"About ten miles from us," Rand said loudly, "a good fifty thousand men are preparing to march." They were aware of that, but it pulled every eye to him and silenced every tongue. Weiramon’s mouth snapped shut sourly; the fellow did love to hear himself talk. Gueyam and Maraconn, tugging at sharp oiled beards, smiled in anticipation, the fools. Semaradrid looked like a man who had eaten an entire bowl of bad plums; Gregorin and the three lords of the Nine with him merely wore grim determination on their faces. Not fools. "The scouts saw no signs of sul’dam or damane," Rand went on, "but even without them, even with Asha’man, that’s enough to kill a lot of us if anybody forgets the plan. No one will forget, though, I’m sure." No charges without orders, this time. He had made that clear as glass, and hard as stone. No haring off because you thought maybe you just might have seen something, either.
Weiramon smiled, managing to put as much oil into it as Sunamon ever could.
It was a simple plan, in its way. They would advance west in five columns, each with Asha’man, and attempt to fall on the Seanchan from every side at once. Or as close to all sides as could be managed. Simple plans were best, Bashere insisted. If you won’t be satisfied with a whole litter of fat piglets, he had muttered, if you have to rush into the woods to find the old sow, then don’t get too fancy, or she’ll gut you.
No plan of battle survives first contact, Lews Therin said in Rand’s head. For a moment, he still seemed lucid. For a moment. Something is wrong, he growled suddenly. His voice began to gain intensity, and drift into wild disbelieving laughter. It can’t be wrong, but it is. Something strange, something wrong, skittering, jumping, twitching. His cackles turned to weeping. It can’t be! I must be mad! And he vanished before Rand could mute him. Burn him, there was nothing wrong with the plan, or Bashere would have been on it like a duck on a beetle.
Lews Therin was mad, no doubt of it. But so long as Rand al’Thor remained sane… A bitter joke on the world, if the Dragon Reborn went mad before the Last Battle even began. "Take your places," he commanded with a wave of the Dragon Scepter. He had to fight down the urge to laugh at that joke.
The large clump of nobles broke apart at his order, milling and muttering as they sorted themselves out. Few liked the way Rand had divided them up. Whatever breaking down of barriers had occurred in the shock of the first fight in the mountains, they had sprung up again almost immediately.
Weiramon frowned over his undelivered speech, but after an elaborate bow that thrust his beard at Rand like a spear he rode north over the hills followed by Kiril Drapeneos, Bertome, Doressin, and several minor Cairhienin lords, every last one of them stony-faced at a Tairen being placed over them. Gedwyn rode by Weiramon’s side almost as if he were the one leading, and got dark scowls for it that he affected not to notice. The other groupings were as mixed. Gregorin also headed north, with a sullen Sunamon trying to pretend he was heading in the same direction by happenstance, and Dalthanes leading lesser Cairhienin behind. Jeordwyn Semaris, another of the Nine, followed Bashere south with Amondrid and Gueyam. Those three had accepted the Saldaean almost eagerly for the simple reason that he was not Tairen, or Cairhienin, or Illianer, depending on the man. Rochaid seemed to be trying the same with Bashere that Gedwyn was with Weiramon, but Bashere appeared to ignore it. A little way from Bashere’s party, Torean and Maraconn rode with their heads together, likely venting spleen at having Semaradrid placed over them. For that matter, Ershin Netari kept glancing toward Jeordwyn, and standing in his stirrups to look back toward Gregorin and Kiril, though it was improbable he could see them any longer past the hills. Semaradrid, his back iron-rod straight, looked as unflappable as Bashere.
It was the same principle Rand had used all along. He trusted Bashere, and he thought he might be able to trust Gregorin, and none of the others could dare think of turning against him with so many outlanders around him, so many old enemies and so few friends. Rand laughed softly, watching them all ride off from his hillside. They would fight for him, and fight well, because they had no other choice. Any more than he had.
Madness, Lews Therin hissed. Rand shoved the voice away angrily.
He was hardly alone, of course. Tihera and Marcolin had most of the Defenders and Companions mounted in ranks among the olive trees on hills flanking the one where he sat his horse. The rest were out as a screen against surprise. A company of blue-coated Legionmen waited patiently in the hollow below under Masond’s eye, and at their rear, as many men in what they had worn surrendering on the heath back in Illian. They were trying to emulate the Legionmen’s calm — the other Legionmen, now — trying without a great deal of success.
