Knife of Dreams

“What did she say?”

“You’ll have to ask her, my Lord.”

Perrin rode down the slope and back to the trees thinking how easy it would be to turn around. Galle

Grady, elbows on his knees, was in a small clearing sitting on a half-worked mossy stone that was partially sunken into the ground and no doubt left over from building the aqueduct. A few others like it stood around. The breeze kept his scent from Perrin’s nose. He did not look up until Perrin drew rein in front of him. The gateway they had used to come here still stood open, showing another clearing among tall trees, not far from where the Seanchan were now camped. It might have been easier to have had them set up close to Perrin’s camp, but he wanted to keep the Aes Sedai and Wise Ones as far from the sul’dam and damane as possible. He was not afraid of the Seanchan breaking Tylee’s word, but the Aes Sedai and Wise Ones practically came down with the pip just thinking about damane. Probably the Wise Ones and A

“Are you all right. Grady?” The man’s weathered face seemed to have new lines in it. That might have been a trick of moonshadows cast by the trees, but Perrin did not think so. The carts had passed through the gateway easily, but was it a little smaller than the first he had seen Grady make?

“Just tired a little, my Lord,” Grady said wearily. He remained seated with his elbows on his knees. “All this Traveling we’ve been doing lately… Well, I couldn’t have held the gateway open long enough for all those soldiers to ride through yesterday. That’s why I’ve taken to tying them off.”

Perrin nodded. Both of the Asha’man were tired. Cha

“I’m going to need you and Neald the day after tomorrow.” That was like saying he needed air. Without the Asha’man, everything became impossible. “You’re going to be busy then.” Another gross understatement.

“Busy as a one-armed man plastering a ceiling, my Lord.”

“Are you up to it?”

“Have to be. don’t I, my Lord.”

Perrin nodded again. You did what had to be done. “Send me back to our camp. After you return Mishima and his people to his, you and the Maidens can sleep there if you’d like.” That would spare Grady a little against two days from now.

“Don’t know about the Maidens, my Lord, but I’d as soon come on home tonight.” He turned his head to look at the gateway without rising, and it dwindled in the reverse of how it had opened, the view through it seeming to rotate as it narrowed, finishing with a vertical slash of silvery blue light that left a faint purplish bar in Perrin’s vision when it winked out. “Those damane fair make my skin crawl. They don’t want to be free.”

“How would you know that?”

“I talked to some of them when none of those sul’dam was close by. Soon as I brought up maybe they’d like those leashes off. just hinting like, they started screaming for the sul’dam. The damae were crying, and the sul’dam petting them and stroking them and glaring daggers at me. Fair made my skin crawl.”

Stepper stamped an impatient hoof, and Perrin patted the stallion’s neck. Grady was lucky those sul’dam had let him go with a whole hide. “Whatever happens with the damane. Grady, it won’t be this week, or next. And it won’t be us who fixes it. So you let the damane be. We have a job of work in front of us that needs doing.” And a deal with the Dark One to do it. He pushed the thought away. Anyway, it had grown hard to think of Tylee Khirgan being on the Dark One’s side. Or Mishima. “You understand that?”

“I understand, my Lord. I’m just saying it makes my skin crawl.”

At last another silvery blue slash appeared, widening into an opening that showed a clearing among large, widely spaced trees and a low stone outcrop. Leaning low on Stepper’s neck. Perrin rode through. The gateway winked out behind him, and he rode on through the trees until he came to the large clearing where the camp lay, near what had once been the tiny village of Brytan, a collection of flea-riddled hovels that the most rain-soaked night could not tempt a man into. The sentries up in the trees gave no warnings, of course. They recognized him.

He wanted nothing so much as he wanted his blankets right then. Well, Faile, certainly, but lacking her, he wanted to be alone in the dark. Likely, he would fail to find sleep again, but he would spend the night as he had so often before, thinking of her, remembering her. Short of the ten-pace wide thicket of sharpened stakes that surrounded the camp, though, he reined in. A raken was crouched just outside the stakes, its long gray neck lowered so a woman in a hooded brown coat could scratch its leathery snout. Her hood hung down her back, revealing short-cropped hair and a hard, narrow face. She looked at Perrin as if she recognized him, but went right on scratching. The saddle on the creature’s back had places for two riders. A messenger had come, it seemed. He turned into one of the narrow, angled lanes through the stakes that had been left to allow horses through. Just not quickly.

Most everybody had turned in already. He sensed movement on the horselines. in the heart of the camp, likely some of the Cairhienin grooms or farriers, but the patched canvas tents and small huts of woven evergreen branches, now long since brown, lay dark and quiet. Nothing moved among the low Aiel tents, and only a few sentries walking up and down in the nearest Mayener section of the camp. The Mayeners and Ghealdanin put little trust in the Two Rivers men in the trees. His tall, red-striped tent was alight, however, and the shadows of a number of people shifted on the tent walls. When he climbed down in front of the tent, Athan Chandin appeared to take the reins and knuckle his forehead while he hunched a sort of bow. Athan was a good bowshot or he would not have been here, but he had a truckling ma

“There you are,” Berelain said brightly. She must have dressed hastily, because her long black hair looked as though it had had just a lick and a promise from a brush, but her high-necked gray riding dress appeared neat and fresh. Her serving women never let her don anything unless it was freshly ironed. She held out a silver winecup for Breane to refill from a long-necked wine pitcher, which the Cairhienin woman did with a grimace. Faile’s maid disliked Berelain with a passion. Berelain seemed not to notice, though. “Forgive me for entertaining in your tent, but the Ba

Balwer was standing unobtrusively in a corner-the bird-like little man could be as u