Hopper fell from the air, landing gracefully on the ground. Always be ready, the wolf sent. Always, but especially when you move. An image of a careful wolf, testing the air before moving out into an open pasture.
“I understand.”
But do not come too strongly, Hopper chided.
Immediately, Perrin forced himself to remember Faile and the place where he slept. His home. He…faded slightly. His skin didn’t grow translucent, and the wolf dream stayed the same, but he felt more exposed.
Good, Hopper sent. Always ready, but never holding on too strong. Like carrying a pup in your jaws.
“That’s not going to be an easy balance,” Perrin said.
Hopper gave a slightly confused scent. Of course it was difficult.
Perrin smiled. “What now?”
Running, Hopper sent. Then more practice.
The wolf dashed away, zipping in a blur of gray and silver off toward the road. Perrin followed. He sensed determination from Hopper—a scent that was oddly similar to the way Tam smelled when training the refugees to fight. That made Perrin smile.
They ran down the road, and Perrin practiced the balance of not being in the dream too strongly, yet being ready to solidify his sense of self at any moment. Occasionally Hopper would attack him, trying to throw him from the wolf dream. They continued until Hopper—suddenly—stopped running.
Perrin took a few extra steps, surging ahead of the wolf, before stopping. There was something in front of him. A translucent violet wall that cut directly through the roadway. It extended up into the sky and distantly to both the right and the left.
“Hopper?” Perrin asked. “What is this?”
Wrongness, Hopper sent. It should not be here. The wolf smelled angry.
Perrin stepped forward and raised a hand toward the surface, but hesitated. It looked like glass. He’d never seen anything like this in the wolf dream. Might it be like the bubbles of evil? He looked up at the sky.
The wall flashed suddenly and was gone. Perrin blinked, stumbling back. He glanced at Hopper. The wolf sat on his haunches, staring at the place where the wall had been. Come, Young Bull, the wolf finally sent, standing. We will practice in another place.
He loped away. Perrin looked back down the road. Whatever the wall had been, it had left no visible sign of its existence.
Troubled, Perrin followed after Hopper.
“Burn me, where are those archers!” Rodel Ituralde climbed up to the top of the hillside. “I wanted them formed up on the forward towers an hour ago to relieve the crossbowmen!”
Before him, the battle clanged and screamed and grunted and thumped and roared. A band of Trollocs had surged across the river, crossing on ford rafts or a crude floating bridge fashioned from log rafts. Trollocs hated crossing water. It took a lot to get them over.
Which was why this fortification was so useful. The hillside sloped directly down to the only ford of reasonable size in leagues. To the north, Trollocs boiled through a pass out of the Blight and ran right into the River Arinelle. When they could be forced across, they faced the hillside, which had been dug with trenches, piled with bulwarks and set with archer towers at the top. There was no way to reach the city of Maradon from the Blight except by passing over this hill.
It was an ideal position for holding back a much larger force, but even the best fortifications could be overrun, particularly when your men were tired from weeks of fighting. The Trollocs had crossed and fought their way up the slope under a hail of arrows, falling into the trenches, having difficulty surmounting the high bulwarks.
The hillside had a flat area at the top, where Ituralde had his command position, in the upper camp. He called orders as he looked down on the woven mass of trenches, bulwarks and towers. The Trollocs were dying to pikemen behind one of the bulwarks. Ituralde watched until the last Trolloc—an enormous, ram-faced beast—roared and died with three pikes in its gut.
It looked as if another surge was coming, the Myrddraal driving another mass of Trollocs through the pass. Enough bodies had fallen in the river that it was clogged for the moment, running red, the carcasses providing a footing for those running up behind.
“Archers!” Ituralde bellowed. “Where are those bloody—”
A company of archers finally ran past, some of the reserves he’d held back. Most of them had the coppery skin of Domani, though there were a few stray Taraboners mixed in. They carried a wide variety of bows: narrow Domani longbows, serpentine Saldaean shortbows scavenged from guard posts or villages, even a few tall Two Rivers longbows.
“Lidrin,” Ituralde called. The young, hard-eyed officer hurried across the hillside to him. Lidrin’s brown uniform was wrinkled and dirty at the knees, not because he was undisciplined, but because there were times when his men needed him more than his laundry did.
“Go with those archers to the towers,” Ituralde said. “Those Trollocs are going to try another push. I do not want another fist breaking through to the top, hear me? If they seize our position and use it against us, I’m going to have a rotten morning.”
Lidrin didn’t smile at the comment, as he once might have. He didn’t smile much at all anymore; usually only when he got to kill a Trolloc. He saluted, turning to jog after the archers.
Ituralde turned and looked down the back side of the hill. The lower camp was set up there, in the shadow of the steep hillside. This hill had been a natural formation, once, but the Saldaeans had built it up over the years, with one long slope extending toward the river and a steeper one on the opposite side. In the lower camp, his troops could sleep and eat, and their supplies could be protected, all sheltered from enemy arrows by the steep hillside upon which Ituralde now stood.
