The Dragon Reborn (59 page)

“We’re leaving!” Perrin said.

Loial gave a jump, nearly upsetting his ink bottle and almost dropping the book. “Leaving? We only just arrived,” he rumbled.

“Yes, leaving. Meet us at the stable as quickly as you can. And don’t let anyone see you go. I think there’s a back stair that runs down by the kitchen.” The smell of food at his end of the hall had been too strong for there not to be.

The Ogier gave one regretful look at the bed, then started tugging on his high boots. “But why?”

“The Whitecloaks,” Perrin said. “I’ll tell you more later.” He ducked back out before Loial could ask any more.

He had not unpacked. Once he had belted on his quiver, slung his cloak around him, tossed blanketroll and saddlebags on his shoulder, and picked up his bow, there was no sign he had ever been there. Not a wrinkle in the folded blankets at the foot of the bed, not a splash of water in the cracked basin on the washstand. Even the tallow candle still had a fresh wick, he realized.
I must have known I would not be staying. I don’t seem to leave any mark behind me, of late
.

As he has suspected, a narrow stair at the back led down to a hall that ran out past the kitchen. He peered cautiously into the kitchen. A spit dog trotted in his big wicker wheel, turning a long spit that held a haunch of lamb, a large piece of beef, five chickens, and a goose. Fragrant steam rose from a soup cauldron hanging from a sturdy crane over a second hearth. But there was not a cook to be seen, nor any living soul except the dog. Thankful for Orban’s lies, he hurried on into the night.

The stable was a large structure of the same stone as the inn, though only the stone faces around the big doors had been polished. A single lantern hanging from a stallpost gave a dim light. Stepper and the other horses stood in stalls near the doors; Loial’s big mount nearly filled his. The smell of hay and horses was familiar and comforting. Perrin was the first to arrive.

There was only one stableman on duty, a narrow-faced fellow in a dirty shirt, with lanky gray hair, who demanded to know who Perrin was to order four horses saddled, and who was his master, and what he was doing all bundled up to travel in the middle of the night, and did Master Furlan
know he was sneaking off like this, and what did he have hidden in those saddlebags, and what was wrong with his eyes, was he sick?

A coin flipped through the air from behind Perrin, glinting gold in the lantern light. The stableman snagged it with one hand and bit it.

“Saddle them,” Lan said. His voice was soft, as cold iron is soft, and the stableman bobbed a bow and scurried to make the horses ready.

Moiraine and Loial came into the stable just as they could take up their reins, and then they were all leading their horses behind Lan, off down a street that ran behind the stable toward the river. The soft clop of the horses’ hooves on the paving blocks attracted only a slat-ribbed dog that barked once and ran away as they went by.

“This brings back memories, doesn’t it, Perrin?” Loial said, quietly for him.

“Keep your voice down,” Perrin whispered. “What memories?”

“Why, it is like old times.” The Ogier had managed to mute his voice; he sounded like a bumblebee only the size of a dog instead of a horse. “Sneaking away in the night, with enemies behind us, and maybe enemies ahead, and danger in the air, and the cold tang of adventure.”

Perrin frowned at Loial over Stepper’s saddle. It was easy enough; his eyes cleared the saddle, and Loial stood head and shoulders and chest above it on the other side. “What are you talking about? I believe you are coming to like danger! Loial, you must be crazy!”

“I am only fixing the mood in my head,” Loial said, sounding formal. Or perhaps defensive. “For my book. I have to put it all in. I believe I am coming to like it. Adventuring. Of course, I am.” His ears gave two violent twitches. “I have to like it if I wish to write of it.”

Perrin shook his head.

At the stone wharves the bargelike ferries lay snugged for the night, still and dark, as did most of the ships. Lantern lights and people moved around on the dock alongside a two-masted vessel, though, and on the deck as well. The main smells were tar and rope, with strong hints of fish, though something back in the nearest warehouse gave off sharp, spicy aromas that the others nearly submerged.

Lan located the captain, a short, slight man with an odd way of holding his head tilted to one side while he listened. The bargaining was over soon enough, and booms and sling rigged to hoist the horses aboard. Perrin kept a close eye on the horses, talking to them; horses had little tolerance for the unusual, such as being lifted into the air, but even the Warder’s stallion seemed soothed by his murmurs.

