Knife of Dreams (110 page)

Arrela came out of the ruin rubbing her bottom and looking grim as death, but she eagerly took the waterskin that Aldin offered. The tall young Amadician, a square-shouldered fellow who looked more a soldier than the bookkeeper he was, gazed at her avidly as she drank. Arrela did not like men that way, but Aldin refused to accept that he could not convince her to marry him. Lacile appeared—rubbing
her
bottom!—and Jhoradin handed her another waterskin, drawing a finger down her dirty cheek. She smiled up at him before beginning to drink. Already preparing her way back into his blankets if Rolan proved obstinate. At least, Faile thought that was what she was doing.

At last Alliandre stalked past Kinhuin, and if she was not rubbing herself, her expression of frosty ire told the tale plainly enough. Kinhuin backed out of the opening and stood while Rolan began working his way back across the dangerous pile of timbers.

“My Lady,” Aravine called anxiously, and Faile turned to find the plump-faced woman kneeling on the paving stones and lifting Maighdin’s head onto her lap. Maighdin’s eyelids fluttered but never came more than half open. Her lips moved weakly, but only mumbles emerged.

“What happened?” Faile said, hurrying to kneel beside them.

“I don’t know, my Lady. She was drinking as if she intended to empty the skin, and suddenly she staggered. The next I knew, she just collapsed.” Aravine’s hands fluttered like falling leaves.

“She must be very tired,” Faile said, smoothing her maid’s hair and trying not to think of how they were to get the woman out of the camp if she could not walk. It would be done if they had to carry her. Light, she felt a touch wobbly herself. “She saved us, Aravine.” The Amadician woman nodded gravely.

“I will hide you somewhere safe until tonight, Faile Bashere,” Rolan said, fastening the last buckles of his bow case harness. His brown
shoufa
was already wrapped around his head. “Then I will take you to the forest.” Taking three short spears from Jhoradin, he thrust them up through the harness behind so the long spearpoints, glinting in the sun, stuck up above his head.

Faile almost collapsed beside Maighdin with relief. There would be no need to conceal anything from Perrin. But she could not afford weakness, not now. “Our supplies,” she began, and as if the sound of her voice were
the last straw, the building gave a squealing groan and fell in with a crash that drowned out the explosions for a moment.

“I will see that you have what you need,” Rolan told her, raising the black veil across his face. Jhoradin handed him another spear and his buckler, which he hung on his belt knife before seizing her right arm and drawing her to her feet. “We must move quickly. I do not know who we are dancing the spears with, but the
Mera’din
will dance today.”

“Aldin, will you carry Maighdin?” was all she managed to get out before Rolan strode away pulling her with him.

She looked over her shoulder to see Aldin lifting a limp Maighdin in his arms. Jhoradin had Lacile by her arm as firmly as Rolan had her. The three Brotherless were leading a parade of white-garbed men and women. And one boy. Theril wore a grim expression. Fumbling in her sleeve, no easy matter with Rolan’s big hand on her arm, she closed her fingers around the ridged hilt of her dagger. Whatever was happening outside the walls, she might have need of that blade before nightfall.

Perrin ran along the winding street through the tents. No one moved in his sight, but through the roar of exploding fireballs and lightnings, he could hear other sounds of battle. Steel clashing on steel. Men shouting, as they killed or died. Men screaming. Blood ran down the left side of his face from a gash in his scalp, and he could feel it oozing down his right side from where a spear had grazed him, oozing down his left thigh from a spear that had bitten deeper. Not all of the blood on him was his own. A face appeared at the opening to a low, dark tent and drew back hurriedly. A child’s face, and frightened, not the first he had seen. The Shaido were being pressed so hard that a good many children had been left behind. They would be a problem for later, though. Over the tents, he could see the gates little more than a hundred paces ahead. Beyond them lay the fortress and Faile.

Two veiled Shaido darted out from beside a dirty brown wall-tent, spears at the ready. But not for him. They were looking at something off to the left. Without slowing, he ran into them. Both were larger than he, but the force of his rush carried them all to the ground, and he fell already fighting. His hammer smashed into the bottom of one man’s chin while he stabbed and stabbed at the other man, blade biting deep. The hammer rose and crushed the first man’s face, splashing blood, rose and fell again while he stabbed. The man with the ruined face twitched once as Perrin rose. The other lay staring at the sky.

