Ingtar glanced at her, but the Aes Sedai was staring at the smudged ground, where her foot had obliterated the symbol. “Dismount,” he ordered. “Armor on the packhorses. We're inside Cairhien, now. We do not want the Cairhienin thinking we have come to fight them. Be quick about it!”
Mat leaned close to Perrin. “Do you ... ? Do you think he was talking about Rand? It's crazy, I know, but even Ingtar thinks he's Aiel.”
“I don't know,” Perrin said. “Everything has been crazy since we got mixed up with Aes Sedai.”
Softly, as to herself, Verin spoke, still staring at the ground. “It must be a part, and yet how? Does the Wheel of Time weave threads into the Pattern of which we know nothing? Or does the Dark One touch the Pattern again?”
Perrin felt a chill.
Verin looked up at the soldiers removing their armor. “Hurry!” she commanded with more snap than Ingtar and Uno combined. “We must hurry!”
Chapter 29
(InsectLike, Horned Helmet)
Seanchan
Geofram Bornhald ignored the smell of burning houses and the bodies that lay sprawled on the dirt of the street. Byar and a whitecloaked guard of a hundred rode into the village at his heels, half the men he had with him. His legion was too scattered for his liking, with Questioners having too many of the commands, but his orders had been explicit: Obey the Questioners.
There had been but slight resistance here; only half a dozen dwellings gave off columns of smoke. The inn was still standing, he saw, whiteplastered stone like almost every structure on Almoth Plain.
Reining up before the inn, his eyes went past the prisoners his soldiers held near the village well to the long gibbet marring the village green. It was hastily made, only a long pole on uprights, but it held thirty bodies, their clothes ruffled by the breeze. There were small bodies hanging among their elders. Even Byar stared at that in disbelief.
“Muadh!” he roared. A grizzled man trotted away from those holding the prisoners. Muadh had fallen into the hands of Darkfriends, once; his scarred face took even the strongest aback. “Is this your work, Muadh, or the Seanchan?”
“Neither, my Lord Captain.” Muadh's voice was a hoarse, whispered growl, another leaving of the Darkfriends. He said no more.
Bornhald frowned. “Surely that lot did not do it,” he said, gesturing to the prisoners. The Children did not look so neat as when he had brought them across Tarabon, but they seemed ready to parade compared with the rabble that crouched under their watchful eyes. Men in rags and bits of armor, with sullen faces. Remnants of the army Tarabon had sent against the invaders on Toman Head.
Muadh hesitated, then said carefully, “The villagers say they wore Taraboner cloaks, my Lord Captain. There was a big man among them, with gray eyes and a long mustache, that sounds twin to Child Earwin, and a young lad, trying to hide a pretty face behind a yellow beard, who fought with his left hand. Sounds almost like Child Wuan, my Lord Captain.”
“Questioners!” Bornhald spat. Earwin and Wuan were among those he had had to hand over to the Questioners' command. He had seen Questioner tactics before, but this was the first time he had ever been faced with children's bodies.
“If my Lord Captain says so.” Muadh made it sound like fervent agreement.
“Cut them down,” Bornhald said wearily. “Cut them down, and make sure the villagers know there will be no more killing.” Unless some fool decides to be brave because his woman is watching, and I have to make an example. He dismounted, eyeing the prisoners again, as Muadh hurried off calling for ladders and knives. He had more to think about than Questioners' overzealousness; he wished he could stop thinking about Questioners altogether.
“They do not put up much fight, my Lord Captain,” Byar said, “either these Taraboners or what is left of the Domani. They snap like cornered rats, but run as soon as anything snaps back.”
“Let us see how we do against the invaders, Byar, before we look down on these men, yes?” The prisoners' faces bore a defeated look that had been there before his men came. “Have Muadh pick one out for me.” Muadh's face was enough to soften most men's resolve by itself. “An officer, preferably. One who looks intelligent enough to tell what he has seen without embroidery, but young enough not to have yet grown a full backbone. Tell Muadh to be not too gentle about it, yes? Make the fellow believe that I mean to see worse happen to him than he ever dreamed of, unless he convinces me otherwise.” He tossed his reins to one of the Children and strode into the inn.
The innkeeper was there, for a wonder, an obsequious, sweating man, his dirty shirt straining over his belly until the embroidered red scrollwork seemed ready to pop off. Bornhald waved the man away; he was vaguely aware of a woman and some children huddling in a doorway, until the fat innkeeper shepherded them out.
Bornhald pulled off his gauntlets and sat at one of the tables. He knew too little about the invaders, the strangers. That was what almost everyone called them, those who did not just babble about Artur Hawkwing. He knew they called themselves the Seanchan, and Hailene. He had enough of the Old Tongue to know the latter meant Those Who Come Before, or the Forerunners. They also called themselves Rhyagelle, Those Who Come Home, and spoke of Corenne, the Return. It was almost enough to make him believe the tales of Artur Hawkwing's armies come back. No one knew where the Seanchan had come from, other than that they had landed in ships. Bornhald's requests for information from the Sea Folk had been met with silence. Amador did not hold the Atha'an Miere in good favor, and the attitude was returned with interest. All he knew of the Seanchan he had heard from men like those outside. Broken, beaten rabble who spoke, wideeyed and sweating, of men who came into battle riding monsters as often as horses, who fought with monsters by their sides, and brought Aes Sedai to rend the earth under their enemies' feet.
A sound of boots in the doorway made him put on a wolfish grin, but Byar was not accompanied by Muadh. The Child of the Light who stood beside him, back braced and helmet in the crook of his arm, was Jeral, who Bornhald expected to be a hundred miles away. Over his armor, the young man wore a cloak of Domani cut, trimmed with blue, not the white cloak of the Children.
“Muadh is talking to a young fellow now, my Lord Captain,” Byar said. “Child Jeral has just ridden in with a message.”
Bornhald waved for Jeral to begin.
The young man did not unbend. “The compliments of Jaichim Carridin,” he started, looking straight ahead, “who guides the Hand of the Light in — ”
“I have no need of the Questioner's compliments,” Bornhald growled, and saw the young man's startled look. Jeral was young, yet. For that matter, Byar looked uncomfortable, as well. “You will give me his message, yes? Not word for word, unless I ask it. Simply tell me what he wants.”
The Child, set to recite, swallowed before he began. “My Lord Captain, he — he says you are moving too many men too close to Toman Head. He says the Darkfriends on Almoth Plain must be rooted out, and you are — forgive me, Lord Captain — you are to turn back at once and ride toward the heart of the plain.” He stood stiffly, waiting.
Bornhald studied him. The dust of the plain stained Jeral's face as well as his cloak and his boots. “Go and get yourself something to eat,” Bornhald told him. “There should be wash water in one of these houses, if you wish it. Return to me in an hour. I will have messages for you to carry.” He waved the young man out.