The Dragon Reborn twot-3 Page 5

  Perrin was not surprised, yet he still felt a small shock. Arguing with an Aes Sedai. All the childhood tales came back to him. Aes Sedai, who made thrones and nations dance to their hidden strings. Aes Sedai, whose gift always had a hook in it, whose price was always smaller than you could believe, yet always turned out to be greater than you could imagine. Aes Sedai, whose anger could break the ground and summon lightning. Some of the stories were untrue, he knew now. And at the same time, they did not tell the half.

  "I had better go to him," he said. "After they argue, he always needs someone to talk to." And aside from Moiraine and Lan, there were only the three of them — Min, Loial, and him — who did not stare at Rand as if he stood above kings. And of the three only Perrin knew him from before.

  He strode up the slope, pausing only to glance at the closed door of Moiraine's hut. Leya would be in there, and Lan. The Warder seldom let himself get far from the Aes Sedai's side.

  Rand's much smaller hut was a little lower down, well hidden in the trees, away from all the rest. He had tried living down among the other men, but their constant awe drove him off. He kept to himself, now. Too much to himself, to Perrin's thinking. But he knew Rand was not headed to his hut now.

  Perrin hurried on to where one side of the bowl-shaped valley suddenly became sheer cliff, fifty paces high and smooth except for tough brush clinging tenaciously here and there. He knew exactly where a crack in the gray rock wall lay, an opening hardly wider than his shoulders. With only a ribbon of late-afternoon light overhead, it was like walking down a tunnel.

  Half a mile the crack ran, abruptly opening out into a narrow vale, less than a mile long, its floor covered with rocks and boulders, and even the steep slopes were thickly forested with tall leatherleaf and pine and fir. Long shadows stretched away from the sun sitting on the mountaintops. The walls of this place were unbroken save for the crack, and as steep as if a giant axe had buried itself in the mountains. It could be even more easily defended by a few than the bowl, but it had neither stream nor spring. No one went there. Except Rand, after he argued with Moiraine.

  Rand stood not far from the entrance, leaning against the rough trunk of a leatherleaf, staring at the palms of his hands. Perrin knew that on each there was a heron, branded into the flesh. Rand did not move when Perrin's boot scraped on stone.

  Suddenly Rand began to recite softly, never looking up from his hands.

  "Twice and twice shall he be marked,

  twice to live, and twice to die.

  Once the heron, to set his path.

  Twice the heron, to name him true.

  Once the Dragon, for remembrance lost.

  Twice the Dragon, for the price he must pay."

  With a shudder he tucked his hands under his arms. "But no Dragons, yet." He chuckled roughly. "Not yet."

  For a moment Perrin simply looked at him. A man who could channel the One Power. A man doomed to go mad from the taint on saidin, the male half of the True Source, and certain to destroy everything around him in his madness. A man — a thing! — everyone was taught to loathe and fear from childhood. Only… it was hard to stop seeing the boy he had grown up with. How do you just stop being somebody's friend? Perrin chose a small boulder with a flat top, and sat, waiting.

  After a while Rand turned his head to look at him. "Do you think Mat is all right? He looked so sick, the last I saw him."

  "He must be all right by now." He should be in Tar Valon, by now. They'll Heal him, there. And Nynaeve and Egwene will keep him out of trouble. Egwene and Nynaeve, Rand and Mat and Perrin. All five from Emond's Field in the Two Rivers. Few people had come into the Two Rivers from outside, except for occasional peddlers, and merchants once a year to buy wool and tabac. Almost no one had ever left. Until the Wheel chose out its ta'veren, and five simple country folk could stay where they were no longer. Could be what they had been no longer.

  Rand nodded and was silent.

  "Lately," Perrin said, "I find myself wishing I was still a blacksmith. Do you… Do you wish you were still just a shepherd?"

  "Duty," Rand muttered. "Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain. That's what they say in Shienar. 'The Dark One is stirring. The Last Battle is coming. And the Dragon Reborn has to face the Dark One in the Last Battle, or the Shadow will cover everything. The Wheel of Time broken. Every Age remade in the Dark One's image.' There's only me." He began to laugh mirthlessly, his shoulders shaking. "I have the duty, because there isn't anybody else, now is there?"