Rand glanced at Ailil and Anaiyella. The Tairen woman gave him a simpering smile, but it faltered weakly. The Cairhienin woman’s face was frost. He could not forget them, or Denharad and their armsmen. His column, in the center, would be the largest, and the strongest by a fair margin. A very fair margin.
Flinn and the men Rand had chosen out after Dumai’s Wells rode up the hill toward him. The balding old man always led, though all save Adley and Narishma now wore the Dragon as well as the Sword, and Dashiva had worn it first. In part it was because the younger men deferred to Flinn, with his long experience as a bannerman in the Andoran Queen’s Guards. In part it was because Dashiva did not seem to care. He only appeared amused by the others. When he could spare time from talking to himself, that was. Most often, he hardly seemed aware of anything past his own nose.
For that reason, it was something of a shock when Dashiva awkwardly booted his slab-sided mount ahead of the rest. That plain face, so often vague or bemused with the fellow’s own thoughts, was fixed in a worried frown. It was more than something of a shock when he seized saidin as soon as he reached Rand and wove a barrier around them against eavesdropping. Lews Therin did not waste breath — if a disembodied voice had breath — on mutters about killing; he lurched for the Source snarling wordlessly, tried to claw the Power away from Rand. And just as abruptly fell silent and vanished.
"There’s something askew with saidin here, something amiss," Dashiva said, sounding not at all vague. In fact, he sounded… precise. And testy. A teacher lecturing a particularly dense pupil. He even stabbed a finger at Rand. "I don’t know what it is. Nothing can twist saidin, and if it could be twisted, we’d have felt it back in the mountains. Well, there was something there, yesterday, but so small… I feel it clearly here, though. Saidin is… eager. I know; I know. Saidin is not alive. But it… pulses, here. It is difficult to control."
Rand forced his hand to loosen its grip on the Dragon Scepter. He had always been sure Dashiva was nearly as mad as Lews Therin himself. Usually the man maintained a better hold on himself, though, however precariously. "I’ve been channeling longer than you, Dashiva. You’re just feeling the taint more." He could not soften his tone. Light, he could not go mad yet, and neither could they! "Get to your place. We’ll be moving soon." The scouts had to return soon. Even in this flatter country, even limited to no further than they could see, ten miles would not take long to cover, Traveling.
Dashiva made no move to obey. Instead, he opened his mouth angrily, then snapped it shut. Shaking visibly, he drew a deep breath. "I am well aware how long you have channeled," he said in an icy, almost contemptuous voice, "but surely even you can feel it. Feel, man! I don’t like ‘strange’ applied to saidin, and I don’t want to die or… or be burned out because you’re blind! Look at my ward! Look at it!"
Rand stared. Dashiva pushing himself forward was peculiar enough, but Dashiva in a temper? And then he did look at the ward. Really look. The flows should have been as steady as the threads in tight-woven canvas. They vibrated. The ward stood solid as it should be, but the individual threads of the Power shimmered with faint movement. Morr had said saidin was strange near Ebou Dar, and for a hundred miles around. They were closer than a hundred miles, now.
Rand made himself feel saidin. He was always aware of the Power — anything else meant death or worse — yet he
had become used to the struggle. He fought for life, but the fight had become as natural as life. The struggle was life. He made himself feel that battle, his life. Cold to make stone shatter into dust. Fire to make stone flash to vapor. Filth to make a rotten cesspit smell a garden in full flower. And… a pulsing, like something quivering in his fist. This was not the sort of throbbing he had felt in Shadar Logoth, when the taint on saidin had resonated with the evil of that place, and saidin had pulsed with it. The vileness was strong, but steady here. It was saidin itself that seemed full of currents and surges. Eager, Dashiva called it, and Rand could see why.
Down the slope, behind Flinn, Morr scrubbed a hand through his hair and looked around uneasily. Flinn alternated shifting on his saddle and easing his sword in its scabbard. Narishma, watching the sky for flying creatures, blinked too often. A muscle twitched in Adley’s cheek. Every one of them displayed some sign of nervousness, and little wonder. Relief welled up in Rand. Not madness after all.
