Perrin

For a moment he studied what he had written. It did not say enough, but it would have to do. He did not have the right words any more than he had time.

Carefully blotting the damp ink with sand, he folded the pages together. He very nearly wrote “Faile Bashere” on the outside before making it “Faile Aybara.” He realized he did not even know if a wife took her husband’s name in Saldaea; there were places where they did not. Well, she had married him in the Two Rivers; she would have to put up with Two Rivers customs.

He placed the letter in the middle of the mantel over the fireplace—perhaps it would reach her eventually—and adjusted the wide red marriage ribbon behind his collar so it hung down his lapels properly. He was supposed to wear it for seven days, an announcement to everyone who saw him that he was newly wed. “I will try,” he told the letter softly. Faile had tried to tie one in his beard; he wished he had let her.

“Pardon, Lord Perrin?” Ban said, still shifting his feet anxiously. “I didn’t hear.” Aram was chewing his lip, his eyes wide and frightened.

“Time to see to the day’s work,” Perrin said. Perhaps the letter would reach her. Somehow. He took his bow from the table and slung it on his back. Axe and quiver already hung at his belt. “And don’t call me that!”

In front of the inn, the Companions were gathered on their horses, Wil al’Seen with that fool wolfhead banner, the long staff resting on his stirrup iron. How long since Wil had refused to carry the thing? The survivors of those who had joined him the first day jealously guarded the right, now. Wil, with his bow on his back and a sword at his hip, looked proud as an idiot.

As Ban scrambled into his saddle, Perrin heard him say, “The man is as cool as a winter pond. Like ice. Maybe it won’t be so bad today.” He barely paid attention. The women were gathered on the Green.

They made a circle five or six deep around the tall pole where the larger red wolfhead flapped out in a breeze. Five or six deep, shoulder to shoulder, with polearms made from scythes and pitchforks, and wood-axes, and even stout kitchen knives and cleavers.

Throat tight, he mounted Stepper and rode toward them. The children were a tight mass inside the circle of women. All the children in Emond’s Field.

Riding slowly along the ranks, he felt the women’s eyes following him, and the children’s. Fear scent, and worry; the children showed it on their too-pale faces, but all smelled of it. He reined in where Marin al’Vere and Daise Congar and the rest of the Women’s Circle stood together. Alsbet Luhhan had one of her husband’s hammers on her shoulder, and her Whitecloak helmet acquired the night of her rescue sat slightly crooked because of her thick braid. Neysa Ayellin held a long-bladed carving knife firm in her hand, and had two more stuck behind her belt.

“We have planned this out,” Daise said, looking up at him as if she expected an argument and did not intend to allow it. She held a pitchfork, fastened to a pole nearly three feet taller than she, upright in front of her. “If the Trollocs break through anywhere, you men are going to be busy, so we will take the children out. The older ones know what to do, and they’ve all played hide-and-seek in the woods. Just to keep them safe until they can come out.”

The older ones. Boys and girls of thirteen and fourteen had toddlers strapped on their backs, and held smaller children by the hand. Girls older than that stood in the ranks with the women; Bode Cauthon had a wood-axe gripped in both hands, her sister Eldrin a boar spear with a broad point. Boys older were out with the men, or up on the thatched rooftops with their bows. The Tinkers were in with the children. Perrin glanced down at Aram, standing by his stirrup. They would not fight, but each adult had two babes fastened on his or her back and another cradled in the crook of an elbow. Raen and Ila, each with an arm around the other, would not look at him. Just to keep them safe until they could come out.

“I’m sorry.” He had to stop and clear his throat. He had not meant it to come to this. Think as hard as he could, nothing else came that he could have done. Even giving himself to the Trollocs would not have stopped them killing and burning. The end would have been the same. “It was not fair, what I did with Faile, but I had to. Please understand that. I had to.”

“Don’t be silly, Perrin,” Alsbet said, voice emphatic but round face smiling warmly. “I can never abide it when you’re silly. Do you think we would expect you to do any different?”

A heavy cleaver in one hand, Marin reached up to pat his knee with the other. “Any man worth cooking a meal for would have done the same.”

“Thank you.” Light, but he sounded hoarse. In a minute he would be snuffling like a girl. But for some reason he could not smooth his voice. They must think him an idiot. “Thank you. I shouldn’t have fooled you, but she’d not have gone if she suspected.”