  Perrin shifted uneasily. The laughter had a raw edge that made his skin crawl. "I understand you were arguing with Moiraine again. The same thing?"

  Rand drew a deep, ragged breath. "Don't we always argue about the same thing? They're down there, on Almoth Plain, and the Light alone knows where else. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They declared for the Dragon Reborn because I raised that banner. Because I let myself be called the Dragon. Because I could see no other choice. And they're dying. Fighting, searching, and praying for the man who is supposed to lead them. Dying. And I sit here safe in the mountains all winter. I… I owe them… something."

  "You think I like it?" Perrin swung his head in irritation.

  "You take whatever she says to you," Rand grated. "You never stand up to her."

  "Much good it has done you, standing up to her. You have argued all winter, and we have sat here like lumps all winter."

  "Because she is right." Rand laughed again, that chilling laugh. "The Light burn me, she is right. They are all split up into little groups all over the plain, all across Tarabon and Arad Doman. If I join any one of them, the Whitecloaks and the Domani army and the Taraboners will be on top of them like a duck on a beetle."

  Perrin almost laughed himself, in confusion. "If you agree with her, why in the Light do you argue all the time?"

  "Because I have to do something. Or I'll… I'll — burst like a rotted melon!"

  "Do what? If you listen to what she says — "

  Rand gave him no chance to say they would sit there forever. "Moiraine says! Moiraine says!" Rand jerked erect, squeezing his head between his hands. "Moiraine has something to say about everything! Moiraine says I mustn't go to the men who are dying in my name. Moiraine says I'll know what to do next because the Pattern will force me to it. Moiraine says! But she never says how I'll know. Oh, no! She doesn't know that." His hands fell to his sides, and he turned toward Perrin, head tilted and eyes narrowed. "Sometimes I feel as if Moiraine is putting me through my paces like a fancy Tairen stallion doing his steps. Do you ever feel that?"

  Perrin scrubbed a hand through his shaggy hair. "I… Whatever is pushing us, or pulling us, I know who the enemy is, Rand."

  "Ba'alzamon," Rand said softly. An ancient name for the Dark One. In the Trolloc tongue, it meant Heart of the Dark. "And I must face him, Perrin." His eyes closed in a grimace, half smile, half pain. "Light help me, half the time I want it to happen now, to be over and done with, and the other half… How many times can I manage to… Light, it pulls at me so. What if I can't… What if I…" The ground trembled.

  "Rand?" Perrin said worriedly.

  Rand shivered; despite the chill, there was sweat on his face. His eyes were still shut tight. "Oh, Light," he groaned, "it pulls so."

  Suddenly the ground heaved beneath Perrin, and the valley echoed with a vast rumble. It seemed as if the ground was jerked out from under his feet. He fell — or the earth leaped up to meet him. The valley shook as though a vast hand had reached down from the sky to wrench it out of the land. He clung to the ground while it tried to bounce him like a ball. Pebbles in front of his eyes leaped and tumbled, and dust rose in waves.

  "Rand!" His bellow was lost in the grumbling roar.

  Rand stood with his head thrown back, his eyes still shut tight. He did not seem to feel the thrashing of the ground that had him now at one angle, now at another. His balance never shifted, no matter how he was tossed. Perrin could not be certain, being shaken as he was
, but he thought Rand wore a sad smile. The trees flailed about, and the leatherleaf suddenly cracked in two, the greater part of its trunk crashing down not three paces from Rand. He noticed it no more than he noticed any of the rest.

  Perrin struggled to fill his lungs. "Rand! For the love of the Light, Rand! Stop it!"

  As abruptly as it had begun, it was done. A weakened branch cracked off of a stunted oak with a loud snap. Perrin got to his feet slowly, coughing. Dust hung in the air, sparkling motes in the rays of the setting sun.

  Rand was staring at nothing, now, chest heaving as if he had run ten miles. This had never happened before, nor anything remotely like it.

  "Rand," Perrin said carefully, "what —?"

