Crossroads of Twilight (30 page)

Abruptly Stepper tossed his head and snorted in a spew of mist, eyes rolling in fear as he stopped dead, and Aram’s gray squealed and shied. Perrin leaned forward to pat the trembling stallion’s neck, but his hand froze as he caught a trace of scent, a smell of burned sulphur faint in the air, that made the hair on the back of his neck try to stand. Almost burnt
sulphur; that was only a pale imitation of this smell. It had a reek of . . . wrongness, of something that did not belong in this world. The scent was not new—you could not ever have called that stink “fresh”—but not old, either. An hour, perhaps less. Maybe about the time he had wakened. About the time he had dreamed of this scent.

“What is it, Lord Perrin?” Aram was having difficulty controlling his gray, which danced in circles fighting the reins and wanting to run in any direction so long as it was away, but even while sawing at his reins he had his wolfhead-pommeled sword out. He practiced with it daily, for hours on end when he could, and those who knew about such things said he was good. “You may be able to make out a black thread from a white in this, but it isn’t day yet to me. I can’t see anything well enough to matter.”

“Put that away,” Perrin told him. “It isn’t needed. Swords wouldn’t do any good, anyway.” He had to coax his trembling mount to move forward, but he followed the rank smell, scanning the snow-covered ground ahead. He knew that smell, and not just from the dream.

It only took a little while to find what he was looking for, and Stepper gave a grateful whicker when Perrin reined him in well short of a slab-like crest of gray stone, two paces wide, that jutted up to his right. The snow all around was smooth and unmarked, but dog tracks covered the tilted span of stone, as though a pack had scrambled over it as they ran. Dimness and shadows or no, they were plain to Perrin’s eyes. Footprints larger than the palm of his hand, pressed into the stone as though it had been mud. He patted Stepper’s neck again. No wonder the animal was frightened.

“Go back to the camp and find Dannil, Aram. Tell him I said to let everyone know there were Darkhounds here, maybe an hour ago. And put your sword away. You wouldn’t want to try killing a Darkhound with a sword, believe me.”

“Darkhounds?” Aram exclaimed, peering around into the murky shadows between the trees. There was an anxious fear in his scent, now. Most men would have laughed about travelers’ tales or stories for children. Tinkers roamed the countryside, and knew what could be found in the wilds. Aram sheathed the sword on his back with obvious reluctance, but his right hand remained raised, half-reaching for the hilt. “How do you kill a Darkhound? Can they be killed?” Then again, maybe he did not have much good sense at that.

“Just be glad you don’t have to try, Aram. Now go do like I told you. Everyone needs to keep a sharp lookout in case they come back. Not much chance of that, I’d say, but better safe.” Perrin remembered facing a pack of
them once, and killing one. He thought he had killed one, after hitting it with three good broadhead arrows. Shadowspawn did not die easily. Moiraine had had to finish that pack, with balefire. “Make sure the Aes Sedai and Wise Ones learn of this, and the Asha’man.” Small chance any of them knew how to make balefire—the women might not admit knowing a forbidden weave if they did, and maybe not the men either—but maybe they knew something else that could work.

Aram was reluctant to leave Perrin alone until Perrin snapped at him, and then he turned back toward the camp trailing smells of umbrage and hurt, as if two men would have been a whit safer than one. As soon as the other man was out of sight, Perrin reined Stepper southward, the direction the Darkhounds had been heading. He did not want company for this, even Aram’s. Just because people sometimes noted his sharp eyesight was no reason to flaunt it, or his sense of smell. There were already reasons enough to shun him without adding more.

It might have been chance that the creatures had passed so near his camp, but the last few years had made him uneasy with coincidences. All too often, they were not coincidence at all, not the way other men counted such things. If this was another bit of his
ta’veren
tugging at the Pattern, it was a bit he could have done without. The thing seemed to have more disadvantages than advantages even when it appeared to be working in your favor. The chance that favored you one minute could turn on you in the next. And there was always another possibility. Being
ta’veren
made you stand out in the Pattern, and some of the Forsaken could use that to find you at times, or so he had been told. Maybe some Shadowspawn could, too.

