Perrin started to run, too, then realized he had a bloody axe in his hands. Hastily he wiped the curved blade on a dead man’s cloak. He’s dead, burn me, and there’s blood on it already. He made himself put the haft back through the loop on his belt before he broke into a trot.
At his second step he saw her, a slim shape at the edge of the square, in dark, narrow skirts. She turned to run; he could see they were divided for riding. She darted back into the street and vanished.
Lan met him before he reached the place where she had been standing. The Warder took in the cage sitting empty beneath the gibbet, the shadowed white mounds that caught the moonlight, and he tossed his head as if he were about to erupt. In a voice as tight and hard as a new wheel rim, he said, “Is this your work, blacksmith? The Light burn me! Is there anyone who can connect it to you?”
“A girl,” Perrin said. “I think she saw. I don’t want you to hurt her, Lan! Plenty of others could have seen, too. There are lighted windows all around.”
The Warder grabbed Perrin’s coat sleeve and gave him a push toward the inn. “I saw a girl running, but I thought. . . . No matter. You dig the Ogier out and haul him down to the stable. After this, we need to get our horses to the docks as quickly as possible. The Light alone knows if there is a ship sailing tonight, or what I’ll have to pay to hire one if there isn’t. Don’t ask questions, blacksmith! Do it! Run!”
CHAPTER
35
The Falcon
The Warder’s long legs outdistanced Perrin’s, and by the time he pushed through the throng outside the inn doors, Lan was already striding up the stairs, not seeming in any particular hurry. Perrin made himself walk as slowly. From the doorway behind him came grumbles about people pushing ahead of other people.
“Again?” Orban was saying, holding his silver cup up to be refilled. “Aye, very well. They lay in ambush close beside the road we traveled, and an ambush I did not expect so close to Remen. Screaming, they rushed upon us from the crowding brush. In a breath they were in our midst, their spears stabbing, slaying two of my best men and one of Gann’s immediately. Aye, I knew Aiel when I saw them, and. . . .”
Perrin hurried up the stairs. Well, Orban knows them now.
Voices came from behind Moiraine’s door. He did not want to hear what she had to say about this. He hurried past to stick his head into Loial’s room.
The Ogier bed was a low, massive thing, twice as long and half as wide as any human bed Perrin had ever seen. It took up much of the room, and that was as large and as fine as Moiraine’s. Perrin vaguely remembered Loial saying something about it being sung wood, and at any other time he might have stopped to admire those flowing curves that made it seem as if the bed had somehow grown where it stood. Ogier really must have stopped in Remen at some time in the past, for the innkeeper had also found a wooden armchair that fit Loial, and filled it with cushions. The Ogier was comfortably sitting on them in his shirt and breeches, idly scratching a bare ankle with a toenail as he wrote in a large, cloth-bound book on an arm of the chair.
“We’re leaving!” Perrin said.
Loial gave a jump, nearly upsetting his ink bottle and almost dropping the book. “Leaving? We only just arrived,” he rumbled.
“Yes, leaving. Meet us at the stable as quickly as you can. And don’t let anyone see you go. I think there’s a back stair that runs down by the kitchen.” The smell of food at his end of the hall had been too strong for there not to be.
The Ogier gave one regretful look at the bed, then started tugging on his high boots. “But why?”
“The Whitecloaks,” Perrin said. “I’ll tell you more later.” He ducked back out before Loial could ask any more.
He had not unpacked. Once he had belted on his quiver, slung his cloak around him, tossed blanketroll and saddlebags on his shoulder, and picked up his bow, there was no sign he had ever been there. Not a wrinkle in the folded blankets at the foot of the bed, not a splash of water in the cracked basin on the washstand. Even the tallow candle still had a fresh wick, he realized. I must have known I would not be staying. I don’t seem to leave any mark behind me, of late.
As he has suspected, a narrow stair at the back led down to a hall that ran out past the kitchen. He peered cautiously into the kitchen. A spit dog trotted in his big wicker wheel, turning a long spit that held a haunch of lamb, a large piece of beef, five chickens, and a goose. Fragrant steam rose from a soup cauldron hanging from a sturdy crane over a second hearth. But there was not a cook to be seen, nor any living
soul except the dog. Thankful for Orban’s lies, he hurried on into the night.
The stable was a large structure of the same stone as the inn, though only the stone faces around the big doors had been polished. A single lantern hanging from a stallpost gave a dim light. Stepper and the other horses stood in stalls near the doors; Loial’s big mount nearly filled his. The smell of hay and horses was familiar and comforting. Perrin was the first to arrive.
There was only one stableman on duty, a narrow-faced fellow in a dirty shirt, with lanky gray hair, who demanded to know who Perrin was to order four horses saddled, and who was his master, and what he was doing all bundled up to travel in the middle of the night, and did Master Furlan know he was sneaking off like this, and what did he have hidden in those saddlebags, and what was wrong with his eyes, was he sick?
A coin flipped through the air from behind Perrin, glinting gold in the lantern light. The stableman snagged it with one hand and bit it.
“Saddle them,” Lan said. His voice was soft, as cold iron is soft, and the stableman bobbed a bow and scurried to make the horses ready.
Moiraine and Loial came into the stable just as they could take up their reins, and then they were all leading their horses behind Lan, off down a street that ran behind the stable toward the river. The soft clop of the horses’ hooves on the paving blocks attracted only a slat-ribbed dog that barked once and ran away as they went by.
“This brings back memories, doesn’t it, Perrin?” Loial said, quietly for him.
“Keep your voice down,” Perrin whispered. “What memories?”
“Why, it is like old times.” The Ogier had managed to mute his voice; he sounded like a bumblebee only the size of a dog instead of a horse. “Sneaking away in the night, with enemies behind us, and maybe enemies ahead, and danger in the air, and the cold tang of adventure.”
Perrin frowned at Loial over Stepper’s saddle. It was easy enough; his eyes cleared the saddle, and Loial stood head and shoulders and chest above it on the other side. “What are you talking about? I believe you are coming to like danger! Loial, you must be crazy!”