The Eye of the World (69 page)

Elyas turned to look at her, a flat, unblinking stare. “Get some more tea now, if you want any. I want the fire out before dark.”

Perrin could make out the eye clearly now, despite the failing light. It was bigger than a man’s head, and the shadows falling across it made it seem like a raven’s eye, hard and black and without pity. He wished they were sleeping somewhere else.

Egwene sat by the fire, staring up at the fragment of statue, but Perrin went down by the pool to be alone. Day was fading, and the night wind was already rising out of the east, ruffling the surface of the water. He took the axe from the loop on his belt and turned it over in his hands. The ashwood haft was as long as his arm, and smooth and cool to the touch. He hated it. He was ashamed of how proud he had been of the axe back in Emond’s Field. Before he knew what he might be willing to do with it.

“You hate her that much?” Elyas said behind him.

Startled, he jumped and half raised the axe before he saw who it was. “Can . . . ? Can you read my mind, too? Like the wolves?”

Elyas cocked his head to one side and eyed him quizzically. “A blind man could read your face, boy. Well, speak up. Do you hate the girl? Despise her? That’s it. You were ready to kill her because you despise her, always dragging her feet, holding you back with her womanish ways.”

“Egwene never dragged her feet in her life,” he protested. “She always does her share. I don’t despise her, I love her.” He glared at Elyas, daring him to laugh. “Not like that. I mean, she isn’t like a sister, but she and Rand. . . . Blood and ashes! If the ravens caught us. . . . If. . . . I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. If she had to choose her way of dying, which do you think
she’d pick? One clean blow of your axe, or the way the animals we saw today died? I know which I’d take.”

“I don’t have any right to choose for her. You won’t tell her, will you? About. . . .” His hands tightened on the axe haft; the muscles in his arms corded, heavy muscles for his age, built by long hours swinging the hammer at Master Luhhan’s forge. For an instant he thought the thick wooden shaft would snap. “I hate this bloody thing,” he growled. “I don’t know what I’m doing with it, strutting around like some kind of fool. I couldn’t have done it, you know. When it was all pretend and maybe, I could swagger, and play as if I. . . .” He sighed, his voice fading. “It’s different, now. I don’t ever want to use it again.”

“You’ll use it.”

Perrin raised the axe to throw it in the pool, but Elyas caught his wrist.

“You’ll use it, boy, and as long as you hate using it, you will use it more wisely than most men would. Wait. If ever you don’t hate it any longer, then will be the time to throw it as far as you can and run the other way.”

Perrin hefted the axe in his hands, still tempted to leave it in the pool.
Easy for him to say wait. What if I wait and then
can’t
throw it away?

He opened his mouth to ask Elyas, but no words came out. A sending from the wolves, so urgent that his eyes glazed over. For an instant he forgot what he had been going to say, forgot he had been going to say anything, forgot even how to speak, how to breathe. Elyas’s face sagged, too, and his eyes seemed to peer inward and far away. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had come. It had only lasted a heartbeat, but that was enough.

Perrin shook himself and filled his lungs deeply. Elyas did not pause; as soon as the veil lifted from his eyes, he sped toward the fire without any hesitation. Perrin ran wordlessly behind him.

“Douse the fire!” Elyas called hoarsely to Egwene. He gestured urgently, and he seemed to be trying to shout in a whisper. “Get it out!”

She rose to her feet, staring at him uncertainly, then stepped closer to the fire, but slowly, clearly not understanding what was happening.

Elyas pushed roughly past her and snatched up the tea kettle, cursing when it burned him. Juggling the hot pot, he upended it over the fire just the same. A step behind him, Perrin arrived in time to start kicking dirt over the hissing coals as the last of the tea splashed into the fire, hissing and rising in tendrils of steam. He did not stop until the last vestige of the fire was buried.

Elyas tossed the kettle to Perrin, who immediately let it fall with a choked-off yell. Perrin blew on his hands, frowning at Elyas, but the
fur-clad man was too busy giving their campsite a hasty look to pay any attention.

“No chance to hide that somebody’s been here,” Elyas said. “We’ll just have to hurry and hope. Maybe they won’t bother. Blood and ashes, but I was sure it was the ravens.”

Hurriedly Perrin tossed the saddle on Bela, propping the axe against his thigh while he bent to tighten the girth.

“What is it?” Egwene asked. Her voice shook. “Trollocs? A Fade?”

“Go east or west,” Elyas told Perrin. “Find a place to hide, and I’ll join you as soon as I can. If they see a wolf. . . .” He darted away, crouching almost as if he intended to go to all fours, and vanished into the lengthening shadows of evening.

Egwene hastily gathered her few belongings, but she still demanded an explanation from Perrin. Her voice was insistent and growing more frightened by the minute as he kept silent. He was frightened, too, but fear made them move faster. He waited until they were headed toward the setting sun. Trotting ahead of Bela and holding the axe across his chest in both hands, he told what he knew over his shoulder in snatches while hunting for a place to go to ground and wait for Elyas.

“There are a lot of men coming, on horses. They came up behind the wolves, but the men didn’t see them. They’re heading toward the pool. Probably they don’t have anything to do with us; it’s the only water for miles. But Dapple says. . . .” He glanced over his shoulder. The evening sun painted odd shadows on her face, shadows that hid her expression.
What is she thinking? Is she looking at you as if she doesn’t know you anymore? Does she know you?
“Dapple says they smell wrong. It’s . . . sort of the way a rabid dog smells wrong.” The pool was lost to sight behind them. He could still pick out boulders—fragments of Artur Hawkwing’s statue—in the deepening twilight, but not to tell which was the stone where the fire had been. “We’ll stay away from them, find a place to wait for Elyas.”

