The Gathering Storm - By Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson Page 0,263

didn’t tell him that they simply vanished,” Thom added. “And that there was no way for him to keep it from happening.”

“Didn’t see the point of telling him,” Mat said. “No use dwelling on the past, I say.”

“A Warder, is it?” Talmanes said, flipping through his stack of papers. “I’ll have to practice scowling.”

Mat regarded him with a flat expression. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

“What did you ask? Is there someone who is taking this seriously?” Burn that twinkle. Had Mat really ever thought this man was slow to laugh? He just did it on the inside. That was the most infuriating way.

“Light, Talmanes,” Mat said. “A woman in that town is looking for Perrin and me. She knows what we look like so well that she can produce a drawing more accurate than my own mother could have made. That gives me a chill, like the Dark One himself standing over my shoulder. And I can’t go into the flaming place myself, since every bloody man, woman and child has a picture with my face on it and a promise of gold for information!

“Now maybe I went a little far with the preparations, but I intend to find this person before they can order a flock of Darkfriends—or worse—to cut my throat in the night. Understood?”

Mat looked each of the five men in the eyes, nodded, and started toward the tent flap, but paused beside Talmanes’s chair. Mat cleared his throat, then half mumbled, “You secretly harbor a love of painting, and you wish you could escape this life of death you’ve committed yourself to. You came through Trustair on your way south, rather than taking a more direct route, because you love the mountains. You’re hoping to hear word of your younger brother, whom you haven’t seen in years, and who disappeared on a hunting trip in southern Andor. You have a very tortured past. Read page four.”

Mat hurried on, pushing his way out into the shaded noon, though he did catch a glimpse of Talmanes rolling his eyes. Burn the man! There was good drama in those pages!

Through the pine trees he could see that the sky was cloudy. Again. When was that going to end? Mat shook his head as he walked through camp, nodding to the groups of soldiers who offered him salutes or calls of greeting to “Lord Mat.” The Band were staying here for the day—camped on a secluded, wooded hillside a half-day march from the town—while they made final preparations for the assault. The three-needle pines here were tall, and their limbs spread wide, the shade keeping underbrush to a minimum. Tents clustered in groups around the pines, and the air was cool and shaded, smelling of sap and loam.

He went about the camp, checking into the workings of his men and seeing that everything was being handled efficiently. Those old memories, the ones that the Eelfinn had given him, had begun to blend so evenly with his own that he could hardly tell which instincts came from them and which were his own.

It was good to be among the Band again; he hadn’t realized how much he’d missed them. It would be nice to reunite with the rest of the men, the troops led by Estean and Daerid. Hopefully, they’d had an easier time of it than Mat’s force had.

The cavalry banners came first in his rounds. They were separate from the rest of the camp—horsemen always considered themselves superior to foot. Today, as all too often, the men were worried about feed for their horses. To a good cavalryman, his horse always came first. Their trip from Hinderstap had been hard on the animals, particularly since there wasn’t much to graze on. Little was growing this spring, and the winter’s leavings were strangely sparse. Horses would refuse patches of thatch, almost as if it had gone bad, like other food stores. They didn’t have much grain; they had hoped to live off the land, as they were moving too quickly for grain wagons.

Well, he’d just have to find something to do about that. Mat assured the cavalrymen he was working on the problem, and they took him at his word. Lord Mat hadn’t let them down yet. Of course, the ones he had let down were rotting in their graves. He denied a request to fly the banner. Perhaps after the raid on Trustair.

He didn’t have any true foot with him at the moment; they were all with Estean and