Dashiva smiled, a twisted self-satisfied smile. "I cannot believe you didn’t notice before." There was very close to a sneer in his voice. "You’ve been holding saidin practically day and night since we began this mad expedition. This is a simple ward, but it did not want to form, then it snapped together like pulling out of my hands."
The silver-blue slash of a gateway rotated open atop one of the bare hills, half a mile to the west, and a Soldier pulled his horse through and mounted hurriedly, returning from the scout. Even at a distance, Rand could make out the faint shimmer of the weaves surrounding the gateway before they vanished. The rider had not reached the bottom of the hill before another gateway opened on the crest, and then a third, a fourth, more, one after another, almost as fast as the preceding man could get out of the way.
"But it did form," Rand said. So had the scouts’ gateways. "If saidin is hard to control, it’s always hard, and it still does what you want." But why more difficult here? A question for another time. Light, he wished Herid Fel were still alive; the old philosopher might have had an answer. "Get back with the others, Dashiva," he ordered, but the man stared at him in astonishment, and he had to repeat himself before the fellow let the ward vanish, jerked his horse around without a salute and thumped the animal back down the slope with his heels.
"Some trouble, my Lord Dragon?" Anaiyella simpered. Ailil merely looked at Rand with flat eyes.
Seeing the first scout on the way toward Rand, the others fanned off to north and south, where they would join one of the other columns. Finding them the old-fashioned way would be faster than casting about with gateways. Drawing rein in front of Rand, Nalaam slapped fist to chest — did he look a bit wild-eyed? No matter. Saidin still did what the man wielding it made it do. Nalaam saluted and gave his report. The Seanchan were not encamped ten miles away, they were no more than five or six distant, marching east. And they had sul’dam and damane by the score.
Rand issued his orders as Nalaam galloped away, and his column began moving west. The Defenders and the Companions rode on either flank. The Legionmen marched at the rear, just behind Denharad. A reminder to the noblewomen, and their armsmen, if they needed one. Anaiyella certainly looked over her shoulder often enough, and Ailil’s refusal to was pointed. Rand formed the main thrust of the column, Rand and Flinn and the others, just as it would be with the other columns. Asha’man to strike, and men with steel to guard their backs while they killed. The sun still had a long way to climb before midday. Nothing had changed to alter the plan.
Madness waits for some, Lews Therin whispered. It creeps up on others.
Miraj rode near the head of his army marching east along a muddy road that wound through hilly olive groves and patchy forest. Not at the head. A full regiment, most Seanchan, rode between him and the forward scouts. He had known generals who wanted to be at the very front. Most were dead. Most had lost the battles they died in. Mud kept down dust, yet word of an army on the move ran like wildfire on the Sa’las Plains, whatever the land. Here and there among the olive trees he spotted an overturned wheelbarrow or an abandoned pruning hook, but the workers had vanished long since. Luckily, they would avoid his opponents as much as they did him. With luck, lacking raken, his opponents would not know he was on them until it was too late. Kennar Miraj did not like trusting to luck.
Aside from under-officers ready to produce maps or copy orders and messengers ready to carry them, he rode accompanied only by Abaldar Yulan, small enough to make his quite ordinary brown gelding seem immense, a fiery man with the nails of his little fingers painted green who wore a black wig to conceal his baldness, and Lisaine Jarath, a gray-haired woman from Seandar itself, whose pale plump face and blue eyes were a study in serenity. Yulan was not calm; Miraj’s coal-dark Captain of the Air often wore a scowl for the rules that seldom let him touch the reins of a raken anymore, but today his frown went bone deep. The sky was clear, perfect weather for raken, but by Suroth’s command, none of his fliers would be in the saddle today, not here. There were too few raken with the Hailene to risk them unnecessarily. Lisaine’s calm troubled Miraj more. More than the senior der’sul’dam under his command, she was a friend with whom he had shared many a cup of kaf and many a game of stones. An animated woman, always bubbling over with enthusiasms and amusement. And she was icy calm, as silent as any sul’dam he had tried to question.
Within his sight were twenty damane flanking the horsemen, each walking beside her sul’dam’s mount. The sul’dam bobbed in their saddles, bending to pat a damane’s head, straightening only to bend again to stroke her hair. The damane looked steady enough to his eye, but plainly the sul’dam were on razor’s edge. And ebullient Lisaine rode silent as a stone.