“Oh, Perrin.” Marin laughed. She actually laughed, with all they faced, and smelling of fear as she did; he wished he had half her courage. “We knew what you were up to before you ever put her on her horse, and I am not sure she didn’t as well. Women do find themselves doing what they don’t want just to please you men. Now you go on and do what you have to. This is Women’s Circle business,” she added firmly.

Somehow he managed to smile back at her. “Yes, mistress,” he said, knuckling his forehead. “Beg pardon. I know enough to keep my nose out of that.” The women around her laughed in soft amusement as he turned Stepper away.

Ban and Tell were riding right behind him, he realized, with the rest of the Companions strung out after Wil and the banner. He motioned the pair to come up beside him. “If things go badly today,” he said when they were on either side of him, “the Companions are to come back here and help the women.”

“But—”

He cut Tell’s protest short. “You do what I say! If it goes wrong, you get the women and children out! You hear me?” They nodded; reluctantly, but they did it.

“What about you?” Ban asked quietly.

Perrin ignored him. “Aram, you stick with the Companions.”

Striding along between Stepper and Tell’s shaggy horse, the Tinker did not even look up. “I go where you go.” He said it simply, but his tone left no room for argument; he was going to do as he wanted whatever Perrin said. Perrin wondered if real lords ever had problems like this.

At the west end of the Green, the Whitecloaks were all mounted, cloaks with the golden sunburst bright, helmets and armor gleaming, lance points shining, a long column of fours that stretched back between the nearest houses. They must have spent half the night polishing. Dain Bornhald and Jaret Byar swung their horses to face Perrin. Bornhald sat straight in his saddle, but he smelled of apple brandy. Byar’s gaunt face twisted with an even deeper rage than usual as he stared at Perrin.

“I thought you would be at your places by now,” Perrin said.

Bornhald frowned at his horse’s mane, not answering. After a moment, Byar spat, “We are leaving here, Shadowspawn.” An angry mutter rose from the Companions, but the hollow-eyed man ignored them as he did Aram’s reaching over his shoulder to his sword hilt. “We will cut our way back to Watch Hill through your friends and rejoin the rest of our men.”

Leaving. Over four hundred soldiers, leaving. Whitecloaks, but mounted soldiers, not farmers, soldiers who had agreed—Bornhald had agreed!—to support the Two Rivers men wherever the fighting was hottest. If Emond’s Field was to have any chance at all, he had to hang on to these men. Stepper tossed his head and snorted as if catching his rider’s mood. “Do you still believe I’m a Darkfriend, Bornhald? How many attacks have you seen so far? Those Trollocs have tried to kill me as much as anybody else.”

Bornhald raised his head slowly, eyes haunted and at the same time half-glazed. Hands in steel-backed gauntlets flexed on his reins unconsciously. “Do you think I do not know by now that these defenses were prepared without you? It was none of your doing, yes? I will not keep my men here to watch you feed your own villagers to the Trollocs. Will you dance atop a pile of thei

r bodies when it is done, Shadowspawn? Not ours! I mean to live long enough to see you brought to justice!”

Perrin patted Stepper’s neck to quiet the stallion. He had to keep these men. “You want me? Very well. When it’s over, when the Trollocs are done, I’ll not resist if you try to arrest me.”

“No!” Ban and Tell shouted together, and growls built behind them from the others. Aram peered up at Perrin, stricken.

“An empty promise,” Bornhald sneered. “You mean everyone to die here save yourself!”

“You’ll never know if you run away, will you?” Perrin made his voice hard and contemptuous. “I will keep my promise, but if you run, you might never find me again. Run, if you want! Run, and try to forget what happens here! All your talk of protecting people from Trollocs. How many died at Trolloc hands after you came? My family wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last. Run! Or stay, if you can remember you’re men. If you need to find the courage, look at the women, Bornhald. Any one of them is braver than the whole lot of you Whitecloaks!”

Bornhald shook as though every word were a blow; Perrin thought the man might fall out of his saddle. Swaying upright, Bornhald stared at him. “We will remain,” he said hoarsely.

“But, my Lord Bornhald,” Byar protested.

