From the start Perrin knew the journey to Caemlyn was going to be far from comfortable, beginning with Egwene’s insistence that they take turns riding Bela. They did not know how far it was, she said, but it was too far for her to be the only one who rode. Her jaw firmed, and her eyes stared at him unblinking.
“I’m too big to ride Bela,” he said. “I’m used to walking, and I’d rather.”
“And I am not used to walking?” Egwene said sharply.
“That isn’t what I—”
“I’m the only one who’s supposed to get saddlesore, is that it? And when you walk till your feet are ready to fall off, you’ll expect me to look after you.”
“Let it be,” he breathed when she looked like going on. “Anyway, you’ll take the first turn.” Her face turned even more stubborn, but he refused to let her get a word in edgewise. “If you won’t get in the saddle by yourself, I’ll put you there.”
She gave him a startled look, and a small smile curved her lips. “In that case. . . .” She sounded as if she were about to laugh, but she climbed up.
He grumbled to himself as he turned away from the river. Leaders in stories never had to put up with this sort of thing.
Egwene did insist on him taking his turns, and whenever he tried to avoid it, she bullied him into the saddle. Blacksmithing did not lend itself to a slender build, and Bela was not very large as horses went. Every time he put his foot in the stirrup the shaggy mare looked at him with what he was sure was reproach. Small things, perhaps, but they irritated. Soon he flinched whenever Egwene announced, “It’s your turn, Perrin.”
In stories leaders seldom flinched, and they were never bullied. But, he reflected, they never had to deal with Egwene, either.
There were only short rations of bread and cheese to begin with, and what there was gave out by the end of the first day. Perrin set snares along likely rabbit runs—they looked old, but it was worth a chance—while Egwene began laying a fire. When he was done, he decided to try his hand with his sling before the light failed altogether. They had not seen a sign of anything at all alive, but. . . . To his surprise, he jumped a scrawny rabbit almost at once. He was so surprised when it burst from under a bush right beneath his feet that it almost got away, but he fetched it at forty paces, just as it was darting around a tree.
When he came back to the camp with the rabbit, Egwene had broken limbs all laid for the fire, but she was kneeling beside the pile with her eyes closed. “What are you doing? You can’t wish a fire.”
Egwene gave a jump at his first words, and twisted around to stare at him with a hand to her throat. “You . . . you startled me.”
“I was lucky,” he said, holding up the rabbit. “Get your flint and steel. We eat well tonight, at least.”
“I don’t have a flint,” she said slowly. “It was in my pocket, and I lost it in the river.”
“Then how . . . ?”
“It was so easy back there on the riverbank, Perrin. Just the way Moiraine Sedai showed me. I just reached out, and. . . .” She gestured as if grasping for something, then let her hand fall with a sigh. “I can’t find it, now.”
Perrin licked his lips uneasily. “The . . . the Power?” She nodded, and he stared at her. “Are you crazy? I mean . . . the One Power! You can’t just play around with something like that.”
“It was so easy, Perrin. I can do it. I can channel the Power.”
He took a deep breath. “I’ll make a firebow, Egwene. Promise you won’t try this . . . this . . . thing again.”
“I will not.” Her jaw firmed in a way that made him sigh. “Would you give up that axe of yours, Perrin Aybara? Would you walk around with one hand tied behind your back? I won’t do it!”
“I’ll make the firebow,” he said wearily. “At least, don’t try it again tonight? Please?”
She acquiesced grudgingly, and even after the rabbit was roasting on a spit over the flames, he had the feeling she felt she could have done it better. She would not give up trying, either, every night, though the best she ever did was a trickle of smoke that vanished almost immediately. Her eyes dared him to say a word, and he wisely kept his mouth shut.
After that one hot meal, they subsisted on coarse wild tubers and a few young shoots. With still no sign of spring, none of it was plentiful, and none of it tasty, either. Neither complained, but not a meal passed without one or the other sighing regretfully, and they both knew it was for the tang of a bit of cheese, or even the smell of bread. A find of mushrooms—Queen’s Crowns, the best—one afternoon in a shady part of the forest was enough to seem a great treat. They gobbled them down, laughing and telling stories from back in Emond’s Field, stories that began, “Do you remember wh
en—” but the mushrooms did not last long, and neither did the laughter. There was little mirth in hunger.
Whichever was walking carried a sling, ready to let fly at the sight of a rabbit or squirrel, but the only time either hurled a stone was in frustration. The snares they set so carefully each evening yielded nothing at dawn, and they did not dare stay a day in one place to leave the snares out. Neither of them knew how far it was to Caemlyn, and neither would feel safe until they got there, if then. Perrin began to wonder if his stomach could shrink enough to make a hole all the way through his middle.
They made good time, as he saw it, but as they got farther and farther from the Arinelle without seeing a village, or even a farmhouse where they could ask directions, his doubts about his own plan grew. Egwene continued to appear outwardly as confident as when they set out, but he was sure that sooner or later she would say it would have been better to risk the Trollocs than to wander around lost for the rest of their lives. She never did, but he kept expecting it.
Two days from the river the land changed to thickly forested hills, as gripped by the tail end of winter as everywhere else, and a day after that the hills flattened out again, the dense forest broken by glades, often a mile or more across. Snow still lay in hidden hollows, and the air was brisk of a morning, and the wind cold always. Nowhere did they see a road, or a plowed field, or chimney smoke in the distance, or any other sign of human habitation—at least, none where men still dwelt.
Once the remains of tall stone ramparts encircled a hilltop. Parts of roofless stone houses stood inside the fallen circle. The forest had long swallowed it; trees grew right through everything, and spiderwebs of old creeper enveloped the big stone blocks. Another time they came on a stone tower, broken-topped and brown with old moss, leaning on the huge oak whose thick roots were slowly toppling it. But they found no place where men had breathed in living remembrance. Memories of Shadar Logoth kept them away from the ruins and hurried their footsteps until they were once more deep in places that seemed never to have known a human footstep.
Dreams plagued Perrin’s sleep, fearful dreams. Ba’alzamon was in them, chasing him through mazes, hunting him, but Perrin never met him face-to-face, so far as he remembered. And their journey had been enough to bring a few bad dreams. Egwene complained of nightmares about Shadar Logoth, especially the two nights after they found the ruined fort and the abandoned tower. Perrin kept his own counsel even when he woke sweating and shaking in the dark. She was looking to him to lead them safely to Caemlyn, not share worries about which they could do nothing.