“Why should they bother us?” she demanded. “We’re supposed to be safe here. It’s supposed to be safe. Light, there has to be someplace safe.”

Perrin began looking harder for somewhere to hide. They could not be very far from the pool, but the twilight was thickening. Soon it would be too dark to travel. Faint light still bathed the crests. From the hollows between, where there was barely enough to see, it seemed bright by contrast. Off to the left a dark shape stood sharp against the sky, a large, flat stone slanting out of a hillside, cloaking the slope beneath in darkness.

“This way,” he said.

He trotted toward the hill, glancing over his shoulder for any sign of the men who were coming. There was nothing—yet. More than once he had to stop and wait while the others stumbled after him. Egwene was crouched over Bela’s neck, and the mare was picking her way carefully over the uneven ground. Perrin thought they both must be more tired than he had believed.
This had better be a good hiding place. I don’t think we can hunt for another.

At the base of the hill he studied the massive, flat rock outlined against the sky, jutting out the slope almost at the crest. There was an odd familiarity to the way the top of the huge slab seemed to form irregular steps, three up and one down. He climbed the short distance and felt across the stone, walking along it. Despite the weathering of centuries he could still feel four joined columns. He glanced up at the step-like top of the stone, towering over his head like a huge lean-to. Fingers.
We’ll shelter in Artur Hawkwing’s hand. Maybe some of his justice is left here.

He motioned for Egwene to join him. She did not move, so he slid back down to the base of the hill and told her what he had found.

Egwene peered up the hill with her head pushed forward. “How can you see anything?” she asked.

Perrin opened his mouth, then shut it. He licked his lips as he looked around, for the first time really aware of what he was seeing. The sun was down. All the way down, now, and clouds hid the full moon, but it still seemed like the deep purple fringes of twilight to him. “I felt the rock,” he said finally. “That’s what it has to be. They won’t be able to pick us out against the shadow of it even if they come this far.” He took Bela’s bridle to lead her to the shelter of the hand. He could feel Egwene’s eyes on his back.

As he was helping her down from the saddle, the night broke out in shouts back toward the pool. She laid a hand on Perrin’s arm, and he heard her unspoken question.

“The men saw Wind,” he said reluctantly. It was difficult to pick out the meaning of the wolves’ thoughts. Something about fire. “They have torches.” He pressed her down at the base of the fingers and crouched beside her. “They’re breaking up into parties to search. So many of them, and the wolves are all hurt.” He tried to make his voice heartier. “But Dapple and the others should be able to keep out of their way, even injured, and they don’t expect us. People don’t see what they don’t expect. They’ll give up soon enough and make camp.” Elyas was with the wolves, and would not leave them while they were hunted.
So many riders. So persistent. Why so persistent?

He saw Egwene nod, but in the dark she did not realize it. “We’ll be all right, Perrin.”

Light,
he thought wonderingly, she’s
trying to comfort
me.

The shouts went on and on. Small knots of torches moved in the distance, flickering points of light in the darkness.

“Perrin,” Egwene said softly, “will you dance with me at Sunday? If we’re home by then?”

His shoulders shook. He made no sound, and he did not know if he was laughing or crying. “I will. I promise.” Against his will his hands tightened on the axe, reminding him that he still held it. His voice dropped to a whisper. “I promise,” he said again, and hoped.

Groups of torch-carrying men now rode through the hills, bunches of ten or twelve. Perrin could not tell how many groups there were. Sometimes three or four were in sight at once, quartering back and forth. They continued to shout to one another, and sometimes there were screams in the night, the screams of horses, the screams of men.

He saw it all from more than one vantage. He crouched on the hillside with Egwene, watching the torches move through the darkness like fireflies, and in his mind he ran in the night with Dapple, and Wind, and Hopper. The wolves had been too hurt by the ravens to run far or fast, so they intended to drive the men out of the darkness, drive them to the shelter of their fires. Men always sought the safety of fires in the end, when wolves roamed the night. Some of the mounted men led strings of horses without riders; they whinnied and reared with wide, rolling eyes when the gray shapes darted among them, screaming and pulling their lead ropes from the hands of the men who held them, scattering in all directions as fast as they could run. Horses with men on their backs screamed, too, when gray shadows flashed out of the dark with hamstringing fangs, and sometimes their riders screamed as well, just before jaws tore out their throats. Elyas was out there, also, more dimly sensed, stalking the night with his long knife, a two-legged wolf with one sharp steel tooth. The shouts became curses more often than not, but the searchers refused to give up.

Abruptly Perrin realized that the men with torches were following a pattern. Each time some of the parties came in view, one of them, at least, was closer to the hillside where he and Egwene were hiding. Elyas had said to hide, but. . . .
What if we run? Maybe we could hide in the dark, if we keep moving. Maybe. It has to be dark enough for that.

He turned to Egwene, but as he did the decision was taken away from him. Bunched torches, a dozen of them, came around the base of the hill, wavering with the trot of the horses. Lanceheads gleamed in the torchlight. He froze, holding his breath, hands tightening on his axe haft.