A hint of motion at the corner of his left eye made him throw himself to the right. A sword whisked through the air where his neck would have been. Aram’s sword. The onetime Tinker had taken wounds, too. Blood coated half his face like a strange mask, there were blood-wet rents in his red-striped coat, and his eyes looked almost glazed, like those of a corpse, but he still seemed to be dancing with that blade in his hands. His scent was the scent of death, a death he sought.

“Have you gone mad?” Perrin growled. Steel rang against steel as he blocked that sword away with the head of his hammer. “What are you doing?” He blocked another slice of the blade, tried to grapple the other man, and barely danced back in time to get away with only a gash across his ribs.

“The Prophet explained it to me.” Aram sounded in a daze, yet his sword moved with liquid ease, blows barely diverted with hammer or belt knife as Perrin backed away. All he could do was hope he did not trip over a tent rope or come up against a tent. “Your eyes. You’re really Shadowspawn. It was you who brought the Trollocs to the Two Rivers. He explained it all. Those eyes. I should have known the first time I saw you. You and Elyas with those Shadowspawn eyes. I have to rescue the Lady Faile from you.”

Perrin gathered himself. He could not keep moving ten pounds of steel as quickly as Aram moved a sword that weighed a third of that. Somehow, he had to get close, get beyond that blade blurring with the speed of its motion. He could not do so without getting cut, and likely badly, but if he waited much longer, the man was going to kill him. Something caught his heel, and he staggered backward, nearly falling.

Aram darted in, sword chopping down. Suddenly, he stiffened, eyes going wide, and the blade dropped from his hands. He toppled forward to lie on his face, two arrows jutting from his back. Thirty paces beyond him, a pair of veiled Shaido already had arrows nocked and drawn again. Perrin leaped sideways, behind a green, peaked tent, rolling to his feet quickly. At the corner of the tent, an arrow poked through the canvas, still quivering. Crouching, he made his way past the green tent and then a faded blue one, a low tent of dingy brown, hammer in one hand, knife in the other. This was not the first time he had played this game today. Cautiously, he peeked around the edge of the brown tent. The two Shaido were nowhere to be seen. They might be stalking him in turn, or off hunting someone else already. The game had turned both ways before. He could see Aram, lying where he had fallen. A scrap of breeze ruffled the dark fletchings on the arrows sticking up from his back. Elyas had been right. He should never
have let Aram pick up that sword. He should have sent him away with the carts, or made him go back to the Tinkers. So many things he should have done. Too late, now.

The gates called to him. He glanced over his shoulder. So close, now. Still crouching, he began to run again along those twisting streets, wary of those two Shaido or any others that might be lurking. The sounds of battle were ahead of him, now, coming from north and south, but that did not mean there would be no stragglers.

Rounding a corner only a few paces from the wide-open gates, he found them filled with people. Most were garbed in dirty white robes, but three were veiled
algai’d’siswai
, one of them a hulking fellow who would have dwarfed Lamgwin. That one had Faile’s arm in his fist. She looked as if she had been rolled in the dirt.

With a roar, Perrin rushed forward raising his hammer, and the huge man flung Faile back and ran toward him, spear coming up as he plucked his buckler from his belt.

“Perrin!” Faile screamed.

The big Shaido seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat, and Perrin took advantage of it. His hammer hit the side of the man’s head so hard that his feet left the ground as he fell. Another was right behind him, though, spear ready to stab. Suddenly the man grunted, surprise in the green eyes above his black veil, and dropped to his knees peering over his shoulder at Faile, who stood close. Slowly he fell forward, revealing a ridged steel hilt rising from his back. Perrin looked hastily for the third, and found him also lying on his face, with two wooden knife hilts sticking out of his back. Lacile was leaning against Arrela, weeping. No doubt she had found actually killing someone not so easy as she had supposed.

