At the walls of the inner city paving stones gave way to dirt, shoes and coats to bare feet and bare chests above baggy breeches held up by broad sashes. The folk here dodged no less assiduously, though, for Perrin would not let Stepper slow until they had galloped past the city's outer wall, past the simple stone houses and shops that clustered outside the city proper, into a countryside of scattered farms and thickets and beyond the pull of ta'veren. Only then, breathing almost as hard as his lathered horse, he reined Stepper to a walk.
Loial's ears were stiff with shock. Faile licked her lips and stared from the Ogier to Perrin, whitefaced. “What happened? Was that... him?”
“I don't know,” Perrin lied. I have to go, Rand. You know that. You looked me in the face when I told you, and said I had to do what I thought I must.
“Where are Bain and Chiad?” Faile said. “It will take them an hour to catch up now. I wish they would ride. I offered to buy them horses, and they looked offended. Well, we need to walk the horses anyway after that, to let them cool down.”
Perrin held back from telling her she did not know as much of Aiel as she thought she did. He could see the city walls behind them, and the Stone rearing above like a mountain. He could even make out the sinuous shape on the banner waving over the fortress, and the displaced birds swirling about; neither of the others could have. It was no difficulty at all to see three people running toward them in long, groundeating strides, their flowing ease belying the pace. He did not think he could have run that fast, not for long, but the Aiel had to have maintained their speed from the Stone to be this close behind.
“We'll not have to wait that long,” he said.
Faile frowned back toward the city. “Is that them? Are you certain?” Abruptly the frown shifted to him for a moment, daring him to answer. Asking him had been too much like admitting he was part of her party, of course. “He is very boastful of his eyesight,” she told Loial, “but his memory is not very good. At times I think he would forget to light a candle at night if I did not remind him. I expect he's seen some poor family running from what they think is an earthquake, don't you?”
Loial shifted uncomfortably in his saddle, sighing heavily, and muttered something about humans that Perrin doubted was complimentary. Faile did not notice, of course.
Not too many minutes later, Faile stared at Perrin as the three Aiel drew close enough for her to make out, but she said nothing. In this mood, she was not about to admit he had been right about anything, not if he said the sky was blue. The Aiel were not even breathing hard when they slowed to a halt beside the horses.
“It is too bad it was not a longer run.” Bain shared a smile with Chiad, and both gave Gaul a sly look.
“Else we could have run this Stone Dog into the ground,” Chiad said as if finishing the other woman's sentence. “That is why Stone Dogs take their vows not to retreat. Stone bones and stone heads make them too heavy to run.”
Gaul took no offense, though Perrin noticed he stood where he could keep an eye on Chiad. “Do you know why Maidens are so often used as scouts, Perrin? Because they can run so far. And that comes from being afraid some man might want to marry them! A Maiden will run a hundred miles to avoid that.”
“Very wise of them,” Faile said tartly. “Do you need to rest?” she asked the Aiel women, and looked surprised when they denied it. She turned to Loial anyway. “Are you ready to go on? Good. Find me this Waygate, Loial. We have stayed here too long. If you let a stray puppy stay close to you, it begins to think you will take care of it, and that will never do.”
“Faile,” Loial protested, “are you not carrying this too far?”
“I will carry it as far as I must, Loial. The Waygate?”
Ears sagging, Loial puffed out a heavy breath and turned his horse eastward again. Perrin let him and Faile get a dozen paces ahead before he and Gaul followed. He must play by her rules, but he would play them at least as well as she.
The farms, cramped little places with rough stone houses Perrin would not have used to shelter animals, grew more scattered the farther east they rode, and the thickets smaller, until there were neither farms nor thickets, only a rolling, hilly grassland. Grass as far as the eye could see, unbroken except for patches of bush here and there on a hill.
Horses dotted the green slopes, too, in clumps of a dozen or herds of a hundred, the famed Tairen stock. Large or small, each gathering of horses was under the eyes of a shoeless boy or two, mounted bareback. The boys carried longhandled whips that they used to keep the horses together, or turn them, cracking the whips expertly to turn a stray without ever coming close to the animal's hide. They kept their charges clear of the strangers, moving them back if necessary, but they watched the passage of this odd company — two humans and an Ogier mounted, plus three of the fierce Aiel that stories said had taken the Stone — with the bold curiosity of the young.
It was all a pleasing sight to Perrin. He liked horses. Part of the reason he had asked to be apprenticed to Master Luhhan had been the chance to work with horses, not that there were so many as this in Emond's Field, nor so fine.
Not so Loial. The Ogier began muttering to himself, louder the farther they rode across the grassy hills, until at last he burst out in a deep bass rumble. “Gone! All gone, and for what? Grass. Once this was an Ogier grove. We did no great works here, not to compare with Manetheren, or the city you call Caemlyn, but enough that a grove was planted. Trees of every kind, from every land and place. The Great Trees, towering a hundred spans into the sky. All tended devotedly, to remind my people of the stedding they had left to build things for men. Men think it is the stonework we prize, but that is a trifling thing, learned during the Long Exile, after the Breaking. It is the trees we love. Men thought Manetheren my people's greatest triumph, but we knew it to be the grove there. Gone, now. Like this. Gone, and it will not come again.”
