That morning the gates of Fal Dara had opened with the dawn. Lord Agelmar, armored and helmeted now like his soldiers, rode with the Black Hawk banner and the Three Foxes from the East Gate toward the sun, still only a red sliver above the trees. Like a steel snake undulating to mounted kettledrums, the column wound its way out of the town four abreast, Agelmar at its head hidden in the forest before its tail left Fal Dara keep. There were no cheers in the streets to speed them on their way, only their own drums and their pennants’ cracking in the wind, but their eyes looked toward the rising sun with purpose. Eastward they would join other steel serpents, from Fal Moran, behind King Easar himself with his sons at his side, and from Ankor Dail, that held the Eastern Marches and guarded the Spine of the World; from Mos Shirare and Fal Sion and Camron Caan, and all the other fortresses in Shienar, great and small. Joined into a greater serpent, they would turn north to Tarwin’s Gap.
Another exodus had begun at the same time, using the King’s Gate that led out on the way to Fal Moran. Carts and wagons, people mounted and people afoot, driving their livestock, carrying children on their backs, faces as long as the morning shadows. Reluctance to leave their homes, perhaps forever, slowed their feet, yet fear of what was coming spurred them, so that they went in bursts, feet dr
agging, then breaking into a run for a dozen paces only to fall back, once more, to shuffling through the dust. A few paused outside the town to watch the soldiers’ armored line winding into the forest. Hope blossomed in some eyes, and prayers were muttered, prayers for the soldiers, prayers for themselves, before they turned south again, trudging.
The smallest column went out of the Malkier Gate. Left behind were a few who would remain, soldiers and a sprinkling of older men, their wives dead and their grown children making the slow way south. A last handful so that Whatever happened in Tarwin’s Gap, Fal Dara would not fall undefended. Ingtar’s Gray Owl led the way, but it was Moiraine who took them north. The most important column of all, and the most desperate.
For at least an hour after they passed the borderpost there was no change in land or forest. The Warder kept them at a hard pace, as fast a walk as the horses could maintain, but Rand kept wondering when they would reach the Blight. The hills became a little higher, but the trees, and the creepers, and the underbrush were no different than what he had seen in Shienar, gray and all but leafless. He began to feel warmer, warm enough to sling his cloak across the pommel of his saddle.
“This is the best weather we’ve seen all year,” Egwene said, shrugging out of her own cloak.
Nynaeve shook her head, frowning as if listening to the wind. “It feels wrong.”
Rand nodded. He could feel it, too, though he could not say what it was exactly he was feeling. The wrongness went beyond the first warmth he could remember out of doors this year; it was more than the simple fact that it should not be so warm this far north. It must be the Blight, but the land was the same.
The sun climbed high, a red ball that could not give so much warmth despite the cloudless sky. A little while later he unbuttoned his coat. Sweat trickled down his face.
He was not the only one. Mat took his coat off, openly displaying the gold-and-ruby dagger, and wiped his face with the end of his scarf. Blinking, he rewound the scarf into a narrow band low over his eyes. Nynaeve and Egwene fanned themselves; they rode slumped as if they were wilting. Loial undid his high-collared tunic all the way down, and his shirt as well; the Ogier had a narrow strip of hair up the middle of his chest, as thick as fur. He muttered apologies all around.
“You must forgive me. Stedding Shangtai is in the mountains, and cool.” His broad nostrils flared, drawing in air that was becoming warmer by the minute. “I don’t like this heat, and damp.”
It was damp, Rand realized. It felt like the Mire in the depths of summer, back in the Two Rivers. In that boggy swamp every breath came as if through a wool blanket soaked in hot water. There was no soggy ground here—only a few ponds and streams, trickles to someone used to the Waterwood—but the air was like that in the Mire. Only Perrin, still in his coat, was breathing easily. Perrin and the Warder.
There were a few leaves now, on trees that were not evergreen. Rand reached out to touch a branch, and stopped with his hand short of the leaves. Sickly yellow mottled the red of the new growth, and black flecks like disease.
“I told you not to touch anything.” The Warder’s voice was flat. He still wore his shifting cloak, as if heat made no more impression on him than cold; it almost made his angular face seem to float unsupported above Mandarb’s back. “Flowers can kill in the Blight, and leaves maim. There’s a little thing called a Stick that likes to hide where the leaves are thickest, looking like its name, waiting for something to touch it. When something does, it bites. Not poison. The juice begins to digest the Stick’s prey for it. The only thing that can save you is to cut off the arm or leg that was bitten. But a Stick won’t bite unless you touch it. Other things in the Blight will.”
