Panic surged through the bond. Fortunately, Gabrelle did not try to tell him what was forbidden and what was not. Asha’man need not obey White Tower law.
“Logain!”
Another voice. Would they not leave him alone? He prepared his weave. “Logain!” Androl was breathing deeply as he arrived. He fell to his knees, face scorched and burned. He looked worse than death itself. “Logain… the refugees of Caemlyn… The Shadow has sent Trollocs to kill them at the ruins. Light! They’re being murdered.”
Logain wove balefire, but held the weave in place, nearly complete as he looked at the crystal and its golden prize.
“Logain…” Androl said, pained. “The others with me stayed to fight, but they are too tired. I can’t find Cauthon, and the soldiers I went to are too busy fighting to help. I don’t think any of the commanders know that the Trollocs are up there. Light.”
Logain held his weave, feeling the One Power pulse within him. Power. Fear.
“Please,” Androl whispered, so soft. “Children, Logain. They’re slaughtering the children…”
Logain closed his eyes.
Mat rode with the heroes of the Horn. Apparently, having once been the Hornsounder gave him a special place among them. They joined him, called to him, spoke to him as if they knew him. They looked so, well, heroic, tall in their saddles and surrounded by a mist that glowed against the breaking dawn’s light.
Amid the fighting, he finally asked the question that had been haunting him for a long while now. “I’m not bloody… one of you, am I?” he asked Hend the Striker. “You know… since heroes are born sometimes, then die and… do whatever you do.”
The big man laughed, riding a bay horse that could have almost gone shoulder-to-shoulder with a Seanchan boar-horse. “I knew that you would ask this thing, Gambler!”
“Well, then you should bloody well have an answer prepared.” Mat felt his face flush as he anticipated the reply.
“No, you are not one of us,” Hend said. “Be at ease. Though you have done more than enough to earn a place, you have not been chosen. I do not know why.”
“Maybe because I don’t like the idea of having to hop whenever anyone blows on that bloody instrument.”
“Maybe!” Hend grinned and galloped toward a line of Sharan spears. Mat no longer directed troop movements on the battlefield. The Light willing, he had set things up well enough that direct control would not be needed. He rode across the plateau, fighting, yelling, joining the heroes.
Elayne was back, and she had rallied her troops. Mat saw Elayne’s banner glowing above them in the sky, crafted of the One Power, and caught a glimpse of someone who looked like her riding among the soldiers, hair glowing as if lit from behind her. She seemed a bloody hero of the Horn herself.
Mat let out a whoop of joy as he saw the Seanchan army marching north, about to merge with Elayne’s army, and he continued riding along the eastern slope of the Heights. Soon after, he slowed, Pips just having trampled a Trolloc. That rushing sound… Mat looked down below as the river returned in a swift crash of muddy water. It broke the Trolloc army into two parts, washing away many of them, as it surged back into its bed.
Snow-haired Rogosh watched the water flow, then nodded to Mat in respect. “Well done, Gambler,” he said. The river’s return had divided the Shadow’s forces.
Mat rejoined the battle. He noticed as he galloped across the plateau that the Sharans—what remained of them—were fleeing through gateways. He let them go.
When the Trollocs atop the Heights saw the Sharans fleeing, their resistance cracked, and they panicked. Boxed in and being swept across the plateau by Mat’s combined armies, they had no choice but to flee toward the long slope to the southwest.
It had become total mayhem off the Heights. The Seanchan army had joined with Elayne’s, and both groups lit into the Trollocs with an intense fury. They formed a cordon around the beasts and advanced quickly, not allowing one to escape. The ground quickly turned to a deep, red mud as Trollocs fell by the thousands.
But the engagement on the Shienaran side of the Mora was nothing compared to the struggle taking place on the other side of the river. The corridor between the bogs and Polov Heights was choked with Trollocs trying to escape the Seanchan attacking them from the far side of the corridor on the west.
The vanguard sent in first against the Trollocs in the corridor was not composed of Seanchan soldiers, but squads of lopar and morat’lopar. On their hind legs, the lopar were no taller than Trollocs, but they outweighed them considerably. The lopar came at the Trollocs, raising up and slashing with their razor-sharp claws. Once a lopar softened up its prey, it grasped the Trolloc behind the neck with its paws and bit the beast’s head off at the neck. This gave the lopar great pleasure.
The lopar were withdrawn as the corpses of Trollocs began to stack up at the far end of the corridor. Next into this pit of carnage came flocks of corlm, large, wingless, feathered creatures with long curved beaks designed to shred flesh. These carnivores easily ran over the stacks of corpses toward Trollocs still fighting, to separate the beasts’ meat from bone. The Seanchan soldiers took little part in these proceedings, only setting their pikes to ensure that no Trollocs escaped through the corridor or off the western side of the Heights. The creatures assaulting them so unnerved the Trollocs that few had any notion of running toward the Seanchan troops.
On the slope, terror-stricken Trollocs, fleeing from Mat’s army charging down after them, threw themselves onto the Trollocs that filled the corridor. The monsters tumbled on top of one another, and they fought among themselves, trying to be the ones to reach the top of the pile and continue breathing a while longer.
Talmanes and Aludra had set up their dragons across from the corridor and commenced firing dragons’ eggs into the roiling masses of terrorized Trollocs.
It was all over quickly. The numbers of living Trollocs diminished from the many thousands to the hundreds. Those that remained, seeing death snatching at them from three sides, fled into the bogs, where many of them were sucked down into the shallow waters. Their deaths were less violent, but equally horrifying. The remainder received a more merciful end, shot with arrows, spears and crossbow bolts as they slogged through the mire toward the sweet scent of freedom.
Mat lowered his bloodied ashandarei. He checked the sky. The sun was hidden up there somewhere; he was not certain how long he had been riding with the heroes.
He would have to thank Tuon for returning. He did not go looking for her, though. He had a feeling that she would expect him to perform his princely duties, whatever they might be.
Only… he did feel that strange tugging inside. Getting stronger and stronger.