer believed the Aiel with them had any knowledge of the kidnapping, but there was a taint in him regarding Aiel.

“I cannot say.” Marline seemed not to notice his tone. Arms folded across her chest, she stood looking at Perrin rather than Arganda. It was one of those looks where a woman weighed and measured you till she could have sewn you a suit of clothes or told you when your smallclothes were last washed. It would have made him uncomfortable back when he had had time for such things. When she spoke again, there was nothing of offering advice in her tone, merely a setting out of the facts. She might even have meant it so. “Your wetlander paying of ransom goes against our custom. Gai’shain may be given as a gift, or traded for other gai’shain, but they are not animals to be sold. Yet it seems the Shaido no longer follow ji’e’toh. They make wetlanders gai’shain and take everything instead of only the fifth. They may set a price.”

“My jewels are at your disposal, Perrin,” Berelain put in, her voice steady and her face firm. “If necessary, Grady or Neald can fetch more from Mayene. Gold, as well.”

Gallenne cleared his throat. “Altarans are used to marauders, my Lady, neighboring nobles and brigands alike,” he said slowly, slapping his reins against his palm. Although reluctant to contradict Berelain, he clearly intended to anyway. “There’s no law this far from Ebou Dar, except what the local lord or lady says. Noble or common, they’re accustomed to paying off anyone they can’t fight off, and quick to tell the difference. It goes against reason that none of them tried to buy safety, yet we’ve seen nothing but ruins in these Shaido’s path, heard of nothing but pillage right down to the ground. They may accept an offer of ransom, and even take it, but can they be trusted to give anything in return? Just making the offer gives away our one real advantage, that they don’t know we are here.” Annoura shook her head slightly, the barest movement, but Gallenne’s one eye caught it, and he frowned. “You disagree, Annoura Sedai?” he asked politely. And with a hint of surprise.

The Gray was almost diffident at times, especially for a sister, but she never vacillated about speaking up when she disagreed with advice offered to Berelain.

This time Annoura hesitated, though, and covered by pulling her cloak around herself and arranging the folds with care. It was clumsy of her; Aes Sedai could ignore heat or cold when they chose, remaining untouched when everyone around them was drenched with sweat or fighting to stop their teeth chattering. An Aes Sedai who paid attention to the temperature was buying time to think, usually about how to hide what she was thinking. Glancing toward Marline with a small frown, she finally reached a decision, and the slight crease in her forehead vanished.

“Negotiation is always better than fighting,” she said in cool Taraboner accents, “and in negotiation, trust is always a matter of the precautions, yes? We must consider with care the precautions that must be taken. There is also the question of who is to approach them. Wise Ones may no longer be sacrosanct, since they took part in the battle at Dumai’s Wells. A sister, or a group of sisters, might be better, yet even that must have careful arrangement. I myself am willing to—”

“No ransom,” Perrin said, and when everyone stared at him, most in consternation, Annoura with her face unreadable, he said it again, in a harder voice. “No ransom.” He would not pay these Shaido for making Faile suffer. She would be afraid, and they had to pay for that, not profit from it. Besides, Gallenne had the right of it. Nothing Perrin had seen, in Altara or Amadicia or before that in Cairhien, so much as hinted that the Shaido could be trusted to keep any bargain. As well trust rats in the grain bins and cutworms with the harvest. “Elyas, I want to see their camp.” When he was a boy he had known a blind man, Nat Torfinn with his wrinkled face and thin white hair, who could disassemble any blacksmith’s puzzle by touch. For years Perrin tried to learn how to duplicate that feat, but he never could. He had to see how the pieces fit together before he could make sense of them. “Aram, find Grady and tell him to meet me as fast as he can, at the Traveling ground.” That was what they had come to call the place where they arrived at the end of each jump, and departed from for the next. It was easier for the Asha’man to weave a gateway in a place already touched by one they had woven before.

