Someone was coming, a Whitecloak carrying a lantern. The man stopped to speak with the guards, who answered respectfully. Perrin could not hear what was said, but he recognized the tall, gaunt shape.
He squinted as the lantern was held close to his face. Byar had Perrin's axe in his other hand; he had appropriated the weapon as his own. At least, Perrin never saw him without it.
'Wake up,' Byar said emotionlessly, as if he thought Perrin slept with his head raised. He accompanied the words with a heavy kick in the ribs.
Perrin gave a grunt through gritted teeth. His sides were a mass of bruises already from Byar's boots.
'I said, wake up.' The foot went back again, and Perrin spoke quickly.
'I'm awake.' You had to acknowledge what Byar said, or he found ways to get your attention.
Byar set the lantern on the ground and bent to check his bonds. The man jerked roughly at his wrist, twisting his arms in their sockets. Finding those knots still as tight as he had left them, Byar pulled at his ankle rope, scraping him across the rocky ground. The man looked too skeletal to have any strength, but Perrin might as well have been a child. It was a nightly routine.
As Byar straightened, Perrin saw that Egwene was still asleep. 'Wake up!' he shouted. 'Egwene! Wake up!'
'Wha ... ? What?' Egwene's voice was frightened and still thick with sleep. She lifted her head, blinking in the lantern light.
Byar gave no sign of disappointment at not being able to kick her awake; he never did. He just jerked at her ropes the same way he had Perrin's, ignoring her groans. Causing pain was another of those things that seemed not to affect him one way or another; Perrin was the only one he really went out of his way to hurt. Even if Perrin could not remember it, Byar remembered that he had killed two of the Children.
'Why should Darkfriends sleep,' Byar said dispassionately, 'when decent men must stay awake to guard them?'
'For the hundredth time,' Egwene said wearily, 'we aren't Darkfriends. '
Perrin tensed. Sometimes such a denial brought a lecture delivered in a grating near monotone, on confession and repentance, leading into a description of the Questioners' methods of obtaining them. Sometimes it brought the lecture and a kick. To his surprise, this time Byar ignored it.
Instead the man squatted in front of him, all angles and sunken hollows, with the axe across his knees. The golden sun on his cloak's left breast, and the two golden stars beneath it, glittered in the lantern light. Taking off his helmet, he set it beside the lantern. For a change there was something besides disdain or hatred on his face, something intent and unreadable. He rested his arms on the axehandle and studied Perrin silently. Perrin tried not to shift under that hollow-eyed stare.
'You are slowing us down, Darkfriend, you and your wolves. The Council of the Anointed has heard reports of such things, and they want to know more, so you must be taken to Amador and given to the Questioners, but you are slowing us down. I had hoped we could move fast enough, even without the remounts, but I was wrong.' He fell silent, frowning at them.
Perrin waited; Byar would tell him when he was ready.
'The Lord Captain is caught in the cleft of a dilemma,' Byar said finally. 'Because of the wolves he must take you to the Council, but he must reach Caemlyn, too. We have no spare horses to carry you, but if we continue to let you walk, we will not reach Caemlyn by the appointed time. The Lord Captain sees his duties with a single- minded vision, and he intends to see you before the Council.'
Egwene made a sound. Byar was staring at Perrin, and he stared back, almost afraid to blink. 'I don't understand,' he said slowly.
'There is nothing to understand,' Byar replied. 'Nothing but idle speculation. If you escaped, we would not have time to track you down. We don't have an hour to spare if we are to reach Caemlyn in time. If you frayed your ropes on a sharp rock, say, and vanished into the night, the Lord Captain's problem would be solved.' Never taking his gaze from Perrin, he reached under his cloak and tossed something on the ground.
Automatically Perrin's eyes followed it. When he realized what it was, he gasped. A rock. A split rock with a sharp edge.
'Just idle speculation,' Byar said. 'Your guards tonight also speculate.'
Perrin's mouth was suddenly dry. Think it through! Light help me, think it through and don't make any mistakes!
Could it be true? Could the Whitecloaks' need to get to Caemlyn quickly be important enough for this? Letting suspected Darkfriends escape? There was no use trying that way; he did not know enough. Byar was the only Whitecloak who would talk to them, aside from Lord Captain Bornhald, and neither was exactly free with information. Another way. If Byar wanted them to escape, why not simply cut their bonds? If Byar wanted them to escape? Byar, who was convinced to his marrow that they were Darkfriends. Byar, who hated Darkfriends worse than he did the Dark One himself. Byar, who looked for any excuse to cause him pain because he had killed two Whitecloaks. Byar wanted them to escape?
If he had thought his mind was racing before, now it sped like an avalanche. Despite the cold, sweat ran down his face in rivulets. He glanced at the guards. They were only shadows of pale gray, but it seemed to him that they were poised, waiting. If he and Egwene were killed trying to escape, and their ropes had been cut on a rock that could have been lying there by chance ... The Lord Captain's dilemma would be solved, all right. And Byar would have them dead, the way he wanted them.
The gaunt man picked up his helmet from beside the lantern and started to stand.
'Wait,' Perrin said hoarsely. His thoughts tumbled over and over as he searched in vain for some way out. 'Wait, I want to talk. I – '
Help comes!
The thought blossomed in his mind, a clear burst of light in the midst of chaos, so startling that for a moment he forgot everything else, even where he was. Dapple was alive. Elyas, he thought at the wolf, demanding without words to know if the man was alive. An image came back. Elyas, lying on a bed of evergreen branches beside a small fire in a cave, tending a wound in his side. It all took only an instant. He gaped at Byar, and his face broke into a foolish grin. Elyas was alive. Dapple was alive. Help was coming.
Byar paused, risen only to a crouch, looking at him. 'Some thought has come to you, Perrin of the Two Rivers, and I would know what it is.'
For a moment Perrin thought he meant the thought from Dapple. Panic fled across his face, followed by relief. Byar could not possibly know.
Byar watched his changes of expression, and for the first time the Whitecloak's eyes went to the rock he had tossed on the ground.
He was reconsidering, Perrin realized. If he changed his mind about the rock, would he dare risk leaving them alive to talk? Ropes could be frayed after the people wearing them were dead, even if it made for risk of discovery. He looked into Byar's eyes – the shadowed hollows of the man's eye sockets made them appear to stare at him from dark caves – and he saw death decided.
Byar opened his mouth, and as Perrin waited for sentence to be pronounced, things began to happen too fast for thought.
Suddenly one of the guards vanished. One minute there were two dim shapes, the next the night swallowed one of them. The second guard turned, the beginning of a cry on his lips, but before the first syllable was uttered there was a solid tchunk and he toppled over like a felled tree.
Byar spun, swift as a striking viper, the axe whirling in his hands so fast that it hummed. Perrin's eyes bulged as the night seemed to flow into the lantern light. His mouth opened to yell, but his throat locked tight with fear. For an instant he even forgot that Byar wanted to kill them. The Whitecloak was another human being, and the night had come alive to take them all.
Then the darkness invading the light became Lan, cloak swirling through shades of gray and black as he moved. The axe in Byar's hands lashed out like lightning ... and Lan seemed to lean casually aside, letting the blade pass so close he must have felt the wind of it. Byar's eyes widened as the force of his blow carried him off balance, as the Warder struck with hands and feet in rapid succession, so quick that Perrin was not sure what he had just seen. What he was sure of was Byar collapsing like a puppet. Before the falling Whitecloak had finished settling to the ground, the Warder was on his knees extinguishing the lantern.
In the sudden return to darkness, Perrin stared blindly. Lan seemed to have vanished again.
