He could see further than the others, so he was first to spot the rider coming from the direction of Tarabon. Even to him the rider was only a spot of bright colors on horseback winding its way through the trees in the distance, now seen, now hidden. A piebald horse, he thought. And not before time! He opened his mouth to announce her—it would be a woman; each rider before had been—when Masema suddenly muttered, “Raven!” like a curse.
Perrin jerked his head up. A big black bird was quartering over the treetops no more than a hundred paces away. Its quarry might have been carrion dead in the snow or some small animal, yet Perrin could not take the chance. It did not seem to have seen them, but the oncoming rider would soon be in its sight. Even as he spotted the raven, his bow came up, and he drew—fletchings to cheek, to ear—and loosed, all in one smooth motion. He was dimly aware of the slap of bowstrings beside him, but his attention was all on the black bird.
Of a sudden it cartwheeled in a shower of midnight feathers as his arrow found it, and tumbled from the sky as two more arrows streaked through the place where it had been. Bows half-drawn, the other Shienarans searched the sky to see if it had a companion.
“Does it have to report,” Perrin asked softly, “or does . . . he . . . see what it sees?” He had not meant anyone to hear, but Ragan, the youngest of the Shienarans, less than ten years his elder, answered as he fitted another arrow to his short bow.
“It has to report. To a Halfman, usually.” In the Borderlands there was a bounty on ravens; no one there ever dared assume any raven was just a bird. “Light, if Heartsbane saw what the ravens saw, we would all have been dead before we reached the mountains.” Ragan’s voice was easy; it was a matter of every day to a Shienaran soldier.
Perrin shivered, not from the cold, and in the back of his head something snarled a challenge to the death. Heartsbane. Different names in different lands—Soulsbane and Heartfang, Lord of the Grave and Lord of the Twilight—and everywhere Father of Lies and the Dark One, all to avoid giving him his true name and drawing his attention. The Dark One often used ravens and crows, rats in the cities. Perrin drew another broadhead arrow from the quiver on his hip that balanced the axe on the other side.
“That may be as big as a club,” Ragan said admiringly, with a glance at Perrin’s bow, “but it can shoot. I would hate to see what it could do to a man in armor.” The Shienarans wore only light mail, now, under their plain coats, but usually they fought in armor, man and horse alike.
“Too long for horseback,” Masema sneered. The triangular scar on his dark cheek twisted his contemptuous grin even more. “A good breastplate will stop even a pile arrow except at close range, and if your first shot fails, the man you’re shooting at will carve your guts out.”
“That is just it, Masema.” Ragan relaxed a bit as the sky remained empty. The raven must have been alone. “With this Two Rivers bow, I’ll wager you don’t have to be so close.” Masema opened his mouth.
“You two stop flapping your bloody tongues!” Uno snapped. With a long scar down the left side of his face and that eye gone, his features were hard, even for a Shienaran. He had acquired a painted eyepatch on their way into the mountains during the autumn; a permanently frowning eye in a fiery red did nothing to make his stare easier to face. “If you can’t keep your bloody minds on the bloody task at hand, I’ll see if extra flaming guard duty tonight will bloody settle you.” Ragan and Masema subsided under his stare. He gave them a last scowl that faded as he turned to Perrin. “Do you see anything yet?” His tone was a little gruffer than he might have used with a commander put over him by the King of Shienar, or the Lord of Fal Dara, yet there was something in it of readiness to do whatever Perrin suggested.
The Shienarans knew how far he could see, but they seemed to take it as a matter of course, that and the color of his eyes, as well. They did not know everything, not by half, but they accepted him as he
was. As they thought he was. They seemed to accept everything and anything. The world was changing, they said. Everything spun on the wheels of chance and change. If a man had eyes a color no man’s eyes had ever been, what did it matter, now?
“She’s coming,” Perrin said. “You should just see her now. There.” He pointed, and Uno strained forward, his one real eye squinting, then finally nodded doubtfully.
