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 hideyhole, 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