Rand jerked his hand back, leaves untouched, and wiped it on his pants leg.
“Then we’re in the Blight?” Perrin said. Strangely, he did not sound frightened.
“Just the fringe,” Lan said grimly. His stallion kept moving forward, and he spoke over his shoulder. “The real Blight still lies ahead. There are things in the Blight that hunt by sound, and some may have wandered this far south. Sometimes they cross the Mountains of Dhoom. Much worse than Sticks. Keep quiet and keep up, if you want to stay alive.” He continued to set a hard pace, not waiting for an answer.
Mile by mile the corruption of the Blight became more apparent. Leaves covered the trees in ever greater profusion, but stained and spotted with yellow and black, with livid red streaks like blood poisoning. Every leaf and creeper seemed bloated, ready to burst at a touch. Flowers hung on trees and weeds in a parody of spring, sickly pale and pulpy, waxen things that appeared to be rotting while Rand watched. When he breathed through his nose, the sweet stench of decay, heavy and thick, sickened him; when he tried breathing through his mouth, he almost gagged. The air tasted like a mouthful of spoiled meat. The horses’ hooves made a soft squishing as rotten-ripe things broke open under them.
Mat leaned out of his saddle and spewed until his stomach was empty. Rand sought the void, but calmness was little help against the burning bile that kept creeping up his throat. Empty or not, Mat heaved again a mile later, bringing up nothing, and yet again after that. Egwene looked as if she wanted to be sick, too, swallowing constantly, and Nynaeve’s face was a white mask of determination, her jaw set and her eyes fixed on Moiraine’s back. The Wisdom would not admit to feeling ill unless the Aes Sedai did, first, but Rand did not think she would have to wait long. Moiraine’s eyes were tight, and her lips pale.
Despite the heat and damp, Loial wrapped a scarf around his nose and mouth. When he met Rand’s gaze, the Ogier’s outrage and disgust were plain in his eyes. “I had heard—” he began, his voice muffled by the wool, then stopped to clear his throat with a grimace. “Faugh! It tastes like. . . . Faugh! I had heard and read about the Blight, but nothing could describe. . . .” His gesture somehow took in the smell as well as the eye-sickening growth. “That even the Dark One should do this to trees! Faugh!”
The Warder was not affected, of course, at least not that Rand could see, but to his surprise neither was Perrin. Or rather, not in the way the rest of them were. The big youth glared at the obscene forest through which they rode as he might have at an enemy, or the banner of an enemy. He caressed the axe at his belt as if unaware of what he was doing, and muttered to himself, half growling in a way that made the hair on Rand’s neck stir. Even in full sunlight his eyes glowed, golden and fierce.
The heat did not abate as the bloody sun fell toward the horizon. In the distance to the north, mountains rose, higher than the Mountains of Mist, black against the sky. Sometimes an icy wind from the sharp peaks gusted far enough to reach them. The torrid humidity leached away most of the mountain chill, but what remained was winter-cold compared to the swelter it replaced, if just for a moment. The sweat on Rand’s face seemed to flash into beads of ice; as the wind died, the beads melted again, running angry lines down his cheeks, and the thick heat returned harder than before by comparison. For the instant the wind surrounded them, it swept away the fetor, yet he would have done without that, too, if he could have. The cold was the chill of the grave, and it carried the dusty must of an old tomb newly opened.
“We cannot reach the mountains by nightfall,” Lan said, “and it is dangerous to move at night, even for a Warder alone.”
“There is a place not far off,” Moiraine said. “It will be a good omen for us to camp there.”
The Warder gave her a flat look, then nodded reluctantly. “Yes. We must camp somewhere. It might as well be there.”
“The Eye of the World was beyond the high passes when I found it,” Moiraine said. “Better to cross the Mountains of Dhoom in full daylight, at noon, when the Dark One’s powers in this world are weakest.”
“You talk as if the Eye isn’t always in the same place.” Egwene spoke to the Aes Sedai, but it was Loial who answered.
“No two among the Ogier have found it in exactly the same place. The Green Man seems to be found where he is needed. But it has always been beyond the high passes. They are treacherous, the high passes, and haunted by creatures of the Dark One.”
“We must reach the passes before we need worry about them,” Lan said. “Tomorrow we will be truly into the Blight.”
Rand looked at the forest around him, every leaf and flower diseased, every creeper decaying as it grew, and he could not repress a shudder. If this isn’t truly the Blight, what is?