“Clean!” Bornhald roared at him. “If we must die here, we will die clean!” He wrenched his head back to Perrin, spittle on his lips. “We will remain. But at the last I will see you dead, Shadowspawn! For my family, for my father, I—will—see—you—dead!” Sawing his horse around roughly, he cantered back to his white-cloaked column. Byar bared his teeth in a wordless snarl at Perrin before following.

“You do not mean to keep that promise?” Aram said anxiously. “You cannot.”

“I have to check everyone,” Perrin said. Small chance he would live long enough to keep it. “There isn’t much time.” He booted Stepper in the flanks and the horse leaped forward, toward the west end of the village.

Behind the sharp stakes facing the Westwood, men crouched with their spears and halberds and polearms fashioned by Haral Luhhan, who was there in his blacksmith’s vest with a scythe blade on the end of an eight-foot shaft. Behind them stood the men with bows in ranks broken by four catapults, Abell Cauthon walking along slowly to speak to each man.

Perrin reined in beside Abell. “Word is they’re coming from north and south,” he said quietly, “but keep a sharp eye.”

“We’ll watch. And I’m ready to send half my men wherever they are needed. They’ll not find Two Rivers folk easy meat.” Abell’s grin was reminiscent of his son’s.

To Perrin’s embarrassment, the men raised a ragged cheer as he rode by, with the Companions and the banner at his heels: “Goldeneyes! Goldeneyes!” and now and then a “Lord Perrin!” He knew he should have stamped harder on that in the beginning.

To the south, Tam had charge, more grim-faced than Abell and striding almost like a Warder, hand resting on his sword hilt. That wolfish, deadly grace looked strange on the blocky, gray-haired farmer. Yet his words to Perrin were not so different from Abell’s. “We Two Rivers folk are a tougher lot than most know,” he said quietly. “Don’t you worry we will not do ourselves proud today.”

Alanna was at one of the six catapults here, fussing over a large stone being lifted into the cup on the end of the thick arm. Ihvon sat his horse near her in his Warder’s color-changing cloak, slender as a steel blade and alert as a hawk; there was no doubt he had chosen his ground—wherever Alanna was—and his fight—to bring her out alive whatever. He barely looked at Perrin. But the Aes Sedai paused, hands hovering over the stone, eyes following him as he passed. He could all but feel her weighing and measuring and judging. Those cheers followed him, too.

Where the hedge of stakes ran beyond the few houses east of the Winespring Inn, Jon Thane and Samel Crawe had charge between them. Perrin told them what he had Abell, and once again got much the same reply. Jon, in a mail shirt with holes rusted through in several places, had seen the smoke of his mill burning, and Samel, with his horse face and long nose, was sure he had seen the smoke of his farm. Neither expected an easy day, but both wore stony determination like cloaks.

It was to the north that Perrin had decided to make his fight. Fingering the ribbon hanging down one lapel, he peered in the direction of Watch Hill, the direction Faile had gone, and wondered why he had chosen the northside. Fly free, Faile. Fly free, my heart. He supposed it was good a place to die as any.

Bran supposedly was in charge here, in his steel cap and disc-sewn metal jerkin, but he stopped checking the men along the hedge to give Perrin as much of a bow as his girth would allow. Gaul and Chiad stood ready, heads wrapped in shoufa and faces hidden to the eyes behind black veils. Side by side, Perrin noted; whatever had passed between them, it seemed to outweigh their clans’ blood feud. Loial had a pair of wood-axes, dwarfed in his huge hands; his tufted ears thrust forward fiercely, and his wide face was grim.

Do you think I would run away? he had said when Perrin suggested he could slip off into the night after Faile. His ears had dropped with weariness and hurt. I came with you, Perrin, and I will stay until you go. And then he had laughed suddenly, a deep booming sound that almost rattled the dishes. Perhaps someone will even tell a story of me, one day. We do not go in for such things, but there could be an Ogier hero, I suppose. A joke, Perrin. I made a joke. Laugh. Come, we will tell each other jokes, and laugh, and think of Faile flying free.

