A Memory of Light

Siuan moved away, calling for Yukiri to make her a gateway before going with Bryne.

Egwene smiled, watching her give the general a kiss. Siuan. Kissing a man in the open.

Silviana channeled, and Egwene climbed into Daishar’s saddle as a gateway opened for them. She embraced the Source, holding Vora’s sa’angreal before her, and trotted through behind a group of Tower Guards. She was immediately assaulted by the scent of smoke.

High Captain Chubain waited for her on the other side. The darkhaired man had always struck her as being too young for his position, but she supposed not every commander had to be silvered like Bryne. After al , they were entrusting this battle to someone only a bit older than she, and she herself was the youngest Amyrlin ever.

Egwene turned toward the Heights and found that she could barely see them through fires that were burning along the slope and the eastern edge of the bogs.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Flaming arrows,” Chubain said, “fired by our forces at the river. I thought Cauthon was mad at first, but I can see his reasoning now. He fired at the Trol ocs to set the fields alight there on the Heights and at their base to give us cover. The undergrowth over there is dry and brittle as tinder. The fires drove the Trollocs and Sharan cavalry back up the slope for the time being. And I think Cauthon is counting on the smoke masking our movement around the bogs.”

The Shadow would know someone was moving over here, but how many troops and in what configuration . . . they would have to rely on scouts, rather than their superior vantage atop the Heights.

“Our orders?” Chubain said.

“He didn’t tell you?” Egwene asked.

He shook his head. “He just put us in position here.”

“We continue on up the west side of the bog and come at the Sharans from behind,” she said.

Chubain grunted. “This is fragmenting our forces a great deal. And now he assaults them on the Heights after relinquishing it to them?”

She didn’t have an answer to that. Wel , she had been the one— essentially—to put Mat in charge. She spared a glance across the bogs again, toward where she sensed Gawyn. He would be fighting at the . . .

Egwene hesitated. Her previous position had let her sense Gawyn in the direction of the river, but after moving through the gateway, she had a better sense of his position. He wasn’t at the river with Elayne’s armies.

Gawyn was on the Heights themselves, where the Shadow held the strongest.

Oh, Light! she thought. Gawyn . . . What are you doing?

Gawyn strode through smoke. Black tendrils of it curled around him, and the heat of smoldering grass warmed his boots, but the fire had mostly burned out here atop the Heights, leaving the ground dark with ash.

Bodies and some broken dragons lay blackened, like heaps of slag or coal. Gawyn knew that sometimes, to renew a field, farmers would burn the previous year’s weeds. The world itself was alight now. As he slipped through the twisting black smoke—his kerchief wetted and tied across his face—he prayed for a renewal.

There were spiderweb cracks al over the ground. The Shadow was destroying this land.

Most of the Trollocs were gathering on the Heights overlooking Hawal Ford, though a handful busied themselves prodding at bodies on the slope. Perhaps they had been drawn by the scent of burning flesh. A Myrddraal emerged from the smoke and began scolding them in a language Gawyn did not understand. It lashed a whip at the Trol ocs’ backs.

Gawyn froze in place, but the Halfman did not notice him. It drove the stragglers toward where the rest of the Trol ocs had gathered. Gawyn waited, breathing softly through his handkerchief, feeling the shadows of the Bloodknives wreathe him. The three rings had done things to him. He felt heady, and his limbs moved too quickly when he stepped. It had taken time to grow accustomed to the changes, to keep his balance each time he moved.

A wolf-featured Trol oc rose up from behind a nearby pile of rubble and sniffed the air, looking after the Fade. The Trol oc then crept out of hiding, a corpse thrown over its shoulder. It walked past Gawyn, passing not five feet away, where it paused and sniffed the air again. Then, hunching low, it continued. The body it carried over its shoulder trailed the cloak of a Warder. Poor Symon. He would never play another hand of cards. Gawyn growled softly, and before he could stop himself, leaped forward. He moved into Kissing the Adder, spinning and relieving the Trol ocs shoulders of its head.