Aram gave one short, purposeful nod, then wheeled his gray and sped toward camp, but Perrin could see arguments and questions and demands gathering on the faces around him. Marline was still examining him, as though suddenly not quite sure what he was, and Gallenne was frowning at the reins in his hands, no doubt seeing matters turn out badly whatever he did, but Berelain wore a perturbed expression, objections visible in her eyes, and Annoura’s mouth had tightened to a thin line. Aes Sedai disliked being interrupted, and, diffident for an Aes Sedai or not, she looked ready to vent her displeasure. Arganda, his face growing red, opened his mouth with the clear intention of shouting. Arganda had shouted often since his queen was kidnapped. There was no point in waiting to listen.

Digging in his heels, Perrin sent Stepper lunging through the line of Winged Guards, heading back toward the sheared trees. Not at a run, but not dawdling, either—a quick trot through the towering forests, hands tight on the reins and eyes already searching the dappled gloom for Grady. Elyas followed on his gelding without a word. Perrin had been sure he had no room in him for another ounce of fear, yet Elyas’ silence made the weight grow. The other man never saw an obstacle without seeing a way around. His silence shouted of impassable mountains. There had to be a way, though. When they reached the smooth stone outcrop, Perrin walked Stepper back and forth through the slanting bars of light, around the toppled trees and between the standing ones, unable to make himself stop. He had to keep moving. There had to be a way. His mind darted like a caged rat.

Elyas dismounted to squat and frown at the sliced stone, paying little heed to his gelding tugging at the reins and trying to back away. Beside the stone, the thick trunk of a pine that had stood a good fifty paces tall was propped up at one end by the splintered remains of its stump, high enough that Elyas could have walked beneath the tree trunk upright. Brilliant rays of sunlight piercing the forest canopy elsewhere seemed to deepen the shadow to near blackness around the track-marked outcrop but that troubled him no more than it did Perrin. His nose wrinkled at the burnt-sulphur smell that still hung in the air. “I thought I caught this stink on the way here. I expect you’d have mentioned this if you didn’t have things on your mind. A big pack. Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen or heard of.”

“That’s what Masuri said,” Perrin said absently. What was keeping Grady? How many people were there in Ebou Dar? That was the size of the Shaido camp. “She said she’s crossed the paths of seven packs, and this isn’t one she’s seen before.”

“Seven,” Elyas murmured in surprise. “Even an Aes Sedai would have to go some to do that. Most tales of Darkhounds are just people frightened by the dark.” Frowning at the tracks crossing the smoothed stone, he shook his head, and sadness entered his voice when he said, “They were wolves, once. The souls of wolves, anyway, caught and twisted by the Shadow. That was the core used to make Darkhounds, the Shadowbrothers. I think that’s why the wolves have to be at the Last Battle. Or maybe Darkhounds were made because wolves will be there, to fight them. The Pattern makes Sovarra lace look like a piece of string, sometimes. Anyway, it was a long time ago, during the Trolloc Wars as near as I can make out, and the War of the Shadow before that. Wolves have long memories. What a wolf knows is never really forgotten while other wolves remain alive. They avoid talking about Darkhounds, though, and they avoid Darkhounds, too. A hundred wolves could die trying to kill one Shadowbrother. Worse, if they fail, the Darkhound can eat the souls of those that aren’t quite dead yet, and in a year or so, there’d be a new pack of Shadowbrothers that didn’t remember ever being wolves. I hope they don’t remember, anyway.”

Perrin reined in, though he itched to keep moving. Shadowbrothers. The wolves’ name for Darkhounds had taken on a new grimness. “Can they eat a man’s soul, Elyas? Say a man who can talk to wolves?” Elyas shrugged. Only a handful of people could do what they did, as far as either man knew. An answer to that question might come only at the point of death. More importantly right then, if they had been wolves, once, they must be intelligent enough to report what they found. Masuri had implied as much. Foolishness to hope otherwise. How long before they did? How long did he have to free Faile?

