Captain Adarra muttered something softly behind him, the tiller creaked, and the Snow Goose changed its course a trifle. Barefoot men at the sweeps moved as if not wanting to make a sound. Perrin did not glance at them beyond a flicker of his eye.
He peered at the tannery, instead, watching men scrape hides stretched on rows of wooden frames, and other men lift hides out of huge, sunken vats with long sticks. Sometimes they stacked the hides on barrows, wheeling them into the long, low building at the edge of the yard; sometimes the hides went back into the vats, with an addition of liquids poured from large stone crocks. They probably made more leather in a day than was made in Emond’s Field in months, and he could see another tannery on another island beyond the first.
It was not that he had any real interest in ships or fishing boats or tanning yards, or even very much in the birds—though he did wonder what those pale red ones could be fishing for with their flat bills, and some of them looked good to eat unless he watched himself—but anything at all was better than watching the scene behind him on the deck of the Snow Goose. The axe at his belt was no defense against that. A stone wall wouldn’t be defense enough, he thought.
Moiraine had been neither pleased nor displeased to discover that Zarine—I’ll not call her Faile, whatever she wants to name herself! She is no falcon!—knew she was Aes Sedai, though she had been perhaps a little upset with him for not telling her. A little upset. She called me a fool, but that was all. Then. Moiraine did not seem to care one way or another about Zarine being a Hunter of the Horn. But once she learned the girl thought they would lead her to the Horn of Valere, once she learned he had known that, too, and not told her—Zarine had been more than forthcoming about both subjects with Moiraine, to his mind—then her cold dark stare had taken on a quality that made him feel as if he had been packed in a barrel of
snow in the dead of winter. The Aes Sedai said nothing, but she stared too often and too hard for any comfort.
He looked over his shoulder and quickly returned to studying the shoreline. Zarine was sitting cross-legged on the deck near the horses tethered between the masts, her bundle and dark cloak beside her, her narrow, divided skirts neatly arrayed, pretending to study the rooftops and towers of the oncoming city. Moiraine was studying Illian, too, from just ahead of the men working the sweeps, but now and then she shot a hard look at the girl from under the deep hood of her fine gray wool cloak. How can she stand wearing that? His own coat was unbuttoned and his shirt unlaced at the neck.
Zarine met each Aes Sedai look with a smile, but every time Moiraine turned away, she swallowed and wiped her forehead.
Perrin rather admired her for managing that smile when Moiraine was watching. It was a good deal more than he could do. He had never seen the Aes Sedai truly lose her temper, but he himself was at the point of wishing she would shout, or rage, or anything but stare at him. Light, maybe not anything! Maybe the stare was bearable.
Lan sat further toward the bow than Moiraine—his color-shifting cloak was still in the saddlebags at his feet—outwardly absorbed in examining his sword blade, but making little effort to hide his amusement. Sometimes his lips appeared to quirk very close to a smile. Perrin was not certain; at times he thought it was only a shadow. Shadows could make a hammer seem to smile. Each woman obviously thought she was the object of that amusement, but the Warder did not appear to mind the tight-lipped frowns he received from both of them.
A few days earlier Perrin had heard Moiraine ask Lan, in a voice like ice, whether he saw something to laugh at. “I would never laugh at you, Moiraine Sedai,” he had replied calmly, “but if you truly intend to send me to Myrelle, I must become used to smiling. I hear that Myrelle tells her Warders jokes. Gaidin must smile at their bondholder’s quips; you have often given me quips to laugh at, have you not? Perhaps you would rather I stay with you after all.” She had given him a look that would have nailed any other man to the mast, but the Warder never blinked. Lan made cold steel seem like tin.
The crew had taken to padding about their work in utter silence when Moiraine and Zarine were on deck together. Captain Adarra held his head tilted, and looked as if he were listening for something he did not want to hear. He passed his orders in whispers, instead of the shouts he had used at first. Everyone knew Moiraine was Aes Sedai, now, and everyone knew she was displeased. Perrin had let himself get into one shouting match with Zarine, and he was not sure which of them had said the words “Aes Sedai,” but the whole crew knew. Bloody woman! He was uncertain whether he meant Moiraine or Zarine. If she is the falcon, what is the hawk supposed to be? Am I going to be stuck with two women like her? Light! No! She is not a falcon, and that is an end to it! The only good thing he could find in all this was that with an angry Aes Sedai to worry about, none of the crew looked twice at his eyes.
Loial was nowhere in sight, at the moment. The Ogier stayed in his stifling cabin whenever Moiraine and Zarine were topside together—working on his notes, he said. He only came on deck at night, to smoke his pipe. Perrin did not see how he could take the heat; even Moiraine and Zarine were better than being belowdecks.
