her hut. Lan stayed long enough to spoon up three dishes of stew, then hurried after her, quickly swallowed by the night.
Perrin's eyes shone golden as they followed the Warder through the darkness. “Sleep well,” he muttered. The smell of cooked meat suddenly made him queasy. “I have the third watch, Uno?” The Shienaran nodded. “Then I will try to take her advice.” Others were coming to the fires, and murmurs of conversation followed him up the slope.
He had a hut to himself, a small thing of logs barely tall enough to stand in, the chinks filled with dried mud. A rough bed, padded with pine boughs beneath a blanket, took up nearly half of it. Whoever had unsaddled his horse had also propped his bow just inside the door. He hung up his belt, with axe and quiver, on a peg, then stripped down to his smallclothes, shivering. The nights were cold still, but cold kept him from sleeping too deeply. In deep sleep, dreams came that he could not shake off.
For a time, with a single blanket over him, he lay staring at the log roof, shivering. Then sleep came, and with it, dreams.
The Dragon Reborn
Chapter 4
(Wolf)
Shadows Sleeping
Cold filled the common room of the inn despite the fire blazing on the long, stone hearth. Perrin rubbed his hands before the flames, but he could get no warmth in them. There was an odd comfort in the cold, though, as if it were a shield. A shield against what, he could not think. Something murmured in the back of his mind, a dim sound only vaguely heard, scratching to get in.
“So you will give it up, then. It is the best thing for you. Come. Sit, and we will talk.”
Perrin turned to look at the speaker. The round tables scattered about the room were empty except for the lone man seated in a corner, in the shadows. The rest of the room seemed in some way hazy, almost an impression rather than a place, especially anything he was not looking at directly. He glanced back at the fire; it burned on a brick hearth, now. Somehow, none of it bothered him. It should. But he could not have said why.
The man beckoned, and Perrin walked closer to his table. A square table. The tables were square. Frowning, he reached out to finger the tabletop, but pulled his hand back. There were no lamps in that corner of the room, and despite the light elsewhere, the man and his table were almost hidden, nearly blended with the dimness.
Perrin had a feeling that he knew the man, but it was as vague as what he saw out of the corner of his eye. The fellow was in his middle years, handsome and too well dressed for a country inn, in dark, nearly black, velvets with white lace falls at his collar and cuffs. He sat stiffly, sometimes pressing a hand to his chest, as if moving hurt him. His dark eyes were fixed on Perrin's face; they appeared like glistening points in the shadows.
“Give up what?” Perrin asked.
“That, of course.” The man nodded to the axe at Perrin's waist. He sounded surprised, as if it were a conversation they had had before, an old argument taken up again.
Perrin had not realized the axe was there, had not felt the weight of it pulling at his belt. He ran a hand over the halfmoon blade and the chick spike that balanced it. The steel felt — solid. More solid than anything else there. Maybe even more solid than he was himself. He kept his hand there, to hold onto something real.
“I have thought of it,” he said, “but I do not think I can. Not yet.” Not yet? The inn seemed to flicker, and the murmur sounded again in his head. No! The murmur faded.
“No?” The man smiled, a cold smile. “You are a blacksmith, boy. And a good one, from what I hear. Your hands were made for a hammer, not an axe. Made to make things, not to kill. Go back to that before it is too late.”
Perrin found himself nodding. “Yes. But I'm ta'veren.” He had never said that out loud before. But he knows it already. He was sure of that, though he could not say why.
For an instant the man's smile became a grimace, but then it returned in more strength than before. A cold strength. “There are ways to change things, boy. Ways to avoid even