The sound of hooves crunching in snow announced riders coming, and he hurriedly told Elyas that the Darkhounds had circled the camp, that they would be carrying word of him to whomever they reported to.

“I wouldn’t worry overmuch, boy,” the older man replied, watching warily for sight of the oncoming horses. Moving away from the stone, he began to stretch, working muscles over-long in the saddle. Elyas was too careful to be caught studying what would be swallowed in shadows to other eyes. “Sounds like they’re hunting something more important than you. They’ll stay on that till they find it if it takes all year. Don’t worry. We’ll get your wife out before those Darkhounds report you were here. Not saying it’ll be easy, but we’ll do it.” There was determination in his voice, and in his scent, but not much hope. Almost none at all, in fact.

Fighting despair, refusing to let it rise again, Perrin resumed walking Stepper as Berelain and her bodyguard appeared through the trees, with Marline astride behind Annoura. As soon as the Aes Sedai drew rein, the twilight-eyed Wise One slid to the ground, shaking down her thick skirts to cover her dark stockings. Another woman might have appeared flustered over having her legs exposed, but not Marline. She was merely straightening her clothes. Annoura was the one who looked upset, a sour-faced disgruntlement that made her nose seem more like a beak. She kept silent, but her mouth was set to bite. She must have been certain her offer to negotiate with the Shaido would be accepted, especially with Berelain supporting and Marline seemingly neutral at worst. Grays were negotiators and mediators, adjudicators and treaty makers. That might have been her motivation. What else could it have been? A problem that he had to set aside while keeping it in mind. He had to take into account anything that might interfere with freeing Faile, but the problem he had to solve lay forty miles to the northeast.

While the Winged Guards formed their protective circle among the towering trees around the Traveling ground, Berelain brought her bay alongside Stepper and paced him, trying to engage Perrin in talk, to entice him with the rest of the woodhen. She smelled uncertain, doubtful of his decision. Maybe she hoped to talk him into attempting the ransom. He kept Stepper moving and refused to listen. To make that attempt was to gamble everything on one toss of the dice. He could not gamble with Faile as the stake. Methodical as working at a forge, that was the way. Light, but he was tired. He folded himself in tighter around his anger, embracing the heat for energy. Gallenne and Arganda arrived shortly after Berelain, with a double column of Ghealdanin lancers in burnished breastplates and bright conical helmets who interspersed themselves among the Mayeners between the trees. A trace of irritation entering her scent, Berelain left Perrin and rode to Gallenne. The pair of them sat their horses knee-to-knee, the one-eyed man bending his head to listen to what Berelain had to say. Her voice was low, but Perrin knew their subject, at least in part. Now and then one of them glanced at him as he walked Stepper back and forth, back and forth. Arganda planted his roan in one spot and stared south through the trees toward the camp, still as a statue yet radiating impatience as a fire radiated heat. He was the picture of a soldier, with his plumes and his sword and his silvered armor, his face as hard as stone, but he smelled on the brink of panic. Perrin wondered how he himself smelled. You could never catch your own scent unless you were in a closed space. He did not think he smelled of panic, just fear and anger. All would be well once he had Faile back. All would be well, then. Back and forth, back and forth.

At last Aram appeared, with a yawning Jur Grady on a dark bay gelding, dark enough that the white stripe on its nose made it seem almost a black. Dannil and a dozen Two Rivers men, spears and halberds abandoned for the moment in favor of their longbows, rode close behind, but not too close. A stocky fellow with a weathered face already beginning to show creases, though he was short of his middle years yet, Grady looked like a sleepy farmer despite of the long-hilted sword at his waist and his black coat with the silver sword pin on the high collar, but he had left the farm behind forever, and Dannil and the others always gave him room. They gave Perrin room, too, hanging back and peering at the ground, sometimes darting quick, embarrassed looks at him or Berelain. It did not matter. All would be well.