“It is no joke, Loial,” Perrin murmured as he rode along the lines of men, trying not to listen to their cheers. “You are a hero whether you want to be or not.” The Ogier gave him a tight, wide-mouthed grin before setting his eyes back on the cleared ground beyond the hedge. White-striped sticks marked hundred-pace intervals out to five hundred; beyond that lay quilted fields, tabac and barley, most trampled in earlier attacks, and hedges and low stone fences, and copses of leatherleaf, pine and oak.

So many faces Perrin knew in those waiting ranks of men. Stout Eward Candwin and lantern-jawed Paet al’Caar with spears. White-haired Buel Dowtry, the fletcher, stood with the bowmen, of course. There was stocky, gray-haired Jac al’Seen and his bald cousin Wit, and gnarled Flann Lewin, a lanky beanpole like all of his male kin. Jaim Torfinn and Hu Marwin, among the first to ride after him; they had felt too uncomfortable to join the Companions, as if missing the ambush in the Waterwood had opened some gap between them and the others. Elam Dowtry, and Dav Ayellin, and Ewin Finngar. Hari Coplin and his brother Darl, and old Bili Congar. Berin Thane, the miller’s brother, and fat Athan Dearn, and Kevrim al’Azar, whose grandsons had grown sons, and Tuck Padwhin, the carpenter, and … .

Making himself stop counting them, Perrin rode to where Verin stood beside one of the catapults under the watchful eye of Tomas on his gray. The plump, brown-clad Aes Sedai studied Aram a moment before turning her birdlike gaze up to Perrin, one eyebrow raised as if to question why he was bothering her.

“I am a little surprised to see you and Alanna still here,” he told her. “Hunting girls who can learn to channel can’t be worth getting killed. Or keeping a string tied to a ta’veren, either.”

“Is that what we are doing?” Folding her hands at her waist, she tilted her head to one side thoughtfully. “No,” she said at last, “I do not think we could go quite yet. You are a very interesting study, as much as Rand, in your own way. And young Mat. Could I only split myself into three, I would latch one onto each of you and follow you every moment of the day and night even if I had to marry you.”

“I already have a wife.” It felt odd, saying that. Odd, and good. He had a wife, and she was safe.

She shattered his moment of reverie. “Yes, you do. But you do not know what marrying Zarine Bashere means, do you?” She reached up to turn his axe in its loop on his belt, studying it. “When are you going to give this up for the hammer?”

Staring at the Aes Sedai, he reined Stepper back a pace, pulling the axe out of her hands, before h

e knew it. What marrying Faile meant? Give up the axe? What did she mean? What did she know?

“ISAM!” The guttural roar rose like thunder, and Trollocs appeared, each half again as tall as a man and twice as wide, trotting into the fields to halt beyond bowshot, a hulking, blackmailed mass, deep and stretching the length of the village. Thousands of them packed together, huge faces distorted by beaks and snouts, heads with horns or feathered crests, spikes at elbows and shoulders, scythe-curved swords and spiked axes, hooked spears and barbed tridents, a seemingly endless sea of cruel weapons. Behind them, Myrddraal galloped up and down on midnight horses, raven-black cloaks hanging undisturbed as they whirled their mounts.

“ISAM!”

“Interesting,” Verin murmured.

Perrin would not have thought that was the word. This was the first time the Trollocs had shouted anything understandable. Not that he had any idea what it meant.

Smoothing his marriage ribbon, he forced himself to ride calmly to the center of the Two Rivers line. The Companions formed behind him, the breeze lifting the banner with its red wolfhead. Aram had his sword out in both hands. “Be ready!” Perrin called. His voice was steady; he could not believe it.

“ISAM!” And the black tide rolled forward, howling wordlessly.

Faile was safe. Nothing else mattered. He would not let himself see the faces of the men stretched out to either side of him. He heard the same howls drifting from the south. Both sides at once. They had never tried that before. Faile was safe. “At four hundred paces … !” All along the ranks, bows rose together. Closer the howling mass came, long thick legs eating ground. Closer. “Loose!”

The snap of bowstrings was lost in the Trolloc roar, but a goose-fletched hail streaked the sky as it arced out, plunged down into the blackmailed horde. Stones from the catapults erupted in fiery balls and sharp splinters in those seething ranks. Trollocs fell. Perrin saw them go down, trampled beneath boots and hooves. Even some Myrddraal fell. Yet the tidal wave rushed on, closing holes and gaps, apparently undiminished.