  Rand still seemed to be looking into a far distance. "It is always there. Calling to me. Pulling at me. Saidin. The male half of the True Source. Sometimes I can't stop myself from reaching out for it." He made a motion of plucking something out of the air, and transferred his stare to his closed fist. "I can feel the taint even before I touch it. The Dark One's taint, like a thin coat of vileness trying to hide the Light. It turns my stomach, but I cannot help myself. I cannot! Only sometimes, I reach out, and it's like trying to catch air." His empty hand sprang open, and he gave a bitter laugh. "What if that happens when the Last Battle comes? What if I reach out and catch nothing?"

  "Well, you caught something that time," Perrin said hoarsely. "What were you doing?"

  Rand looked around as if seeing things for the first time. The fallen leatherleaf, and the broken branches. There was, Perrin realized, surprisingly little damage. He had expected gaping rents in the earth. The wall of trees looked almost whole.

  "I did not mean to do this. It was as if I tried to open a tap, and instead pulled the whole tap out of the barrel. It… filled me. I had to send it somewhere before it burned me up, but I… I did not mean this."

  Perrin shook his head. What use to tell him to try not to do it again? He barely knows more about what he's doing than I do. He contented himself with, "There are enough who want you dead — and the rest of us — without you doing the job for them." Rand did not seem to be listening. "We had best get on back to the camp. It will be dark soon, and I don't know about you, but I am hungry."

  "What? Oh. You go on, Perrin. I will be along. I want to be alone again a while."

  Perrin hesitated, then turned reluctantly toward the crack in the valley wall. He stopped when Rand spoke again.

  "Do you have dreams when you sleep? Good dreams?"

  "Sometimes," Perrin said warily. "I don't remember much of what I dream." He had learned to set guards on his dreaming.

  "They're always there, dreams," Rand said, so softly Perrin barely heard. "Maybe they tell us things. True things." He fell silent, brooding.

  "Supper's waiting," Perrin said, but Rand was deep in his own thoughts. Finally Perrin turned and left him standing there.

  Chapter 3

  (Serpent and Wheel)

  News from the Plain

  Darkness shrouded part of the crack, for in one place the tremors had collapsed a part of the wall against the other side, high up. He stared up at the blackness warily before hurrying underneath, but the slab of stone seemed to be solidly wedged in place. The itch had returned to the back of his head, stronger than before. No, burn me! No! It went away.

  When he came out above the camp, the bowl was filled with odd shadows from the sinking sun. Moiraine was standing outside her hut, peering up at the crack. He stopped short. She was a slender, dark-haired woman no taller than his shoulder, and pretty, with the ageless quality of all Aes Sedai who had worked with the One Power for a time. He could not put any age at all to her, with her face too smooth for many years and her dark eyes too wise for youth. Her dress of deep blue silk was disarrayed and dusty, and wisps stuck out in her usually well-ordered hair. A smudge of dust lay across her face.

  He dropped his eyes. She knew about him — she and Lan alone, of those in the camp — and he did not like the knowing in her face when she looked into his eyes. Yellow eyes. Someday, perhaps, he could bring himself to ask her what she knew. An Aes Sedai must know more of it than he did. But this was not the time. There never seemed to be a time. "He… He didn't mean… It was an accident."

  "An accident," she said in a flat voice, then shook her head and vanished back inside the hut. The door banged shut a little loudly.

  Perrin drew a deep breath and continued on down toward the cook fires. There would be another argument between Rand and the Aes Sedai, in the morning if not tonight.

  Half a dozen trees lay toppled on the slopes of the bowl, roots ripped out of the earth in arcs of soil. A trail of scrapes and churned ground led down to the streamside and a boulder that had not been there before. One of the huts up the opposite slope had collapsed in the tremors, and most of the Shienarans were gathered around it, rebuilding it. Loial was with them. The Ogier could pick up a log it would take four men to lift. Uno's curses occasionally drifted down.

  Min stood by the fires, stirring a kettle with a disgruntled expression. There was a small bruise on her cheek, and a faint smell of burned stew hung in the air. "I hate cooking," she announced, and peered doubtfully into the kettle. "If something goes wrong with it, it isn't my fault. Rand spilled half of it on the fire with his… What right does he have to bounce us around like sacks of grain?" She rubbed the seat of her breeches and winced. "When I get my hands on him, I'll thump him so he never forgets." She waved the wooden spoon at Perrin as if she intended to start the thumping with him.