Aram tried to lead Grady to Perrin, but the Asha’man knew why he had been summoned. With a sigh, he climbed down beside Elyas, who squatted in a patch of sunlight to mark a map in the snow with his finger and speak of distance and direction, describing the place he wanted to go in detail, a clearing on a slope that faced almost south, with the ridge above notched in three places. Distance and direction were enough, if the distance and direction were precise, but the better the picture in an Asha’man’s mind, the closer he could come to an exact spot.

“There’s no margin for error here, boy.” Elyas’s eyes seemed to brighten with intensity. Whatever others thought of Asha’man, they never intimidated him. “There’s lots of ridges in that country, and the main camp is only a mile or so the other side of this one. There’ll be sentries, little parties that camp in a different place every night, maybe less than two miles the other way. You put us out off by much, and we’ll be seen for sure.”

Grady met that stare, unblinking. Then he nodded and scrubbed stubby ringers through his hair, drawing a deep breath. He looked as weary as Elyas. As bone-tired as Perrin felt. Making gateways, holding them open long enough for thousands of people and horses to pass through, was wearing work.

“Are you rested enough?” Perrin asked him. Tired men made mistakes, and mistakes with the One Power could be deadly. “Should I send for Neald?”

Grady stared up at him blearily, then shook his head. “Fager’s no more rested than me. Less, maybe. I’m stronger than he is, a bit. Better if I do it.” He turned to face northeast, and with no more warning, a vertical slash of silver-blue appeared beside the track-marked stone. Annoura jerked her mare out of the way with a loud gasp as the line of light widened into an opening, a hole in the air that showed a sunlit clearing on steep ground among trees much smaller than those around Perrin and the others. The already splintered pine shivered as it lost another thin slice, groaned, and collapsed the rest of the way with a snow-muffled crash that made the horses snort and dance. Annoura glared at the Asha’man, her face growing dark, but Grady just blinked and said, “Does that look like the right place?” Elyas adjusted his hat before nodding.

That nod was all Perrin waited for. He ducked his head and rode Stepper through into snow that was over the dun’s fetlocks. It was a small clearing, but the sky full of white clouds overhead made it seem vastly open after the forest behind. The light was almost blinding compared to the forest, though the sun was still hidden by the tree-covered ridge above. The Shaido camp lay on the other side of that ridge. He stared toward the height yearningly. It was all he could do to stay where he was rather than race ahead to finally see where Faile was. He made himself turn Stepper to face the gateway as Marline came out.

Still studying him, hardly taking her eyes away long enough to place her feet in the snow without tripping, she moved to one side to let Aram and the Two Rivers men ride through. Accustomed to Traveling if not to Asha’man by now, they barely bent their heads enough to clear the top of the opening, and only the tallest did even that. It struck Perrin that the gateway was larger than the first one of Grady’s make that he had passed through. He had had to dismount, then. It was a vague thought, no more important than a fly buzzing. Aram rode straight to Perrin, tight-faced and smelling impatient and eager to be going on, and once Dannil and the others were out of the way, climbing down and calmly fitting arrows to bows while they watched the surrounding trees, Gallenne appeared, peering grimly at the trees around them as though he expected an enemy to come dashing out, followed by half a dozen Mayeners who had to lower their red-streamered lances to crowd through after him.

A long pause passed with the gateway empty, but just when Perrin had decided to go back and see what was holding Elyas up, the bearded man led his horse out, with Arganda and six Ghealdanin riding at his heels, discontent carved on their faces. Their shining helmets and breastplates were nowhere to be seen, and they scowled as though they had been made to leave off their breeches.

Perrin nodded to himself. Of course. The Shaido camp was on the other side of this ridge, and so was the sun. That gleaming armor would have been like mirrors. He should have thought of that. He was still letting fear goad him into impatience and cloud his thinking. He had to be clearheaded, now more than ever. The detail he missed now could kill him and leave Faile in Shaido hands. It was easier to say that he had to let go of fear than to do it, though. How could he not be afraid for Faile? It had to be managed, but how?