The trail he followed was surely near an hour old, but Perrin felt a tightness between his shoulder blades, a prickling on his scalp. The sky was still a deep dark gray where it showed, even to his eyes. The sun had not yet crested the horizon. Just before sunrise was one of the worst times to meet the Wild Hunt, when darkness was changing to light but the light had not taken hold. At least there was no crossroads nearby, no graveyard, but the only hearthstones to touch lay back in Brytan, and he was not certain how much safety those hovels held. In his mind, he marked out the location of a nearby stream, where the camp got its water by chopping through the ice. It was no more than ten or twelve paces wide and only knee-deep, but putting running water between you and Darkhounds would stop them supposedly. But then, so would facing them, supposedly, and he had seen the results of that. His nose tested the breezes, searching
for that old scent. And for any hint of a newer. Coming on those things unaware would be worse than unpleasant.

Stepper caught scents almost as easily as Perrin, and sometimes noticed what they were sooner, but whenever the dun balked, Perrin forced him forward. There were plenty of tracks scattered in the snow, hoofprints of the mounted patrols going out and coming back, occasional sign of rabbits and foxes, but the only marks left by the Darkhounds were where stone stuck up out of the snow. The burnt sulphur smell was always strongest there, yet enough trace lingered in between to lead him to the next place where their tracks showed. The huge pawprints overlapped one another, and there was no way to tell how many Darkhounds there had been, but whether a pace wide or six, every rock surface they had crossed was smothered in tracks from one side to the other. A larger pack than the ten he had seen outside Illian. Much larger. Was that why there were no wolves in the area? He was sure that the certainty of death he had felt in the dream was something real, and he had
been
a wolf in the dream.

As the trail began to curve to the west, he felt a growing suspicion that firmed into certainty as it continued to bend. The Darkhounds had circled the camp completely, running right across the place north of the camp where several huge trees lay half toppled and propped by their neighbors, each with a tall chunk sliced cleanly out of its splintered trunk. The tracks covered a stone outcrop as smooth and flat as a polished marble floor except for one hair-thin gouge cut through it straight as a plumb line. Nothing resisted the opening of an Asha’man’s gateway, and two had opened here. A thick pine that had fallen blocking one had a section four paces wide burned out of it, but the charred ends were as neat as if they had come from a sawmill. It seemed that evidence of the One Power did not interest Darkhounds, however. The pack had not paused there any more than anywhere else, or even slowed that he could tell. Darkhounds could run faster than horses, and for longer, and the stench of them hardly seemed to have faded more in one place than another. At two points in that circuit he had picked up a forking in the trail, but that was only the pack coming from the north and departing south. Once around the camp, and then on their way after whatever or whoever they were hunting.

Plainly, that was not him. Perhaps the pack had circled because they sensed him, sensed someone who was
ta’veren,
yet he doubted that Darkhounds would have hesitated one instant at coming into the camp, had they been after him. The pack he had faced before had entered the city of
Illian, though it had not tried to kill him till later. But did Darkhounds report what they saw, the way rats and ravens did? The thought made his jaw clench. The Shadow’s attention was something any sane man feared, the Shadow’s attention might interfere with freeing Faile. That concerned him more than anything else. Yet there were ways to fight Shadowspawn, ways to fight the Forsaken, if it came to that. Whatever came between him and Faile, Darkhounds or the Forsaken or anything else, he would find a way to go around or through, whichever was necessary. A man could only have so much fear in him at one time, and all of his fear was centered on Faile. There just was no room for any more.

Before he reached his starting place again, the breezes brought him the smells of people and horses, sharp in the icy cold, and he reined Stepper to a slow walk, and then to a halt. He had spotted some fifty or sixty horses near a hundred paces ahead. The sun had finally peeked above the horizon and begun to send sharply slanted shafts of light through the forest canopy, reflecting off the snow and lessening the gloom a little, though deep, dappled shadows remained between the sun’s slender fingers. Some of those shadows enveloped him. The mounted party was not far from where he had first seen the Darkhounds’ tracks, and he could see Aram’s sickly green cloak and red-striped coat, the Tinker garments jarring with the sword on his back. Most of the riders wore rimmed red helmets shaped like pots and dark cloaks over red breastplates, and the long red streamers on their lances stirred in the light airs as the soldiers tried to keep watch in every direction. The First of Mayene often rode out in the mornings, with a suitable bodyguard of the Winged Guards.