Alliandre was at the front of the crowd, too, and Maighdin right behind her, carried by a tall young man in white, but Perrin had eyes only for Faile. Letting knife and hammer fall, he stepped over the dead men and gathered her in his arms. The smell of her filled his nose. It filled his head. She smelled strongly of charred wood, of all things, but he could still smell
her
.

“I’ve dreamed of this moment so long,” he breathed.

“I have, too,” she said against his chest, hugging him hard. Her scent was full of joy, but she was trembling.

“Did they hurt you?” he asked gently.

“No. They. . . . No, Perrin, they didn’t hurt me.” There were other smells mixed in with her joy, though, laced through it inextricably. The
dull, aching scent of sadness and the greasy aroma of guilt. Shame, like thousands of hair-fine needles pricking. Well, the man was dead, and a woman had the right to keep her secrets if she wanted.

“All that matters is that you’re alive, and we’re together again,” he told her. “That’s all that matters in the world.”

“All that matters,” she agreed, hugging him even harder. Hard enough that she actually groaned with the effort. But the next instant, she had pushed back and was examining his wounds, fingering open tears in his coat to look at them. “These don’t look too bad,” she said briskly, though all of those emotions still lay tangled in her joy. She reached up to part his hair and tugged until he bent his head so she could examine the slash along his scalp. “You’ll need Healing, of course. How many Aes Sedai did you bring? How did you—? No, that’s of no matter right now. There are enough of them to defeat the Shaido, and that is what’s important.”

“This lot of Shaido,” he said, straightening to look down at her. Light, dirt or no dirt, she was so beautiful. “There’ll be another six or seven thousand spears here in . . .” he glanced at the sun; it seemed it should be higher, “less than two hours, maybe. We need to finish up here and be moving before then, if we can. What’s wrong with Maighdin?” She was limp as a feather pillow against the young man’s chest. Her eyelids were fluttering without opening fully.

“She tired herself out saving our lives,” Faile said, abandoning his injuries and turning to the other people in white. “Aravine, all of you, start gathering up
gai’shain
. Not just those sworn to me. Everybody in white. We leave no one we can reach behind. Perrin, what direction is safest?”

“North,” he told her. “North is safe.”

“Start them moving north,” Faile went on. “Gather carts, wagons, packhorses, and load them with whatever you think we’ll need. Hurry!” People started moving. Running. “No, you stay here, Aldin. Maighdin still needs to be carried. You stay, too, Alliandre. And Arrela. Lacile needs a shoulder to cry on for a while.”

Perrin grinned. Put his wife down in the middle of a house engulfed in flames, and she would calmly set about putting the fire out. She
would
put it out, too. Bending, he cleaned his belt knife on the green-eyed man’s coat before sheathing it. His hammer needed a good wiping, too. He tried not to think about what he was smearing on the man’s coat. The fire was fading from his blood. There was no thrill remaining, only tiredness. His wounds were beginning to throb. “Will you send someone to the fortress
to let Ban and Seonid know they can come out now?” he said as he slipped the hammer’s haft back through the loop on his belt.

Faile stared at him in amazement. “They’re in the
fortress
? How? Why?”

“Alyse didn’t tell you?” He had always been slow to anger until Faile was taken. Now, he felt fury bubbling up in him. Bubbles like white-hot iron. “She said she was taking you with her when she left, but she promised to tell you to go to the fortress when you saw fog on the ridges and heard wolves howl by daylight. I’d swear she said it straight out. Burn me, you can’t trust Aes Sedai an inch.”

Faile glanced toward the western ridge, where the fog still clung thickly, and grimaced. “Not Alyse, Perrin. Galina. If that wasn’t a lie, too. It has to be her. And she has to be Black Ajah. Oh, how I wish I knew her real name.” She moved her left arm and winced. She
had
been hurt. Perrin found himself wanting to kill the big Shaido all over again. Faile did not let her injury slow her, though. “Theril, come out from there. I see you peeking around the gate.”

A skinny young man edged shyly around the corner of the gate. “My father told me to stay and keep an eye on you, my Lady,” he said in an accent so rough that Perrin could barely understand.