To his surprise, Annoura rode through the gateway just ahead of Grady, who was leading his dark bay. Just as every time he had seen her pass through a gateway, she lay as flat on her mare as her saddle’s high pommel would allow, grimacing at the opening that had been made with the tainted male half of the Power, and as soon as she was clear of it, she urged her horse as far up the slope as she could without entering the trees. Grady let the gateway snap shut, leaving the purple afterimage of a vertical bar in Perrin’s eyes, and Annoura flinched and looked away, glaring at Marline, at Perrin. If she had been anyone other than an Aes Sedai, he would have said she was simmering in a sullen fury. Berelain must have told her to come, but it was not Berelain she blamed for her having to be there.

“From here, we go afoot,” Elyas announced in a quiet voice that barely carried over the occasional stamp of a horse’s hoof. He had said the Shaido were careless and had no sentries, or almost none, but he spoke as if they could be within twenty paces. “A man on a horse stands out. The Shaido aren’t blind, just blind for Aiel, which means they see twice as sharp as any of you, so don’t go skylining yourselves when we reach the crest. And try not to make any more noise than you can help. They aren’t deaf, either. They’ll find our tracks, eventually—can’t do much about that in snow—but we can’t let them know we were here until after we’re gone.”

Already sour over being shorn of his armor and plumes, Arganda began to argue about Elyas giving orders. Not being a complete fool, he did it in a quiet voice that would not carry, but he had been a soldier since the age of fifteen, he had commanded soldiers fighting Whitecloaks, Altarans and Amadicians, and as he was fond of pointing out, he had fought in the Aiel War and lived through the Blood Snow, at Tar Valon. He knew about Aiel, and he did not need an unbarbered woodsman to tell him how to put his boots on. Perrin let it pass, since the man did his complaining in between telling off two men to hold the horses. He really was not a fool, just afraid for his queen. Gallenne left all of his men behind, muttering that lancers were worse than useless off their horses and would probably break their necks if he made them walk any distance. He was no fool, either, but he did see the black side first. Elyas took the lead, and Perrin waited only long enough to transfer the thick brass-bound tube of his looking glass from Stepper’s saddlebags to his coat pocket before following.

The underbrush grew in clumps beneath the trees, which were mostly pine and fir, with clusters of others that were winter-gray and leafless, and the terrain, no steeper than the Sand Hills back home, if more rocky, presented no problems for Dannil and the other Two Rivers men, who ghosted up the slope with arrows nocked and eyes watchful, almost as silent as the mist of their breath. Aram, no stranger to the woods himself, stayed close to Perrin with his sword out. Once he started to chop a tangle of thick brown vines out of his way until Perrin stopped him with a hand on his arm, yet he made little more noise than Perrin, the faint crunch of boots in snow. It was no shock that Marline moved through the trees as if she had grown up in a forest instead of the Aiel Waste, where anything that could be called a tree was rare and snow unheard of, though it seemed that all of her necklaces and bracelets should have made some clatter as they swung, but Annoura climbed with almost as little effort, floundering a little with her skirts but deftly avoiding the sharp thorns of dead cat’s-claw and wait-a-minute vines. Aes Sedai usually found a way to surprise you. She managed to keep a wary eye on Grady, too, though the Asha’man appeared to be focused on putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes he sighed heavily and paused for a minute, frowning toward the crest ahead, but somehow he never fell behind. Gallenne and Arganda were not young men, nor accustomed to walking where they could ride, and their breathing began to grow heavier as they ascended, sometimes pulling themselves up from tree to tree, but they watched one another nearly as much as they did the ground, each unwilling to let the other outdo him. The four Ghealdanin lancers, on the other hand, slipped and slid, tripped over roots hidden beneath the snow, caught their scabbards on vines, and growled curses when they fell on rocks or were stabbed by thorns. Perrin began to consider sending them back to wait with the horses. That, or hitting them over the head and leaving them to be picked up when he returned.