Lan gave gold to the captain, and silver to two sailors who ran barefoot to a warehouse for sacks of oats. More crewmen tethered the horses between the masts in a sort of small pen made of rope, all the while muttering about the mess they would have to clean. Perrin did not think anyone was supposed to overhear, but his ears caught the words. The men were just not used to horses.

In short order the
Snow Goose
was ready to sail, only a little ahead of what the captain—his name was Jaim Adarra—had intended. Lan led Moiraine below as the lines were cast off, and Loial followed yawning. Perrin stayed at the railing near the bow, though the Ogier’s every yawn had summoned one of his own. He wondered if the
Snow Goose
could outrun wolves down the river, outrun dreams. Men began readying the sweeps to push the vessel away from the wharf.

As the last line was tossed ashore and seized by a dockman, a girl in narrow, divided skirts burst out of the shadows between two warehouses, a bundle in her arms and a dark cloak streaming behind her. She leaped onto the deck just as the men at the sweeps began pushing off.

Adarra bustled from his place by the tiller, but she calmly set down her bundle and said briskly, “I will take passage downriver . . . oh . . . say, as far as he is going.” She nodded toward Perrin without looking at him. “I’ve no objections to sleeping on deck. Cold and wet do not bother me.”

A few minutes of bargaining followed. She passed over three silver marks, frowned at the coppers she got back, then stuffed them into her purse and came forward to stand beside Perrin.

She had an herbal scent to her, light and fresh and clean. Those dark, tilted eyes regarded him over high cheekbones, then turned to look back toward shore. She was about his own age, he decided; he could not decide if her nose fit her face, or dominated it.
You
are
a fool, Perrin Aybara. Why care what she looks like?

The gap to the wharf was a good twenty paces, now; the sweeps dug in, cutting white furrows in black water. For a moment he considered tossing her over the side.

“Well,” she said after a moment, “I never expected my travels to take me back to Illian so soon as this.” Her voice was high, and she had a flat way of speaking, but it was not unpleasant. “You
are
going to Illian, are you not?” He tightened his mouth. “Don’t sulk,” she said. “You left quite a mess back there, you and that Aielman between you. The uproar was just beginning when I left.”

“You did not tell them?” he said in surprise.

“The townsfolk think the Aielman chewed through the chain, or broke it with his bare hands. They had not decided which when I left.” She made a sound suspiciously like a giggle. “Orban was quite loud in his disgust that his wounds would keep him from hunting down the Aielman personally.”

Perrin snorted. “If he ever sees an Aiel again, he’ll bloody soil himself.” He cleared his throat and muttered, “Sorry.”

“I do not know about that,” she said, as if his remark had been nothing out of the way. “I saw him in Jehannah during the winter. He fought four men together, killed two and made the other two yield. Of course, he started the fight, so that takes something away from it, but they knew what they were doing. He did not pick a fight with men who could not defend themselves. Still, he is a fool. He has these peculiar ideas about the Great Blackwood. What some call the Forest of Shadows. Have you ever heard of it?”

He eyed her sideways. She spoke of fighting and killing as calmly as another woman might speak of baking. He had never heard of any Great Blackwood, but the Forest of Shadows lay just south of the Two Rivers. “Are you following me? You were staring at me, back at the inn. Why? And why didn’t you tell them what you saw?”

“An Ogier,” she said, staring at the river, “is obviously an Ogier, and the others were not much more difficult to figure out. I managed a much better look inside
Lady Alys
’s hood than Orban did, and her face makes that stone-faced fellow a Warder. The Light burn me if I’d want that one angry with me. Does he always look like that, or did he eat a rock for his last meal? Anyway, that left only you. I do not like things I cannot account for.”

Once again he considered tossing her over the side. Seriously, this time. But Remen was now only a blotch of light well behind them in the darkness, and no telling how far it was to shore.