“There’s bloody something moving down there.” Some of the others nodded and murmured, too. Uno glared at them, and they went back to studying the sky and the mountains.
Suddenly Perrin realized what the bright colors on the distant rider meant. A vivid green skirt peeking out beneath a bright red cloak. “She’s one of the Traveling People,” he said, startled. No one else he had ever heard of dressed in such brilliant colors and odd combinations, not by choice.
The women they had sometimes met and guided even deeper into the mountains included every sort: a beggar woman in rags struggling afoot through a snowstorm; a merchant by herself leading a string of laden packhorses; a lady in silks and fine furs, with red-tasseled reins on her palfrey and gold worked on her saddle. The beggar departed with a purse of silver—more than Perrin thought they could afford to give, until the lady left an even fatter purse of gold. Women from every station in life, all alone, from Tarabon, and Ghealdan, and even Amadicia. But he had never expected to see one of the Tuatha’an.
“A bloody Tinker?” Uno exclaimed. The others echoed his surprise.
Ragan’s topknot waved as he shook his head. “A Tinker wouldn’t be mixed in this. Either she’s not a Tinker, or she is not the one we are supposed to meet.”
“Tinkers,” Masema growled. “Useless cowards.”
Uno’s eye narrowed until it looked like the pritchel hole of an anvil; with the red painted eye on his patch, it gave him a villainous look. “Cowards, Masema?” he said softly. “If you were a woman, would you have the flaming nerve to ride up here, alone and bloody unarmed?” There was no doubt she would be unarmed if she was of the Tuatha’an. Masema kept his mouth shut, but the scar on his cheek stood out tight and pale.
“Burn me, if I would,” Ragan said. “And burn me if you would either, Masema.” Masema hitched at his cloak and ostentatiously searched the sky.
Uno snorted. “The Light send that flaming carrion eater was flaming alone,” he muttered.
Slowly the shaggy brown-and-white mare meandered closer, picking a way along the clear ground between broad snowbanks. Once the brightly clad woman stopped to peer at something on the ground, then tugged the cowl of her cloak further over her head and heeled her mount forward in a slow walk. The raven, Perrin thought. Stop looking at that bird and come on, woman. Maybe you’ve brought the word that finally takes us out of here. If Moiraine means to let us leave before spring. Burn her! For a moment he was not sure whether he meant the Aes Sedai, or the Tinker woman who seemed to be taking her own time.
If she kept on as she was, the woman would pass a good thirty paces to one side of the thicket. With her eyes fixed on where her piebald stepped, she gave no sign that she had seen them among the trees.
Perrin nudged the stallion’s flanks with his heels, and the dun leaped ahead, sending up sprays of snow with his hooves. Behind him, Uno quietly gave the command, “Forward!”
Stepper was halfway to her before she seemed to become aware of them, and then she jerked her mare to a halt with a start. She watched as they formed an arc centered on her. Embroidery of eye-wrenching blue, in the pattern called a Tairen maze, made her red cloak even more garish. She was not young—gray showed thick in her hair where it was not hidden by her cowl—but her face had few lines, other than the disapproving frown she ran over their weapons. If she was alarmed at meeting armed men in the heart of mountain wilderness, though, she gave no sign. Her hands rested easily on the high pommel of her worn but well-kept saddle. And she did not smell afraid.
Stop that! Perrin told himself. He made his voice soft so as not to frighten her. “My name is Perrin, good mistress. If you need help, I will do what I can. If not, go with the Light. But unless the Tuatha’an have changed their ways, you are far from your wagons.”
She studied them a moment more before speaking. There was a gentleness in her dark eyes, not surprising in one of the Traveling People. “I seek an . . . a woman.”
The skip was small, but it was there. She sought not any woman, but an Aes Sedai. “Does she have a name, good mistress?” Perrin asked. He had done this too many times in the last few months to need her reply, but iron was spoiled for want of care.
“She is called. . . . Sometimes, she is called Moiraine. My name is Leya.”