Abruptly, two Aiel stepped out of the undergrowth in front of Elyas, dark veils hiding their faces to the eyes, white cloaks hanging down their backs and spears and bucklers in hand. They were Maidens of the Spear by their height, which made them no less dangerous than any other algai’d’siswai, and in an instant, nine longbows were drawn, broadhead points aimed at their hearts.

“You could get hurt that way, Tuandha,” Elyas muttered. “You should know better, Sulin.” Perrin motioned for the Two Rivers men to lower their bows, and for Aram to lower his sword. He had caught their scents as soon as Elyas had, before they stepped into the open.

The Maidens exchanged startled looks, but they unveiled, letting the dark veils hang down their chests. “You see closely, Elyas Machera,” Sulin said. Wiry and leather-faced, with a scar across one cheek, she had sharp blue eyes that could pierce like awls, but they still looked surprised, now. Tuandha was taller and younger, and she might have been pretty before losing her right eye and gaining a thick scar than ran from her chin up under her shoufa. It pulled up one corner of her mouth in a half-smile, but that was the only smile she ever gave.

“Your coats are different,” Perrin said. Tuandha frowned down at her coat, all gray and green and brown, then at Sulin’s identical garment. “Your cloaks, too.” Elyas was tired, to make that slip. “They haven’t started moving, have they?”

“No, Perrin Aybara,” Sulin said. “The Shaido seem prepared to stay in one place for a time. They made the people from the city leave and go north last night, those they would let leave.” She gave a small shake of her head, still perturbed by the Shaido forcing people to become gai’shain who did not follow ji’e’toh. “Your friends Jondyn Barran and Get Ayliah and Hu Marwin have gone after them to see if they can learn anything. Our spear-sisters and Gaul are making their way around the camp again. We waited here for Elyas Machera to return with you.” She seldom let emotion into her voice, and there was none there now, but she smelled of sadness. “Come, I will show you.”

The two Maidens turned up the slope, and he hurried after them, forgetting anyone else. A little short of the crest, they crouched, then went to hands and knees, and he copied them, crawling the last spans through the snow to peer past a tree over the top of the ridgeline. The forest ended there, fading into scattered brush and isolated saplings on the downslope. He was high enough to see for several leagues, across rolling ridges like long treeless hills to where a dark band of forest began again. He could see everything he wanted to see, and so much less than he needed.

He had tried to imagine the Shaido camp from Elyas’ description, but the reality dwarfed his imaginings. A thousand paces below lay a mass of low Aiel tents and every other sort of tent, a mass of wagons and carts and people and horses. It spread for well over a mile in every direction from the gray stone walls of a city halfway to the next rise. He knew the sprawl must be the same on the other side. It was not one of the great cities, not like Caemlyn or Tar Valon, less than four hundred paces wide along the side he could see and narrower on the others, it seemed, but still a city with high walls and towers and what looked like a fortress at the northmost end. Yet the Shaido encampment swallowed it whole. Faile was somewhere in that great lake of people.

Fumbling his looking glass from his pocket, he remembered at the last instant to cup one hand for shade on the far end of the tube. The sun was a golden ball almost ahead of him, just shy of halfway to its noonday height. A stray reflection from the lens could ruin everything. Groups of people leapt up in the looking glass, their faces clear, at least to his eye. Long-haired women with dark shawls over their shoulders, draped in dozens of long necklaces, women with fewer necklaces milking goats, women wearing the cadin’sor and sometimes carrying spears and bucklers, women peeking from the deep cowls of heavy white robes as they scurried across snow already trampled halfway to mud. There were men and children, too, but his eye skipped past them hungrily, ignored them. Thousands upon thousands of women, just counting those in white.

