The sea boiled, churning. Perrin turned. He’d kept his hammer, somehow, and he raised it to face Slayer.
The waters continued to move, but nothing came from them. Suddenly, behind him, the hill split in half. Perrin felt something heavy hit him in the shoulder, like a punch. He fell to his knees, twisting to see the hillside broken in two, Slayer standing on the other side, nocking another arrow to his bow.
Perrin shifted, desperate, pain belatedly flaring up his side and across his body.
"All I’m saying is that battles are being fought", Mandevwin said, "and we are not there".
"Battles are always being fought somewhere", Vanin replied, leaning back against the wall outside a warehouse in Tar Valon. Faile listened to them with half an ear. "We’ve fought our share of them. All I’m saying is that I’m pleased to avoid this particular one".
"People are dying", Mandevwin said, disapproving. "This is not simply a battle, Vanin. It is Tarmon Gai’don itself!"
"Which means nobody is paying us", Vanin said.
Mandevwin sputtered, "Paying . . . to fight the Last Battle . . . You knave! This battle means life itself".
Faile smiled as she looked over the supply ledgers. The two Redarms idled by the doorway as servants wearing the Flame of Tar Valon loaded Faile’s caravan. Behind them, the White Tower rose over the city.
At first, she had been annoyed by the banter, but the way Vanin poked at the other man reminded her of Gilber, one of her father’s quartermasters back in Saldaea.
"Now, Mandevwin", Vanin said, "you hardly sound like a mercenary at all! What if Lord Mat heard you?"
"Lord Mat will fight", said Mandevwin.
"When he has to", Vanin said. "We don’t have to. Look, these supplies are important, right? And someone has to guard them, right? Here we are".
"I just do not see why this job requires us. I should be helping Talmanes lead the Band, and you lot, you should be guarding Lord Mat . . ".
Faile could almost hear the end of that line, the one they were all thinking. You should be guarding Lord Mat from those Seanchan.
The soldiers had taken in stride Mat’s disappearance, then his reappearance with the Seanchan. Apparently, they expected this kind of behavior from "Lord" Matrim Cauthon. Faile had a squad of fifty of the Band’s best, including Captain Mandevwin, Lieutenant Sandip and several Redarms who came highly recommended by Talmanes. None of them knew their true purpose in guarding the Horn of Valere.
She would have brought ten times this number if she could. As it was, fifty was suspicious enough. Those fifty were the Band’s very best, some pulled from command positions. They would have to do.
We’re not going far, Faile thought, checking the next page of the ledgers. She had to look as if she were concerned about the supplies. Why am I so worried?
She needed only to carry the Horn to the Field of Merrilor, now that Cauthon had finally appeared. She’d already run three caravans from other locations using the same guards, so her current job wouldn’t be suspicious in the least.
She’d chosen the Band very deliberately. In the eyes of most, they were just mercenaries, so the least important—and least trustworthy—troops in the army. However, for all of her complaints about Mat—she might not know him well, but the way Perrin spoke of him was enough—he did inspire loyalty in his men. The men who found their way to Cauthon were like him. They tried to hide from duty and preferred gambling and drinking to doing anything useful, but in a pinch they’d each fight like ten men.
At Merrilor, Cauthon would have good reason to check in on Mandevwin and his men. At that point, Faile could give him the Horn. Of course, she also had some members of Cha Faile with her as guards. She wanted some people she knew for certain she could trust.
Nearby, Laras—the stout mistress of the kitchens at Tar Valon—came out of the warehouse, wagging a finger at several of the serving girls. The woman walked to Faile, trailed by a lanky youth with a limp who was carrying a beat-up chest.
"Something for you, my Lady". Laras gestured to the trunk. "The Amyrlin herself added it to your shipment as an afterthought. Something about a friend of hers, from back home?"
"It’s Matrim Cauthon’s tabac", Faile said with a grimace. "When he found that the Amyrlin had a store of Two Rivers leaf left, he insisted upon purchasing it".
"Tabac, at a time like this". Laras shook her head, wiping her fingers on her apron. "I remember that boy. I’ve known a youth or two in my day like him, always skulking around the kitchens like a stray wanting scraps. Someone ought to find something useful for him to do".
"We’re working on it", Faile said as Laras’ servant placed the trunk in Faile’s own wagon. She winced as he let it thump down, then dusted off his hands.
Laras nodded, walking back into her warehouse. Faile rested her fingers on the chest. Philosophers claimed the Pattern did not have a sense of humor. The Pattern, and the Wheel, simply were, they did not care, they did not take sides. However, Faile could not help thinking that somewhere, the Creator was grinning at her. She had left home with her head full of arrogant dreams, a child thinking herself on a grand quest to find the Horn.
Life had knocked those out from under her, leaving her to haul herself back up. She had grown up, had started paying mind to what was really important. And now . . . now the Pattern, with almost casual indifference, dropped the Horn of Valere into her lap.