He started to slip away without having to meet Berelain, but then he saw three tall women afoot among the horses, long dark shawls wrapped around their heads and draped over their upper bodies, and he hesitated. Wise Ones rode when they had to, if unwillingly, but tramping a mile or two in the snow wearing heavy woolen skirts was insufficient reason to force them onto horseback. Almost certainly Seonid or Masuri was in that group, as well, though the Aiel women seemed to like Berelain for some reason he could not fathom.

He had no thought of joining the riders, no matter who was with them, but hesitation cost him his chance at evasion. One of the Wise Ones—he thought it was Carelle, a fire-haired woman who always had a challenge in her sharp blue eyes—raised a hand to point in his direction, and the whole party turned, the soldiers whipping their horses around and peering through the trees toward him, lances tipped with a foot of steel half lowered. It was
unlikely they could make him out clearly through the deep pools of shadow and bright bars of sunlight. He was surprised the Wise One had, but then, Aiel generally had sharp eyes.

Masuri was there, a slim woman in a bronze-colored cloak riding a dapple mare, and Annoura as well, keeping her brown mare well back but marked by the dozens of thin dark braids that hung from the opening of her cowl. Berelain herself sat a sleek bay gelding at the forefront, a tall beautiful young woman with long black hair, in a red cloak lined with black fur. A simple flaw lessened her beauty, though; she was not Faile. A worse flaw ruined it, as far as he was concerned. He had learned of Faile’s kidnapping from her, and of Masema’s contact with the Seanchan, but nearly everyone in the camp believed that he had slept with Berelain on the very night Faile was taken, and she had done nothing to correct the tale. It was hardly the kind of story he could ask her to stand up and deny publicly, yet she could have said something, told her maids to deny it, anything. Instead, Berelain held her silence, and her maids, gossiping like magpies, actually fostered the tale. That sort of reputation stuck to a man, in the Two Rivers.

He had avoided Berelain since that night, and he would have ridden away now even after they saw him, but she took a hoop-handled basket from the maid accompanying her, a plump woman wrapped in a blue-and-gold cloak, then spoke to the others and started her sleek bay gelding toward him. Alone. Annoura raised a hand and called something after her, but Berelain never glanced back. Perrin did not doubt she would follow wherever he went, and the way things were, leaving would only make people believe he wanted to be private with her. He dug his heels into Stepper’s flanks, meaning to join the others no matter how little he wanted to—let her follow him back to them if she wanted—but she urged the bay to a canter despite the rough ground and the snow, even leaping a stone outcrop, her red cloak flowing out behind her, and met him halfway. She was a good rider, he admitted grudgingly. Not as good as Faile, but better than most.

“Your scowl is quite fierce,” she laughed softly as she halted right in front of Stepper. From the way she held her reins, she was ready to block him if he tried going around. The woman had no shame at all! “Smile, so people think we are flirting.” She pushed the basket at him with one crimson-gloved hand. “This should make you smile, at least. I hear you forget to eat.” Her nose wrinkled. “And to wash, it seems. Your beard needs trimming, too. A careworn, somewhat disheveled husband rescuing his wife is a romantic figure, but she might not think so well of a dirty ragamuffin. No woman will ever forgive you ruining her image of you.”

Suddenly confused, Perrin took the basket, sitting it in front of him on the tall pommel of his saddle, and unconsciously rubbed at his nose. He was accustomed to certain smells from Berelain, usually those of a hunting she-wolf, and he was the intended prey, but today she gave off no hunting scent. Not a whisker of it. She smelled patient as stone, and amused, with undercurrents of fear. The woman certainly had never been afraid of him that he recalled. And what did she have to be patient about? For that matter, what did she have to amused about? A ridge cat smelling like a lamb would not have confounded him more.

Confusion or no, his stomach rumbled at the aromas drifting from the lidded basket. Roasted woodhen, unless he was much mistaken, and bread still warm from the baking. Flour was in short supply, and bread almost as rare as meat. It was true that he missed eating some days. He really did forget, sometimes, and when he remembered, eating was a chore, for he had to run the gauntlet of Lini and Breane or be given the cold shoulder by people he had grown up with just to get a meal. Food right under his nose made his mouth water. Would it be disloyal to eat food brought by Berelain?