“Too many,” Marline whispered, and he lowered the glass to glare at her. The others had joined the Maidens and him, all lying in a row in the snow along the ridgeline. The Two Rivers men were taking pains to keep their bowstrings up out of the snow without raising their bows above the ridgeline. Arganda and Gallenne were using their own looking glasses to study the camp below, and Grady was staring down the slope with his chin propped on his hands, every bit as intent as the two soldiers. Maybe he was using the Power in some way. Marline and Annoura were staring at the camp, too, the Aes Sedai licking her lips and the Wise One frowning. Perrin did not think Marline had intended to speak aloud.

“If you think I’ll walk away just because there are more Shaido than I expected,” he began heatedly, but she broke in, meeting his scowl with a level look.

“Too many Wise Ones, Perrin Aybara. Wherever I look, I can see a woman channeling. Just for a moment here, a moment there—Wise Ones do not channel all the time—but they are everywhere I look. Too many to be the Wise Ones of ten septs.”

He drew a deep breath. “How many do you think there are?”

“I think maybe all the Shaido Wise Ones are down there,” Marline replied, as calm as if she were talking about the price of barley. “All who can channel.”

All of them? That made no sense! How could they all be together here, when the Shaido seemed to be scattered everywhere? At least, he had heard tales of what had to be Shaido raids all across Ghealdan and Amadicia, tales of raids here in Altara long before Faile was taken and rumors from even farther. Why would they all be together? If the Shaido intended to gather here, the whole clan . . . No, he had to deal with what he knew for fact. That was bad enough. “How many?” he asked again, in a reasonable tone.

“Do not growl at me, Perrin Aybara. I cannot say exactly how many Shaido Wise Ones remain alive. Even Wise Ones die from sickness, snakebite, accident. Some died at Dumai’s Wells. We found bodies left behind, and they must have carried away those they could for proper burial. Even Shaido cannot have abandoned all custom. If all who remain alive are below, and the apprentices who can channel, I would say perhaps four hundred. Perhaps more, but fewer than five hundred. There were fewer than five hundred Shaido Wise Ones who could channel before they crossed the Dragonwall, and perhaps fifty apprentices.” Most farmers would have shown more emotion over the barley.

Still staring at the Shaido camp, Annoura made a strangled sound, half a sob. “Five hundred? Light! Half the Tower from one clan? Oh, Light!”

“We could sneak in, in the night,” Dannil murmured from down the row, “the way you sneaked into that Whitecloak camp back home.” Elyas gave a grunt that might have meant anything but did not sound hopeful.

Sulin snorted derisively. “We could not sneak into that camp, not with any real hope of getting out. You would be trussed like a goat for the spit before you passed the first tents.”

Perrin nodded slowly. He had thought of slipping in under cover of darkness and somehow spiriting Faile away. And the others, of course. She would not go without the others. He had never had any real belief that could work, though, not against Aiel, and the size of the camp had quenched the last glimmers. He could wander for days among that many people without finding her.

Abruptly, he realized that he was not having to fight down despair. The anger remained, but it was cold as steel in winter, now, and he could not detect a single drop of the hopelessness that had threatened to drown him before. There were ten thousand algai’d’siswai in that camp, and five hundred women who could channel—Gallenne had the right of it; prepare for the worst, and all your surprises were pleasant ones—five hundred women who would not hesitate to use the Power as a weapon; Faile was hidden like one snowflake in a meadow covered with snow, but when you piled up so much, there just was no point in despair. You had to buckle down or be plowed under. Besides, he could see the puzzle, now. Nat Torfinn had always said any puzzle could be solved, once you found out where to push and where to pull.

