The Dragon Reborn - By Robert Jordan Page 0,22

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.

For a moment Moiraine’s gaze rested on Perrin, and seemed to penetrate too deeply. “She fell and split her scalp when Rand. . . .” Her mouth tightened, but in the next instant her face was utter calm again. “I Healed her, and she is sleeping. There is always a good deal of blood with even a minor scalp wound, but it was not serious. Did you see anything about her, Min?”

Min looked uncertain. “I saw. . . . I thought I saw her death. Her own face, all over blood. I was sure I knew what it meant, but if she split her scalp. . . . Are you sure she is all right?” It was a measure of her discomfort that she asked. An Aes Sedai did not Heal and leave anything wrong that could be Healed. And Moiraine’s Talents were particularly strong in that area.

Min sounded so troubled that Perrin was surprised for a moment. Then he nodded to himself. She did not really like doing what she did, but it was a part of her; she thought she knew how it worked, or some of it, at least. If she was wrong, it would almost be like finding out she did not know how to use her own hands.

Moiraine considered her for a moment, serene and dispassionate. “You have never been wrong in any reading for me, not one about which I had any way of knowing. Perhaps this is the first time.”

“When I know, I know,” Min whispered obstinately. “Light help me, I do.”

“Or perhaps it is yet to come. She has a long way yet to travel, to return to her wagons, and she must ride through unsettled lands.”

The Aes Sedai’s voice was a cool song, uncaring. Perrin made an involuntary sound in his throat. Light, did I sound like that? I won’t let a death matter that little to me.

As if he had spoken aloud, Moiraine looked at him. “The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, Perrin. I told you long ago that we were in a war. We cannot stop just because some of us may die. Any of us may die before it is done. Leya’s weapons may not be the same as yours, but she knew that when she became part of it.”

Perrin dropped his eyes. That’s as may