“Well, Wil?” Perrin said. “Do you want to go to Emond's Field? You can shave, and maybe find a girl to kiss while these Trollocs have supper tonight.”
Wil flushed a dark red. “I will be wherever you are tonight, Aybara,” he said in a hard voice.
“Nobody means to go home if there are Trollocs still about, Perrin,” Kenley added.
Perrin looked around at the others, meeting only agreeing nods. “What of you, Luc? We would be pleased to have a lord and Hunter for the Horn with us. You could show us how it is done.”
Luc smiled fractionally, a gash on stone that never came close to those cold blue eyes. “I regret the defenses of Emond's Field still need me. I must see to protecting your people, should the Trollocs come there in greater numbers than thirty. Or the Children of the Light. My Lady Faile?” He held out a hand to assist her in mounting, but she shook her head.
“I will remain with Perrin, Lord Luc.”
“A pity,” he murmured, shrugging as if to say there was no accounting for women's taste. Tugging on his wolfembroidered gauntlets, he swung into the black stallion's saddle smoothly. “Good luck to you, Master Goldeneyes. I do hope you all have good luck.” With a halfbow to Faile, he whirled his tall horse showily and spurred him to a gallop that forced some of the men to leap out of his way.
Faile frowned at Perrin in a manner that suggested a lecture on rudeness when they were alone. He listened to Luc's horse until he could hear it no more, then turned to Gaul. “Can we get ahead of the Trollocs? Be waiting somewhere before they reach wherever they mean to stop?”
“The distances are right if we start now,” Gaul said. “They are moving in a straight line, and not hurrying. There is a Nightrunner with them. It will be easier surprising them in their blankets than facing them awake.” He meant that the Two Rivers men might do better; there was no fear smell on him.
There was certainly fear smell on some of the others, yet no one suggested that a confrontation with Trollocs up and alert, and a Myrddraal to boot, might not be the best plan. They broke camp as soon as he gave the order, dousing the fires and scattering the ashes, gathering their few pots and mounting their illassorted horses and ponies. With the sentries in — Perrin reminded himself to have that word with them — they numbered nearly seventy. Surely enough to ambush thirty Trollocs. Ban al'Seen and Dannil each still led half — it seemed the way to keep arguments down — with Bili al'Dai and Kenley and others each heading ten or so. Wil, too; he was not too bad a fellow usually, when he could keep his mind off the girls.
Faile rode Swallow close beside Stepper as they started south with the Aiel running ahead. “You truly do not trust him at all,” she said. “You think he is a Darkfriend.”
“I trust you and my bow and my axe,” he told her. Her face looked sad and pleased at the same time, but it was the simple truth.
For two hours Gaul led them south before turning into the Waterwood, a tangle of towering oak and pine and leatherleaf, bushy bay trees and coneshaped redoil trees, tall roundtopped ash and sweetberry and black willow, with thickets of vinewoven brush below. A thousand squirrels chittered on the branches, and thrushes and finches and redwings darted everywhere. Perrin smelled deer and rabbits, too, and foxes. Tiny streams abounded, and rushbordered pools and ponds dotted the forest, often shaded but sometimes open, from less than ten paces across to a few almost fifty. The ground seemed sodden after all the rain it had received, squelching under the horses' hooves..
Between a large, willowringed pond and a narrow rivulet a pace wide, perhaps two miles into the wood, Gaul halted. Here the Trollocs would come if they continued as they had been. The three Aiel melted into the trees to make sure of that, and bring back warning of their approach.
Leaving Faile and a dozen men to watch the horses, Perrin spread the others out in a narrow curve, a cup into which the Trollocs should march. After making certain each man was well hidden and knew what he was to do, he placed himself at the bottom of the cup, beside an oak with a trunk thicker than he was tall.
Easing his axe in its belt loop, he nocked an arrow and waited. A light breeze blew in his face, swelling and falling. He should be able to smell the Trollocs long before they came in sight. They should be coming right at him. Touching the axe again, he waited. Minutes passed. An hour. More. How long before the Shadowspawn appeared? Much longer in this damp and bowstrings would need to be changed.
The birds vanished a moment before the squirrels went silent. Perrin drew a deep breath, and frowned. Nothing. On that breeze he should surely be able to smell Trollocs as soon as the animals sensed them.
A vagrant gust brought him the putrid stink, like centuriesold sweat and rot. Whirling, he shouted, “They're behind us! Rally to me! Two Rivers to me!” Behind. The horses. “Faile!”
Screams and shouts erupted from every side, howls and savage cries. A ramhorned Trolloc leaped into the open twenty paces away, raising a long curved bow. Perrin drew fletchings to ear and fired in one smooth motion, reaching for another shaft as soon as his arrow cleared bow. His broadhead point took the Trolloc between its eyes; it bellowed once as it fell. And its arrow, the size of a small spear, took Perrin in the side like a hammerblow.
Gasping with shock, he hunched over, dropping bow and fresh arrow alike. Pain spread out in sheets from the blackfletched shaft; it quivered when he drew breath, and every quiver shot out new pain.