Loial stared at the hills, bare save for grass and horses, with a hard face, his ears drawn back tight to his head. He smelled of... fury. Peaceful, most stories called Ogier, almost as pacific as the Traveling People, but some, a few, named them implacable enemies. Perrin had only seen Loial angry once before. Perhaps he had been angry last night, defending those children. Looking at Loial's face, an old saying came back to him. “To anger the Ogier and pull the mountains down on your head.” Everyone took its meaning as to try to do something that was impossible. Perrin thought maybe the meaning had changed with the years. Maybe in the beginning, it had been “Anger the Ogier, and you pull the mountains down on your head.” Difficult to do, but deadly if accomplished. He did not think he would ever want Loial — gentle, fumbling Loial with his broad nose always in a book — to become angry with him.
It was Loial who took the lead once they reached the site of the vanished Ogier grove, bending their path a little southward. There were no landmarks, but he was sure of his direction, surer with every pace of the horses. Ogier could feel a Waygate, sense it somehow, find it as certainly as a bee could find the hive. When Loial finally dismounted, the grass was little more than kneehigh on him. There was only a thick clump of brush to be seen, taller than most, leafy shrubs as tall as the Ogier. He ripped it all away almost regretfully, stacking it to one side. “Perhaps the boys with the horses can use it for firewood when it dries.”
And there was the Waygate.
Rearing against the side of the hill, it appeared more a length of gray wall than a gate, and the wall of a palace at that, thickly carved in leaves and vines so finely done that they seemed almost as alive as the bushes had been. Three thousand years at least it had stood there, but not a trace of weathering marred its surface. Those leaves could have rippled with the next breeze.
For a moment they all stared at it silently, until Loial took a deep breath and put his hand on the one leaf that was different from any other on the Waygate. The trefoil leaf of Avendesora, the fabled Tree of Life. Until the moment his huge hand touched it, it seemed as much a part of the carving as all the rest, but it came away easily.
Faile gasped loudly, and even the Aiel murmured. The air was full of the smell of unease; there was no saying who it came from. All of them, perhaps.
The stone leaves did seem to stir from an unfelt breeze now; they took a tinge of green, of life. Slowly a split appeared down the middle, and the halves of the Waygate opened out, revealing not the hill behind, but a dull shimmering that faintly reflected their images.
“Once, it is said,” Loial murmured, “the Waygates shone like mirrors, and those who walked the Ways walked through the sun and the sky. Gone, now. Like this grove.”
Hastily pulling one of the filled polelanterns from his packhorse, Perrin got it alight. “It is too hot out here,” he said. “A little shade would be good.” He booted Stepper toward the Waygate. He thought he heard Faile gasp again.
The dun stallion balked, approaching his own dim reflection, but Perrin heeled him onward. Slowly, he remembered. It should be done slowly. The horse's nose touched its image hesitantly, then merged in as though walking into a mirror. Perrin moved closer to himself, touched... Icy cold slid along his skin, enveloping him hair by hair; time stretched out.
The cold vanished like a pricked bubble, and he was in the midst of endless blackness, the light of his polelantern a crushed pool around him. Stepper and the packhorse whickered nervously.
Gaul stepped through calmly and began preparing another lantern. Behind him was what seemed like a sheet of smoked glass. The others were visible out there, Loial getting back on his horse, Faile gathering her reins, all of them creeping, barely moving. Time was different inside the Ways.
“Faile is upset with you,” Gaul said once he had his lantern alight. It did not add much illumination. The darkness drank in light, swallowed it. “She seems to think you have broken some sort of agreement. Bain and Chiad... Do not let them get you alone. They mean to teach you a lesson, for Faile's sake, and you will not sit on that animal so easily if they manage what they plan.”
“I agreed to nothing, Gaul. I do what she's forced me to do through trickery. We will have to follow Loial as she wants soon enough, but I mean to take the lead for as long as I can.” He pointed to a thick white line under Stepper's hooves. Broken and heavily pitted, it led off ahead, vanishing in the blackness only a few feet away. “That leads to the first guidepost. We will need to wait there for Loial to read it and decide which bridge to take, but Faile can follow us that far.”
“Bridge,” Gaul murmured thoughtfully. “I know that word. There is water in here?”
“No. It isn't exactly that kind of bridge. They look the same, sort of, but... Maybe Loial can explain it.”
The Aielman scratched his head. “Do you know what you are doing, Perrin?”
“No,” Perrin admitted, “but there's no reason for Faile to know that.”
Gaul laughed. “It is fun to be so young,