Both of his camps, upper and lower, were patchwork things. Some of the tents had been purchased from Saldaean villages, some were of Domani make, and dozens had been brought in by gateway from all over the land. A large number of them were enormous Cairhienin things with striped patterns. They kept the rain off his men, and that was enough.
The Saldaeans certainly knew how to build fortifications. If only Ituralde had been able to persuade them to leave their hiding place in the city of Maradon and come help.
“Now,” Ituralde said, “where in—”
He cut off as something darkened the sky. He barely had time to curse and duck away as a group of large objects rained down, arcing high to fall on the upper camp, eliciting howls of pain and confusion. Those weren’t boulders: they were corpses. The hulking bodies of dead Trollocs. The Shadowspawn army had finally set up their trebuchets.
A part of Ituralde was impressed that he’d driven them to it. The siege equipment had undoubtedly been brought to assault Maradon, which was a little to the south. Setting up the trebuchets across the ford to assault Ituralde’s lines instead not only would slow the Shadowspawn, but would expose their trebuchets to his counterfire.
He hadn’t expected them to hurl carcasses. He cursed as the sky darkened again, more bodies falling, knocking down tents, crushing soldiers.
“Healers!” Ituralde bellowed. “Where are those Asha’man?” He’d pushed the Asha’man hard, since this siege had begun. To the brink of exhaustion. Now he held them back, using them only when Trolloc assaults got too close to the upper camp.
“Sir!” A young messenger with dirt under his fingernails scrambled up from the front lines. His Domani face was ashen, and he was still too young to grow a proper mustache. “Captain Finsas reports the Shadowspawn army moving trebuchets into range. There are sixteen by his count.”
“Let Captain Finsas know that his bloody timing could be better,” Ituralde growled.
“I’m sorry, my Lord. They rolled them down through the pass before we figured out what was going on. The initial volley hit our watchpost. Lord Finsas himself was wounded.”
Ituralde nodded; Rajabi was arriving to take command of the upper camp and organize the wounded. Below, a lot of bodies had hit the lower camp, too. The trebuchets could get the height and range to launch over the hill and fall down on his men in their previously sheltered area. He’d have to pull the lower camp back, farther across the plain toward Maradon, which would delay response times. Bloody ashes.
I never used to swear this much, Ituralde thought. It was that boy, the Dragon Reborn. Rand al’Thor had given Ituralde promises, some spoken, some implied. Promises to protect Arad Doman from the Seanchan. Promises that Ituralde could live, rather than die trapped by the Seanchan. Promises to give him something to do, something important, something vital. Something impossible.
Hold back the Shadow. Fight until help arrived.
The sky darkened again, and Ituralde ducked into the command pavilion, which had a wooden roof as a precaution against siege weapons. He’d feared sprayshot of smaller rocks, not carcasses. The men scattered to help pull the wounded down to the relative safety of the lower camp, and from there across the plain toward Maradon. Rajabi led the effort. The lumbering man had a neck as thick as a ten-year-grown ash and arms nearly as wide. He now hobbled as he walked, his left leg hurt in the fighting and amputated beneath the knee. Aes Sedai had Healed him as best he could, and he walked on a peg. He’d refused to retire through gateways with the badly injured, and Ituralde hadn’t forced him. You didn’t throw away a good officer because of one wound.
A young officer winced as a bloated carcass thumped against the top of the pavilion. The officer—Zhell—didn’t have the coppery skin of a Domani, though he wore a very Domani mustache and a beauty mark on his cheek in the shape of an arrow.
They could not hold against Trollocs here for much longer, not with the numbers they were fielding. Ituralde would have to fall back, point by point, farther into Saldaea, farther toward Arad Doman. Odd, how he was always retreating toward his homeland. First from the south, now from the northeast.
Arad Doman would be crushed between the Seanchan and the Trollocs. You’d better keep your word, boy.
He couldn’t retreat into Maradon, unfortunately. The Saldaeans there had made it quite clear they considered Ituralde—and the Dragon Reborn—to be invaders. Bloody fools. At least he had a chance to destroy those siege engines.
Another body hit the top of the command pavilion, but the roof held. From the stink—and, in some cases, splash—of those deceased Trollocs, they’d not chosen the newly dead for this assault. Confident that his officers were seeing to their duties—now was not the time to interfere—Ituralde clasped his hands behind him. Seeing him, soldiers both inside and out of the pavilion stood a little straighter. The best of plans lasted only until the first arrow hit, but a determined, unyielding commander could bring order to chaos by the way he held himself.
Overhead, the storm boiled, clouds of silver and black like a blackened pot hanging above a cook fire, bits of steel shining through at the edges of the crusted soot. It was unnatural. Let his men see that he did not fear it, even when it hailed corpses upon them.
Wounded were carried away, and men in the lower camp began to break it down, preparing to move it farther back. He kept his archers and crossbowmen firing, pikemen ready along the bulwarks. He had a sizable cavalry, but couldn’t use them here.