To the north and south, the land had been cleared farther from the city than the rise where he lay. Scattered farmhouses, none with smoke rising from its chimney, dotted the landscape, and rail fences marked out fields beneath the snow, but more than a handful of men trying to approach from either direction might as well carry torches and banners and blow trumpets. There seemed to be a road leading roughly south through the farms and another roughly north. Useless to him, probably, but you never could tell. Jondyn might bring back some information about the city, though what good that would do when the city was in the middle of the Shaido, he could not begin to guess. Gaul and the Maidens who were making their way around the camp would be able to tell him what lay beyond the next ridge. A saddle in that ridge had the look of a road heading somewhere east. Oddly, a cluster of windmills stood maybe a mile north of the saddle, long white arms turning slowly, and there appeared to another group of windmills atop the next rise beyond. A row of arches, like a long narrow bridge, stretched down the slope from the nearest windmills all the way to the city walls.

“Does anybody know what that is?” he asked, pointing. Studying it through the looking glass told him nothing except that it seemed made of the same gray stone as the wall. The thing was much too narrow for a bridge. It lacked side walls, and there did not seem to be anything for a bridge to cross.

“It is for bringing water,” Sulin replied. “It runs for five miles, to a lake. I do not know why they did not build their city closer, but most of the land around the lake looks as if it will be mud when the cold goes away.” She no longer stumbled over unfamiliar words like mud, yet a touch of awe remained in “lake,” in the idea of so much water in one place. “You think to stop their water supply? That will surely make them come out.” She understood fighting over water. Most fighting in the Waste started with water. “But I do not think—“

The colors erupted inside Perrin’s head, an explosion of hues so strong that sight and hearing vanished. All sight except for the colors themselves, at least. They were a vast tide, as if all the times he had pushed them out of his head had built a dam that they now smashed aside in a silent flood, swirling in soundless whirlpools that tried to suck him under. An image coalesced in the middle of it, Rand and Nynaeve sitting on the ground facing one another, as clear as if they were right in front of him. He had no time for Rand, not now. Not now! Clawing at the colors like a drowning man clawing for the surface, he—forced—them—out!

Sight and hearing, the world around, crashed in on him.

“ . . . it’s madness,” Grady was saying in worried tones. “Nobody can handle enough of saidin for me to feel that far off! Nobody!”

“No one can handle that much of saidar, either,” Marline murmured. “But someone is.”

“The Forsaken?” Annoura’s voice shook. “The Forsaken, using some sa’angreal we never suspected. Or . . . or the Dark One himself.”

They were all three peering back to the north and west, and if Marline looked calmer than Annoura or Grady, she smelled as frightened and worried. Except for Elyas, the others were watching those three with the look of men awaiting an announcement that a new Breaking of the World had begun. Elyas’s face was accepting. A wolf would snap at a landslide carrying him to his death, but a wolf knew that death came sooner or later, and you could not fight death.

“It’s Rand,” Perrin muttered thickly. He shuddered as the colors tried to return, but he hammered them down. “His business. He’ll take care of it, whatever it is.” Everyone was staring at him, even Elyas. “I need prisoners, Sulin. They must send out hunting parties. Elyas says they have sentries out a few miles, small groups. Can you get me prisoners?”

“Listen to me carefully,” Annoura said, the words rushing out of her. She rose up out of the snow enough to reach over Marline and seize a fistful of Perrin’s cloak. “Something is happening, perhaps wonderful, perhaps terrible, but in any case momentous, more so than anything in recorded history! We must know what! Grady can take us there, close enough to see. I could take us if I knew the weaves. We must know!”

Meeting her gaze, Perrin raised his hand, and she stopped with her mouth open. Aes Sedai never shut up that easily, yet she did. “I told you what it is. Our work is right down there in front of us. Sulin?”

Sulin’s head swung from him to the Aes Sedai to Marline. Finally, she shrugged. “You will learn little useful even if you put them to the question. They will embrace the pain and laugh at you. And shame will be slow—if these Shaido can still be shamed.”

“Whatever I learn will be more than I know now,” he replied. His work lay in front of him. A puzzle to solve, Faile to free, and the Shaido to destroy. That was all that mattered in the world.