  "Was anyone hurt?"

  "Only if you count bruises," Min said grimly. "They were upset, all right, at first. Then they saw Moiraine staring off toward Rand's hidey-hole, and decided it was his work. If the Dragon wants to shake the mountain down on our heads, then the Dragon must have a good reason for it. If he decided to make them take off their skins and dance in their bones, they would think it all right." She snorted and rapped the spoon on the edge of the kettle.

  He looked back toward Moiraine's hut. If Leya had been hurt — if she were dead — the Aes Sedai would not simply have gone back inside. The sense of waiting was still there. Whatever it is, it hasn't happened yet. "Min, maybe you had better go. First thing in the morning. I have some silver I can let you have, and I'm sure Moiraine would give you enough to take passage with a merchant's train out of Ghealdan. You could be back in Baerlon before you know it."

  She looked at him until he began to wonder if he had said something wrong. Finally, she said, "That is very sweet of you, Perrin. But, no."

  "I thought you wanted to go. You're always carrying on about having to stay here."

  "I knew an old Illianer woman, once," she said slowly. "When she was young, her mother arranged a marriage for her with a man she had never even met. They do that down in Illian, sometimes. She said she spent the first five years raging against him, and the next five scheming to make his life miserable without his knowing who was to blame. It was only years later, she said, when he died, that she realized he really had been the love of her life."

  "I don't see what that has to do with this."

  Her look said he obviously was not trying to understand, and her voice became overly patient. "Just because fate has chosen something for you instead of you choosing it for yourself doesn't mean it has to be bad. Even if it's something you are sure you would never have chosen in a hundred years. 'Better ten days of love than years of regretting,' " she quoted.

  "I understand that even less," he told her. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to."

  She hung the spoon on a tall forked stick stuck in the ground, then surprised him by rising on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "You are a very nice man, Perrin Aybara. Even if you don't understand anything."

  Perrin blinked at her uncertainly. He wished that he could be certain Rand was in his right mind, or that Mat were there. He was never sure of his ground with girls, but Rand always seemed to know his way. So did Mat; most of the girls b
ack home in Emond's Field had sniffed that Mat would never grow up, but he had seemed to have a way with them.

  "What about you, Perrin? Don't you ever want to go home?"

  "All the time," he said fervently. "But I… I do not think I can. Not yet." He looked off toward Rand's vale. We are tied together, it seems, aren't we, Rand? "Maybe not ever." He thought he had said that too softly for her to hear, but the look she gave him was full of sympathy. And agreement.

  His ears caught faint footsteps behind him, and he looked back up toward Moiraine's hut. Two shapes were making their way down through the deepening twilight, one a woman, slender and graceful even on the rough, slanting ground. The man, head and shoulders taller than his companion, turned off toward where the Shienarans were working. Even to Perrin's eyes he was indistinct, sometimes seeming to vanish altogether, then reappear in midstride, parts of him fading into the night and fading back as the wind gusted. Only a Warder's shifting cloak could do that, which made the larger figure Lan, just as the smaller was certainly Moiraine.

  Well behind them, another shape, even dimmer, slipped between the trees. Rand, Perrin thought, going back to his hut. Another night when he won't eat because he can't stand the way everybody looks at him.

  "You must have eyes in the back of your head," Min said, frowning toward the approaching woman. "Or else the sharpest ears I have ever heard of. Is that Moiraine?"

  Careless. He had grown so used to the Shienarans knowing how well he could see — in daylight at least; they did not know about the night — that he was beginning to slip about other things. Carelessness might kill me yet.

  "Is the Tuatha'an woman all right?" Min asked as Moiraine came to the fire.

  "She is resting." The Aes Sedai's low voice had its usual musical quality, as if speaking were halfway to singing, and, her hair and clothes were back in perfect order again. She rubbed her hands over the fire. There was a golden ring on her left hand, a serpent biting its own tail. The Great Serpent, an even older symbol for eternity than the Wheel of Time. Every woman trained in Tar Valon wore such a ring.