A torm appeared ahead, racing down the column. Well off to the side, on the edge of the groves, yet horses whickered and shied as the bronze-scaled creature flowed past. A trained torm would not attack horses — at least not unless the killing frenzy overtook it, the reason torm were no good in battle — but horses trained to be calm around torm were in as short supply as torm themselves.
Miraj sent a skinny under-lieutenant named Varek to fetch the morat’torm’s scouting report. Afoot, and the Light consume whether Varek lost sei’taer. He would not waste time on Varek trying to control a mount acquired locally. The man returned faster than he went and made a crisp bow, beginning his report before his back was straight again.
"The enemy is less than five miles due east, my Lord Captain-General, marching in our direction. They are deployed in five columns spaced approximately one mile apart."
So much for luck. But Miraj had considered how he would attack forty thousand with only five himself, and fifty damane. Quickly men were galloping with orders to deploy to meet an attempted envelopment, and the regiments behind him began turning into the groves, sul’dam riding among them with their damane.
Gathering his cloak against a sudden cold wind, Miraj noticed something that made him feel colder still. Lisaine was watching the sul’dam vanish into the trees, too. And she had begun to sweat.
Bertome rode easily, letting the wind stream his cloak to one side, but he studied the forested country ahead with a wariness he barely attempted to conceal. Of his four countrymen at his back, only Doressin was truly skilled in the Game of Houses. That fool Tairen dog Weiramon was blind, of course. Bertome glared at the puffed-up buffoon’s back. Weiramon rode well ahead of the rest in deep conversation with Gedwyn, and if Bertome needed any further proof that the Tairen would smile at what gagged a goat, it was how he tolerated that hot-eyed young monster. He noticed Kiril glancing sideways at him, and reined his gray further from the towering man. He had no particular enmity toward the Illianer, but he did hate people looming over him. He could not wait to return to Cairhien, where he did not have to be surrounded by ungainly giants. Kiril Drapeneos was not blind, though, however over-tall. He had sent a dozen scouts forward, too. Weiramon had sent one.
"Doressin," Bertome said softly, then, a little louder, "Doressin, you lump!
"
The bony man gave a start in his saddle. Like Bertome, like the other three, he had shaved and powdered the front of his head; the style of marking yourself like a soldier had become quite fashionable. Doressin should have called him a toad in return, the way they had since boyhood, but instead he heeled his gelding up beside Bertome’s and leaned close. He was worried, and letting it show, his forehead furrowed deeply. "You realize the Lord Dragon means us to die?" he whispered, glancing at the column trailing behind them. "Blood and fire, I only listened to Colavaere, but I have known I was a dead man since he killed her."
For a moment, Bertome eyed the column of armsmen, snaking back through the rolling hills. The trees were more scattered here than ahead, but still enough to shield an attack until it was right on top of you. The last olive grove lay nearly a mile behind. Weiramon’s men rode at the fore, of course, in those ridiculous coats with their fat white-striped sleeves, and then Kiril’s Illianers in enough green and red to shame Tinkers. His own people, decently clad in dark blue beneath their breastplates, were still beyond his sight with Doressin’s and the others’, ahead only of the company of Legionmen. Weiramon had seemed surprised that the foot kept up, though he had hardly set a difficult pace.
It was not really the armsmen Bertome glanced at, though. Seven men rode before even Weiramon’s, seven men with hard faces and death-cold eyes, in black coats. One wore a pin in the shape of a silver sword on his tall collar.
"An elaborate way to go about it," he told Doressin dryly. "And I doubt al’Thor would have sent those fellows with us, if we were just being fed into a sausage grinder." Forehead still creased, Doressin opened his mouth again, but Bertome said, "I need to talk to the Tairen." He disliked seeing his childhood friend this way. Al’Thor had unhinged him.
Absorbed in one another, Weiramon and Gedwyn did not hear him riding up on them. Gedwyn was idly playing with his reins, his features cold with contempt. The Tairen was red-faced. "I don’t care who you are," he was saying to the black-coated man in a low, hard voice, spittle flying, "I won’t take more risk without a command direct from the lips of —"
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