“Yes,” she said. “Waiting. Make sure your guards are especially alert tonight, Uno.” There was no need to suggest that the men sleep with their weapons close at hand; Shienarans always did that. “Sleep well,” she added to them all, as if there were any chance of that now, and started back for her hut. Lan stayed long enough to spoon up three dishes of stew, then hurried after her, quickly swallowed by the night.
Perrin’s eyes shone golden as they followed the Warder through the darkness. “Sleep well,” he muttered. The smell of cooked meat suddenly made him queasy. “I have the third watch, Uno?” The Shienaran nodded. “Then I will try to take her advice.” Others were coming to the fires, and murmurs of conversation followed him up the slope.
He had a hut to himself, a small thing of logs barely tall enough to stand in, the chinks filled with dried mud. A rough bed, padded with pine boughs beneath a blanket, took up nearly half of it. Whoever had unsaddled his horse had also propped his bow just inside the door. He hung up his belt, with axe and quiver, on a peg, then stripped down to his smallclothes, shivering. The nights were cold still, but cold kept him from sleeping too deeply. In deep sleep, dreams came that he could not shake off.
For a time, with a single blanket over him, he lay staring at the log roof, shivering. Then sleep came, and with it, dreams.
CHAPTER
4
Shadows Sleeping
Cold filled the common room of the inn despite the fire blazing on the long, stone hearth. Perrin rubbed his hands before the flames, but he could get no warmth in them. There was an odd comfort in the cold, though, as if it were a shield. A shield against what, he could not think. Something murmured in the back of his mind, a dim sound only vaguely heard, scratching to get in.
“So you will give it up, then. It is the best thing for you. Come. Sit, and we will talk.”
Perrin turned to look at the speaker. The round tables scattered about the room were empty except for the lone man seated in a corner, in the shadows. The rest of the room seemed in some way hazy, almost an impression rather than a place, especially anything he was not looking at directly. He glanced back at the fire; it burned on a brick hearth, now. Somehow, none of it bothered him. It should. But he could not have said why.
The man beckoned, and Perrin walked closer to his table. A square table. The tables were square. Frowning, he reached out to finger the tabletop, but pulled his hand back. There were no lamps in that corner of the room, and despite the light elsewhere, the man and his table were almost hidden, nearly blended with the dimness.
Perrin had a feeling that he knew the man, but it was as vague as what he saw out of the corner of his eye. The fellow was in his middle years, handsome and too well dressed for a country inn, in dark, nearly black, velvets with white lace falls at his collar and cuffs. He sat stiffly, sometimes pressing a hand to his chest, as if moving hurt him. His dark eyes were fixed on Perrin’s face; they appeared like glistening points in the shadows.
“Give up what?” Perrin asked.
“That, of course.” The man nodded to the axe at Perrin’s waist. He sounded surprised, as if it were a conversation they had had before, an old argument taken up again.
Perrin had not realized the axe was there, had not felt the weight of it pulling at his belt. He ran a hand over the half-moon blade and the thick spike that balanced it. The steel felt—solid. More solid than anything else there. Maybe even more solid than he was himself. He kept his hand there, to hold onto something real.
“I have thought of it,” he said, “but I do not think I can. Not yet.” Not yet? The inn seemed to flicker, and the murmur sounded again in his head. No! The murmur faded.
“No?” The man smiled, a cold smile. “You are a blacksmith, boy. And a good one, from what I hear. Your hands were made for a hammer, not an axe. Made to make things, not to kill. Go back to that before it is too late.”
Perrin found himself nodding. “Yes. But I’m ta’veren.” He had never said that out loud before. But he knows it already. He was sure of that, though he could not say why.
For an instant the man’s smile became a grimace, but then it returned in more strength than before. A cold strength. “There are ways to change things, boy. Ways to avoid even fate. Sit, and we will talk of them.” The shadows appeared to shift and thicken, to reach out.
Perrin took a step back, keeping well in the light. “I don’t think so.”
“At least have a drink with me. To years past and years to come. Here, you will see things more clearly after.” The cup the man pushed across the table had not been there a moment before. It shone bright silver, and dark, blood-red wine filled it to the brim.
Perrin peered at the man’s face. Even to his sharp eyes, the shadows seemed to shroud the other man’s features like a Warder’s cloak. Darkness molded the man like a caress. There was something about the man’s eyes, something he thought he could remember if he tried hard enough. The murmur returned.
“No,” he said. He spoke to the soft sound inside his head, but when the man’s mouth tightened in anger, a flash of rage suppressed as soon as begun, he decided it would do for the wine as well. “I am not thirsty.”
He turned and started for the door. The fireplace was rounded river stones; a few long tables lined by benches filled the room. He suddenly wanted to be outside, anywhere away from this man.
“You will not have many chances,” the man said behind him in a hard voice. “Three threads woven together share one another’s doom. When one is cut, all are. Fate can kill you, if it does not do worse.”
Perrin felt a sudden heat against his back, rising then fading just as quickly, as if the doors of a huge smelting furnace had swung open and closed again. Startled, he turned back to the room. It was empty.
Only a dream, he thought, shivering from the cold, and with that everything shifted.
He stared into the mirror, a part of him not comprehending what he saw, another part accepting. A gilded helmet, worked like a lion’s head, sat on his head as if it belonged there. Gold leaf covered his ornately hammered breastplate, and gold-work embellished the plate and mail on his arms and legs. Only the axe at his side was plain. A voice—his own—whispered in his mind that he would take it over any other weapon, had carried it a thousand times, in a hundred battles. No! He wanted to take it off, throw it away. I can’t! There was a sound in his head, louder than a murmur, almost at the level of understanding.
“A man destined for glory.”
He spun away from the mirror and found himself staring at the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He noticed nothing else about the room, cared to see nothing but her. Her eyes were pools of midnight, her skin creamy pale and surely softer, more smooth than her dress of white silk. When she moved toward him, his mouth went dry. He realized that every other woman he had ever seen was clumsy and ill-shaped. He shivered, and wondered why he felt cold.