She removed her hand and pointedly refusing to open the chest. She had the key, delivered to her separately, and she would check to see that the Horn was really in the chest. Not now. Not until she was alone and reasonably certain she was safe.
She climbed into the wagon and rested her feet on the chest.
"I still don’t like it", Mandevwin was saying beside the warehouse.
"You don’t like anything.." Vanin said. "Look, the work we’re doing is important. Soldiers have to eat".
"I suppose that is true", Mandevwin said.
"It is!" a new voice added. Harnan, another Redarm, joined them. Not one of the three, Faile noticed, jumped to help the servants load the caravan. "Eating is wonderful", Harnan said. "And if there is an expert on the subject, Vanin, it is certainly you".
Harnan was a sturdily built man with a wide face and a hawk tattooed on his cheek. Talmanes swore by the man, calling him a veteran survivor of both "the Six-Story Slaughter" and Hinderstap, whatever those were.
"Now, that wounds me, Harnan", Vanin said from behind. "That wounds me badly".
"I doubt it", Harnan said with a laugh. "To wound you badly, an attack would first have to penetrate through fat to reach the muscle. I’m not sure Trolloc swords are long enough for that!"
Mandevwin laughed, and the three of them moved off. Faile went over the last few pages of the ledger, then began to climb down, to call for Setalle Anan. The woman had been acting as her assistant for these caravan runs. As she was climbing down, however, Faile noticed that not all three members of the Band had moved off. Only two of them had. Portly Vanin still stood back there. She saw him, and paused.
Vanin immediately lumbered off toward some of the other soldiers. Had he been watching her?
"Faile! Faile! Aravine says she has finished checking over the manifests for you. We can go, Faile".
Olver scrambled eagerly into the wagon seat. He had insisted on joining the caravan, and the members of the Band had persuaded her to allow it. Even Setalle had suggested it would be wise to bring him. Apparently, they worried that Olver would find his way to the fighting somehow if he wasn’t constantly under their watch. Faile had reluctantly set him to running errands.
"All right, then", Faile said, climbing back into the wagon. "I suppose we can be off".
The wagons lumbered into motion. She spent the entire trip out of the city trying not to look at the chest.
She tried to distract herself from thinking about it, but that only brought her mind to another pressing concern. Perrin. She had seen him only briefly during a supply run to Andor. He’d warned her he might have another duty, but had been reluctant to tell her about it.
Now he’d vanished. He’d made Tam steward in his place, had taken a gateway to Shayol Ghul and had vanished. She’d asked those who’d been there, but nobody had seen him since his conversation with Rand.
All would be well with him, wouldn’t it? She was a soldier’s daughter and a soldier’s wife; she knew not to worry overly much. But a person could not help but worry a little. Perrin had been the one to suggest her as the keeper of the Horn.
She wondered, idly, if he had done it to keep her off the battlefield. She wouldn’t mind terribly if he’d done so, though she would never tell him that. In fact, once this was all said and done, she would insinuate that she was offended and see how he reacted. He needed to know that she would not sit back and be coddled, even if her true name implied otherwise.
Faile pulled her wagon, which was first in the caravan, onto the Jualdhe Bridge out of Tar Valon. About halfway across, the bridge trembled. The horses stomped and tossed their heads as Faile slowed them and glanced over her shoulder. The sight of swaying buildings in Tar Valon proved to her that the trembling wasn’t just the bridge, but an earthquake.
The other horses danced and whinnied, and the shaking rattled carts.
"We need to move off the bridge, Lady Faile!" Olver cried.
"The bridge is much too long for us to get to the other side before this ends", Faile said calmly. She had suffered earthquakes in Saldaea before. "We’d be more in danger of hurting ourselves in the scramble than we will be here. This bridge is Ogier work. We’re probably safer here than we’d be on solid ground".
Indeed, the earthquake passed without so much as a stone being loosed from the bridge. Faile brought her horses under control and started ahead again. The Light willing, the damage to the city wasn’t too bad. She didn’t know if earthquakes were common here. With Dragonmount nearby, there would at least be occasional rumblings, wouldn’t there?
Still, the earthquake worried her. People spoke of the land becoming unstable, the groanings of the earth coming to match the breaking of the sky by lightning and thunder. She had heard more than one account of the spiderweb cracks that appeared in rocks, pure black, as if they extended on into eternity itself.
Once the rest of the caravan left the city, Faile pulled her wagons up beside some mercenary bands waiting their turn at an Aes Sedai for Traveling. Faile could not afford to insist on preference; she had to avoid attention. So, nerve-racking though it was, she settled down to wait.
Her caravan was last in line for the day. Eventually, Aravine came up to Faile’s wagon, and Olver scooted over to make room for her. She patted him on the head. A lot of women responded that way to Olver, and he did seem so innocent much of the time. Faile wasn’t convinced; she narrowed her eyes at Olver as he snuggled up beside Aravine. Mat seemed to have had a strong influence on the child.