He sighed and kept his eyes on Illian. The city the ship was approaching was large—as big as Cairhien or Caemlyn, the only two great cities he had ever seen—and it reared out of a huge marsh that stretched for miles like a plain of waving grass. Illian had no walls at all, but it seemed to be all towers and palaces. The buildings were all pale stone, except for some that appeared covered with white plaster, but the stone was white and gray and reddish and even faint shades of green. Rooftops of tile sparkled under the sun with a hundred different hues. The long docks held many ships, most dwarfing the Snow Goose, and bustled with the loading and unloading of cargo. There were shipyards at the far end of the city, where great ships stood in every stage from skeletons of thick wooden ribs to nearly ready to slide into the harbor.
Perhaps Illian was large enough to keep wolves at bay. They surely would not hunt in those marshes. The Snow Goose had outrun the wolves that had followed him from the mountains. He reached out for them gingerly, now, and felt—nothing. A curiously empty feeling, given that it was what he wanted. His dreams had been his own—for the most part—since that first night. Moiraine had asked about them in a cold voice, and he had told the truth. Twice he had found himself in that odd sort of wolf dream, and both times Hopper had appeared, chasing him away, telling him he was too young yet, too new. What Moiraine made of that, he had no idea; she told him nothing, except to say he had best be wary.
“That’s as well by me,” he growled. He was almost becoming used to Hopper being dead but not dead, in the wolf dreams, at least. Behind him, he heard Captain Adarra scuff his boots on the deck and mutter something, startled that anyone would speak aloud.
Lines were hurled ashore from the ship. While they were still being made fast to stone posts along the docks, the slightly built captain leaped into motion, whispering fiercely to his crew. He had booms rigged to lift the horses onto the wharf almost as quickly as the gangplank was laid in place. Lan’s black warhorse kicked and nearly broke the boom hoisting him. Loial’s huge, hairy-fetlocked mount needed two.
“An honor,” Adarra whispered to Moiraine with a bow as she stepped onto the wide plank leading to the dock. “An honor to have served you, Aes Sedai.” She strode ashore without looking at him, her face hidden in her deep hood.
Loial did not appear until everyone else was on the dock, and the horses, too. The Ogier came thumping up the gangplank trying to don his long coat while carrying his big saddlebags and striped blanketroll, and his cloak over one arm. “I did not know we had arrived,” he rumbled breathlessly. “I was rereading my. . . .” He trailed off with a glance at Moiraine. She appeared to be absorbed in watching Lan saddle Aldieb, but the Ogier’s ears flickered like a nervous cat’s.
His notes, Perrin thought. One of these days I have to see what he is saying about all this. Something tickled the back of his neck, and he jumped a foot before he realized he was smelling a clean, herbal scent through the spices and tar and stinks of the docks.
Zarine wiggled her fingers, smiling at them. “If I can do that with just a brush of my fingers, farmboy, I wonder how high you would jump if I—?”
He was growing a little tired of considering looks from those dark, tilted eyes. She may be pretty, but she looks at me the way I’d look at a tool I’d never seen before, trying to puzzle out how it was made, and what it is supposed to be used for.
“Zarine.” Moiraine’s voice was cool but unruffled.
“I am called Faile,” Zarine said firmly, and for a moment, with her bold nose, she did look like a falcon.
“Zarine,” Moiraine said firmly, “it is time for our ways to part. You will find better Hunting elsewhere, and safer.”
“I think not,” Zarine said just as firmly. “A Hunter must follow the trail she sees, and no Hunter would ignore the trail you four leave. And I am Faile.” She spoiled it a bit by swallowing, but she did not blink as she met Moiraine’s eyes.
“Are you certain?” Moiraine said softly. “Are you sure you will not change your mind . . . Falcon?”
“I will not. There is nothing you or your stone-faced Warder can do to stop me.” Zarine hesitated, then added slowly, as if she had decided to be entirely truthful, “At least, there is nothing that you will do that can stop me. I know a little of Aes Sedai; I know, for all the stories, that there are things you will not do. And I do not believe stone-face would do what he must to make me give over.”
“Are you sure enough of that to risk it?” Lan spoke quietly, and his face did not change, but Zarine swallowed again.
“There is no need to threaten her, Lan,” Perrin said. He was surprised to realize he was glaring at the Warder.
Moiraine’s glance silenced him and the Warder both. “You believe you know what an Aes Sedai will not do, do you?” she said more softly than before. Her smile was not pleasant. “If you wish to go with us, this is what you must do.” Lan’s eyelids flickered in surprise; the two women stared at each other like falcon and mouse, but Zarine was not the falcon, now. “You will swear by your Hunter’s oath to do as I say, to heed me, and not to leave us. Once you know more than you should of what we do, I will not allow you to fall into the wrong hands. Know that for truth, girl. You will swear to act as one of us, and do nothing that will endanger our purpose. You will ask no questions of where we go or why: you will be satisfied with what I choose to tell you. All of this you will swear, or you will remain here in Illian. And you will not leave this marsh until I return to release you, if it takes the rest of your life. That I swear.”