She seemed to take his silence as an urging to go on. “So there I have an”—she looked around, then dropped her voice, though the closest crewman was working a sweep ten feet away—“an Aes Sedai, a Warder, an Ogier—and you. A countryman, by first look at you.” Her tilted eyes rose to study his yellow ones intently—he refused to look away—and she smiled. “Only you free a caged Aielman, hold a long talk with him, then help him chop a dozen Whitecloaks into sausage. I assume you do this regularly; you certainly looked as if it were nothing out of the ordinary for you. I scent something strange in a party of travelers such as yours, and strange trails are what Hunters look for.”

He blinked; there was no mistaking that emphasis. “A Hunter? You? You cannot be a Hunter. You’re a girl.”

Her smile became so innocent that he almost walked away from her. She stepped back, made a flourish with each hand, and was holding two knives as neatly as old Thom Merrilin could have done it. One of the men at the sweeps made a choking sound, and two others stumbled; sweeps thrashed and tangled, and the
Snow Goose
lurched a little before the captain’s shouts set things right. By that time, the black-haired girl had made the knives disappear again.

“Nimble fingers and nimble wits will take you a good deal further than a sword and muscles. Sharp eyes help, as well, but fortunately, I have these things.”

“And modesty, as well,” Perrin murmured. She did not seem to notice.

“I took the oath and received the blessing in the Great Square of Tammaz, in Illian. Perhaps I
was
the youngest, but in that crowd, with all the trumpets and drums and cymbals and shouting. . . . A six-year-old could have taken the oath, and none would have noticed. There were over a thousand of us, perhaps two, and every one with an idea of where to find the Horn of Valere. I have mine—it still may be the right one—but no Hunter can afford to pass up a strange trail. The Horn will certainly lie at the end of a strange trail, and I have never seen one any stranger than the trail you four make. Where are you bound? Illian? Somewhere else?”

“What was your idea?” he asked. “About where the Horn is?”
Safe in Tar Valon, I hope, and the Light send I never see it again
. “You think it’s in Ghealdan?”

She frowned at him—he had the feeling she did not give up a scent once she had raised it, but he was ready to offer her as many side trails as she would take—then said, “Have you ever heard of Manetheren?”

He nearly choked. “I have heard of it,” he said cautiously.

“Every queen of Manetheren was an Aes Sedai, and the king the Warder bound to her. I can’t imagine a place like that, but that is what the books say. It was a large land—most of Andor and Ghealdan and more besides—but the capital, the city itself, was in the Mountains of Mist. That is where I think the Horn is. Unless you four lead me to it.”

His hackles stirred. She was lecturing him as if he were an untaught village lout. “You’ll not find the Horn or Manetheren. The city was destroyed during the Trolloc Wars, when the last queen drew too much of the One Power to destroy the Dreadlords who had killed her husband.”
Moiraine had told him the names of that king and queen, but he did not remember them.

“Not in Manetheren, farmboy,” she said calmly, “though a land such as that would make a good hiding place. But there were other nations, other cities, in the Mountains of Mist, so old that not even Aes Sedai remember them. And think of all those stories about it being bad luck to enter the mountains. What better place for the Horn to be hidden than in one of those forgotten cities.”

“I have heard stories of something being hidden in the mountains.” Would she believe him? He had never been good at lying. “The stories did not say what, but it’s supposed to be the greatest treasure in the world, so maybe it is the Horn. But the Mountains of Mist stretch for hundreds of leagues. If you are going to find it, you should not waste time following us. You’ll need it all to find the Horn before Orban and Gann.”

“I told you, those two have some strange idea the Horn is hidden in the Great Blackwood.” She smiled up at him. Her mouth was not too big at all, when she smiled. “And I told you a Hunter has to follow strange trails. You are lucky Orban and Gann were injured fighting all those Aielmen, or they might well be aboard, too. At least I will not get in your way, or try to take over, or pick a fight with the Warder.”

He growled disgustedly. “We are just travelers on our way to Illian, girl. What is your name? If I have to share this ship with you for days yet, I can’t keep calling you girl.”

“I call myself Mandarb.” He could not stop the guffaw that burst out of him. Those tilted eyes regarded him with heat. “I will teach you something, farmboy.” Her voice remained level. Barely. “In the Old Tongue, Mandarb means ‘blade.’ It is a name worthy of a Hunter of the Horn!”

He managed to get his laughter under control, and hardly wheezed at all as he pointed to the rope pen between the masts. “You see that black stallion? His name is Mandarb.”