Robert Jordan - The Path of Daggers

"The farm!" Eliya shouted, and suddenly something hit Segani hard, harder than the worst storm gust Chulein had ever felt, tumbling him wing over wing.

Down the raken plunged, screaming his raucous cry, spinning so fast that Chulein was pulled tight against her safety straps. She left her hands on her thighs, tensed on the reins but still. Segani had to pull out of this himself; any twitch on the reins would only hinder him. Rolling like a gambling wheel, they fell. Morat’raken were taught not to watch the ground if a raken fell, whatever the reason, but she could not help estimating her height every time a whiplike tumble bought the ground into sight. Eight hundred paces. Six hundred. Four. Two. The Light illumine her soul, and the infinite mercy of the Creator protect her from—

With a snap of his broad wings that jerked her sideways and rattled her teeth, Segani leveled out, the tips of his pinons brushing treetops as they swept down. With a calmness born of hard training, she checked the motion of his wings for strain. Nothing, but she would have a der’morat’raken examine him thoroughly anyway. A tiny thing that might slip by her eyes would not escape a master.

"It seems we’ve escaped the Lady of the Shadows one more time, Eliya." Turning to look over her shoulder, she let her words tail off. A length of broken safety strap trailed back from the empty seat behind her. Every flier knew that the Lady waited at the bottom of the long fall, but knowing never made seeing easier.

Offering a quick prayer for the dead, she firmly pushed herself back to duty and urged Segani to climb. A slow, spiraling climb, in case of some hidden strain, but as quick as she thought safe. Maybe a little quicker than safe. Smoke rising from beyond the knobby hill ahead made her frown, but what she saw as she cleared the crest dried her mouth. Her hands stilled on the reins, and Segani continued to climb on powerful sweeps of his wings.

The farm was… gone. Foundations scoured clean of the white buildings that had stood on them, the big structures built into a hillside smashed heaps of rubble. Gone. Everything was blackened and burned. Fire raged through the undergrowth on the slopes and made fans a hundred paces long into the olive groves and the forest, stretching from the spaces between the hills. Beyond lay broken trees for another hundred or more, all leaning away from the farm. She had never seen anything like it. Nothing could be alive down there. Nothing could have lived through that. Whatever it had been.

Quickly she came to herself and turned Segani south. In the distance she could make out to’raken , each one crowded with a dozen Fists of Heaven over this short distance, Fists of Heaven and sul’dam , coming too late. She began composing her report in her head; there was certainly no one else to make one. Everyone said this was a land full of marath’damane waiting to be collared, but with this new weapon, these women who called themselves Aes Sedai were a true danger. Something had to be done about them, something decisive. Perhaps, if the High Lady Suroth was on her way to Ebou Dar, she would see the need, too.

The Ghealdanin sky was cloudless, the forested hills hammered by a fierce morning sun. Even short of midday, the land sweltered. Pines and leatherleaf were yellowing in the drought, and others Perrin suspected also were evergreens. Not a whisper of air stirred. Sweat dripped down his face, ran into his short beard. His curly hair was matting on his head. He thought he heard thunder somewhere to the west, but he had almost stopped believing it would ever rain again. You hammered the iron that lay on your anvil instead of daydreaming about working silver.

From the vantage of his sparsely treed ridge, he studied the walled town of Bethal through a brass-bound looking glass. Even his eyes could use help over this distance. It was a good-sized town of slate-roofed buildings, with half a dozen tall stone structures that might have been minor nobles’ palaces or the homes of well-to-do merchants. He could not make out the scarlet banner hanging limply atop the tallest tower of the largest palace, the only flag in sight, but he knew who it belonged to. Alliandre Maritha Kigarin, Queen of Ghealdan, far from her capital in Jehannah.

The town gates stood open, with a good twenty guards at each, yet no one came out, and the roads he could see were empty except for a lone rider galloping hard toward Bethal from the north. The soldiers were on edge, some shifting pikes or bows at sight of the horseman as though he waved a blood-dripping sword. More soldiers on watch crowded the wall towers or marched the walls between. Plenty of nocked arrows up there, too, and raised crossbows. Plenty of fear.

A storm had swept over this part of Ghealdan. It still did. The Prophet’s bands created chaos, bandits took advantage, and Whitecloaks raiding across the border from Amadicia might easily strike this far. A few scattered columns of smoke farther south probably marked burning farms, Whitecloak work or the Prophet’s. Bandits seldom bothered with burning, and the other two left little for them in any case. Adding to the jumble, rumor in every village he had passed the last few days said that Amador had fallen, to the Prophet or Taraboners or Aes Sedai, depending on who told the tale. Some claimed Pedron Niall himself was dead in the fighting to defend the city. All in all, reason enough for a queen to be concerned for her own safety. Or the soldiers could be down there because of him. Despite his best efforts, his passage south had hardly gone unnoticed.

He scratched his beard, considering. A pity the wolves in the surrounding hills could not tell him anything, but they seldom paid heed to men’s doings except to stay clear of them. And since Dumai’s Wells he had not felt right in asking any more of them than he absolutely had to. It might be best after all if he rode in alone, with just a few of the Two Rivers men.

He often thought Faile could read his mind, usually when he least wanted her to, and she proved it now, heeling her night-black mare Swallow close to his dun. Her narrow-skirted riding dress was nearly as dark as the mare, yet she seemed to be taking the heat better than he. She smelled faintly of herbal soap and clean perspiration, of herself. Of determination. Her tilted eyes were very determined, and with her bold nose, she was very much her namesake falcon.

"I would not like to see holes in that fine blue coat, husband," she said softly, for his ears alone, "and those fellows look as if they might just shoot at a group of strange men before asking who they are. Besides, how will you reach Alliandre without announcing your name to the world? This must be done quietly, remember." She did not say that she should be the one to go, that the gate guards would take a woman alone for a refugee from the troubles, that she could reach the Queen using her mother’s name without exciting too much comment, but she did not need to. He had had all that and more from her every night since entering Ghealdan. He was here in part because of Alliandre’s cautious letter to Rand, offering… Support? Allegiance? Her desire for secrecy had been paramount, in any case.

Perrin doubted that even Aram, sitting his leggy gray a few paces behind them, could have heard a word Faile said, yet before she finished speaking, Berelain brought her white mare up on his other side, sweat glistening on her cheeks. She also smelled determined, through a cloud of rose perfume. To him, it seemed a cloud. For a wonder, her green riding dress showed no more flesh than it had to.

Berelain’s two companions stayed back, though Annoura, her Aes Sedai advisor, studied him with an unreadable expression from beneath her cap of thin shoulder-long beaded braids. Not him and the two women at his sides; him in particular. No sweat there. He wished he were close enough to smell the beak-nosed Gray sister; unlike the other Aes Sedai, she had made no promises to anyone. For whatever those promises were worth. Lord Gallenne, commander of Berelain’s Winged Guards, was seemingly busy examining Bethal through a looking glass raised to his one eye, and fiddling with his reins in a way Perrin had come to know meant that he was deep in calculations. Probably how to take Bethal by force; Gallenne always saw the worst possibility first.