Two more Trollocs leaped over their dead companion, wolf snout and goat horns, blackmailed shapes half again as tall as Perrin and twice as broad. Baying, they rushed at him, curved swords upraised.
Forcing himself upright, he gritted his teeth and snapped the thumbthick arrow off short, pulled his axe free and rushed to meet them. Howling, he realized dimly. Howling with rage that filmed his eyes red. They towered over him, their armor all spikes at elbows and shoulders, but he swung his axe in a frenzy, as if trying to cut down a tree with every blow. For Adora. For Deselle. “My mother!” he screamed. “Burn you! My mother!”
Abruptly he realized he was hacking at bloody shapes on the ground. Growling, he made himself stop, shaking with the effort as much as with the pain in his side. There was less shouting now. Fewer screams. Was anyone left but him? “Rally to me! Two Rivers to me!”
“Two Rivers!” someone shouted frantically, off through the damp woods, and then another, “Two Rivers!”
Two. Only two. “Faile!” he cried. “Oh, Light, Faile!”
A flicker of black flowing through the trees announced a Myrddraal before he could see it clearly, snakelike black armor down its chest, inky cloak hanging undisturbed by its running. As it came closer, it slowed to a sinuous, assured walk; it knew he was hurt, knew him for easy meat. Its palefaced, eyeless stare stabbed him with fear. “Faile?” it said mockingly. Its voice made the name sound like burned leather crumbling. “Your Faile was delicious.”
Roaring, Perrin hurled himself at it. A blackbladed sword turned his first stroke. And his second. His third. The thing's slugwhite face became fixed with concentration, but it moved like a viper, like lightning. For the moment he had it on the defensive. For the moment. Blood trickled down his side; his side burned like a forgefire. He could not keep this up. And when his strength failed, that sword would find his heart.
His foot slipped in the mud churned up beneath his boots, the Fade's blade drew back — and a blurring sword halfsevered the eyeless head, so it fell over on one shoulder in a fountain of black blood. Stabbing blindly, the Myrddraal staggered forward, stumbling, refusing to die completely, still instinctively trying to kill.
Perrin scrambled out of its path, but his attention was all for the man coolly wiping his blade with a fistful of leaves. Ihvon's colorshifting cloak hung down his back. “Alanna sent me to find you. I almost didn't, the way you have been moving, but seventy horses do leave tracks.” The dark, slender Warder seemed as composed as if he were lighting his pipe before a fireplace. “The Trollocs were not linked to that...” He indicated the Myrddraal with his sword; it had fallen, but still stabbed randomly. “...more's the pity, but if you can gather your people together, they might not be willing to try you without one of the Faceless to goad them. I would estimate about a hundred, to begin. A few less, now. You have bloodied them some.” He began a calm survey of the shadows beneath the trees, only the blade in his hand indicating anything out of the ordinary.
For a bare moment Perrin gaped. Alanna wanted him? She had sent Ihvon? Just in time to save his life. Shaking himself, he raised his voice again. “Two Rivers to me! For the love of the Light, rally to me! Here! Rally! Here!”
This time he kept it up until familiar faces appeared, stumbling through the trees. Bloodstreaked faces, often as not. Shocked, staring faces. Some men halfsupported others, and some had lost their bows. The Aiel were among them, apparently unhurt except that Gaul limped slightly.
“They did not come as we expected” was all the Aielman said. The night was colder than we expected. There was more rain than we expected. That was how he said it.
Faile seemed to materialize with the horses. With half the horses, including Stepper and Swallow, and nine of the twelve men he had left with her. A scrape marred one cheek, but she was alive. He tried to hug her, but she pushed his arms away, muttering angrily over the brokenoff arrow even while she gently pulled his coat away from the thick shaft in an effort to examine where it had gone in.
Perrin studied the men around him. They had stopped coming now, yet there were faces missing. Kenley Ahan. Bili al'Dai. Teven Marwin. He made himself name the missing, made himself count them. Twentyseven. Twentyseven not there. “Did you bring all the wounded?” he asked dully. “Is anybody left out there?” Faile's hand trembled on his side; her expression as she frowned at his wound was a blend of worry and fury. She had a right to be angry. He should never have gotten her into this.
“Only the dead,” Ban al'Seen said in a voice as leaden as his face.
Wil looked to be frowning at something just out of sight. “I saw Kenley,” he said. “His head was in the crook of an oak, but the rest of him was down at the foot. I saw him. His cold won't bother him now.” He sneezed, and looked startled.
Perrin sighed heavily, and wished he had not; pain shooting up his side clenched his teeth. Faile, a greenandgold silk scarf wadded in her hand, was trying to pull his shirt out of his breeches. He pushed her hands away despite her scowl; there was no time for tending wounds now. “Wounded on the horses,” he said when he could speak. “Ihvon, will they attack us?” The forest seemed too still. “Ihvon?” The Warder appeared, leading a dark gray gelding with a fierce eye. Perrin repeated his question.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. On their own, Trollocs kill whomever is easiest. Without a Halfman, they would probably rather find a farm than someone who might put arrows in them. Make sure everyone who can stand upright carries a bow with an arrow nocked even if they cannot draw it. They may decide the price is to
