“Mat,” Elayne asked. “Won’t that be giving them what they want? A chance to wipe us out?”
“Yes,” Mat said softly as the Aes Sedai sent over maps. These had markings on them, notations that appeared to be in General Bryne’s hand, judging by what they said. “We have to be a tempting target. We have to draw them in, face them and either defeat them or be crushed.”
A drawn-out fight would serve the Shadow. Once enough Trollocs reached southern lands, there would be no containing them. He had to win or lose quickly.
One last toss of the dice indeed.
Mat pointed at a location on the maps, a place that Bryne had annotated. It had a good water supply, a nice meeting of hills and rivers. “This place. Merrilor? You’ve been using it as a supply dump?”
Saerin chuckled softly. “And so we go back where we began, do we?”
“It does have some small fortifications,” Elayne said. “The men built a palisade on one side, and we could expand it.”
“It’s what we need,” Mat said, envisioning a battle there.
Merrilor would put them where the two major Trolloc armies could come in, try to crush the humans between them. That would be tempting. But the terrain would be wonderful for Mat to use…
Yes. It would be like the Battle of the Priya Narrows. If he put archers along those cliffs—no, dragons—and if he could give the Aes Sedai a few days of rest… Priya Narrows. He had counted on using a large river to trap the Hamarean army at the mouth of the Narrows. But as he sprung the trap, the blasted river dried up on him; the Hamareans had dammed it up on the other side of the Narrows. They had stepped right over the riverbed, and got clean away. That’s a lesson I won’t forget.
“This will do,” Mat said, placing his hand on the map. “Elayne?”
“Let it be done,” Elayne said. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Mat.”
As she spoke, the dice started tumbling inside his head.
Galad closed Trom’s eyes. He’d searched the battlefield north of Cairhien for over an hour to find him. Trom had bled out, and only a few corners of his cloak were still white. Galad ripped the officer’s knots off his shoulder—amazingly unsoiled—and stood up.
He felt weary to the bone. He started back across the battlefield, passing heaps of the dead. The crows and the ravens had come; they blanketed the landscape behind him. An undulating, quivering blackness that coated the ground like mold. From a distance, it seemed as if the ground had been burned, there were so many carrion birds.
Occasionally, Galad passed men like himself who sifted through the corpses for friends. There were surprisingly few looters—you had to watch for those on a battlefield. Elayne had caught a few trying to sneak out of Cairhien. She’d threatened to hang them.
She’s grown harder, Galad thought, trudging back toward camp. His boots felt like lead on his feet. That is good. As a child, she had often made decisions with her heart. She was a queen now, and acted it. Now, if only he could right her moral compass. She wasn’t a bad person, but Galad wished that she—like other monarchs—could see as clearly as he did.
He was beginning to accept that they didn’t. He was beginning to accept that it was all right, so long as they tried their best. Whatever he had inside of him that allowed him to see the right of things was obv
iously a gift of the Light, and holding others to scorn because they had not been born with it was wrong. Just as it would be wrong to hold a man to scorn because he had been born with only one hand, and was therefore an inferior swordsman.
Many of the living he passed sat on the ground in the rare spots where there were no corpses and no blood. These men did not look like the victors of a battle, though the arrival of the Asha’man had saved this day. The trick with the lava had given Elayne’s army the breather it needed to regroup and attack.
That battle had been swift, but brutal. Trollocs did not surrender, and they couldn’t be allowed to break and flee. So Galad and the others had fought, bled and died long past when it was obvious they would be victorious.
The Trollocs were dead now. The remaining men sat and stared out at the blanket of corpses, as if numbed by the prospect of searching out the few living among the many thousands dead.
The setting sun and choking clouds made the light red, and gave faces a bloody cast.
Galad eventually reached the long hill that had marked the division between the two battlefields. He climbed it, slowly, forcing down thoughts of how good a bed would feel. Or a pallet on the floor. Or some flat rock in an out-of-the-way place, where he could roll up in his cloak.
The fresher air atop the hill shocked him. He’d been smelling blood and death for so long that now it was the clean air that smelled wrong. He shook his head, walking past tired Borderlanders who were trudging through gateways. The Asha’man had gone to hold off the Trollocs to the north so Lord Mandragoran’s armies could escape.
From what Galad heard, the Borderlander armies were a fraction of what they had been. The betrayal of the great captains had been felt most deeply by Lord Mandragoran and his men. It sickened Galad, for this battle had not gone easily for him or anyone else with Elayne. It had been horrible—and as bad as it had been, the fight had gone more poorly for the Borderlanders.
Galad kept his stomach settled with difficulty as his view from atop the hill let him see just how many carrion birds had come to feast. The Dark One’s minions fell, and the Dark One’s minions glutted themselves.
Galad eventually found Elayne. Her passionate words, being spoken to Tam al’Thor and Arganda, took him by surprise.
“Mat is right,” she said. “The Field of Merrilor is a good battlefield. Light! I wish we could give the people more time to rest. We’ll have only a few days, a week at most, before the Trollocs reach Merrilor behind us.” She shook her head. “We should have seen those Sharans coming. When the deck starts to look like it’s stacked against the Dark One, of course he will just add a few new cards to the game.”
Galad’s pride demanded that he remain standing as he listened to Elayne talk to the other commanders. For once, however, his pride lost out, and he settled down on a stool and slumped forward.