“They will come,” Arganda snapped in answer to Aram, though he glared through the face-bars of his helmet as if expecting a challenge.
“What if they don’t?” Gallenne demanded, his one eye scowling as fiercely as Arganda’s pair. His red-lacquered breastplate was not much better than Arganda’s silvered one. Small chance they could be talked into painting them something dull. “What if it is a trap?” Arganda growled, almost a wolf’s guttural growl. The man was near the end of his tether.
The breeze brought the scent of horses only moments before Perrin’s ears caught the first bluetits’ trills, too distant for anyone else to hear. They came from the trees flanking the meadow. Large parties of men, perhaps unfriendly, were entering the woods. More trills sounded, closer.
“They’re here,” he said, which earned him looks from Arganda and Gallenne. He tried to avoid revealing the acuteness of his hearing, or his sense of smell, yet that pair had been on the point of coming to blows. The relayed trills grew nearer, and everyone could hear them. The two men’s looks grew odd.
“I can’t risk the Lady First if there’s any chance of a trap,” Gallenne said, buckling on his helmet. They all knew what the signal meant.
“The choice is mine, Captain.” Berelain replied before Perrin could open his mouth.
“And your safety is my responsibility, my Lady First.”
Berelain drew breath, her face darkening, but Perrin got there first. “I told you how we’re going to spring that trap, if that’s what it is. You know how suspicious the Seanchan are. Likely they’re worried about us ambushing them.” Gallenne harrumphed loudly. The patience in Berelain’s smell flickered, then settled in again rock steady.
“You should listen to him, Captain.” she said with a smile for Perrin. “He knows what he is doing.”
A party of riders appeared at the far end of the meadow and drew rein. Tallanvor was easy to pick out. In a dark coat and mounted on a good dappled gray, he was the only man not wearing armor vividly striped in red and yellow and blue. The other pair unarmored were women, one in blue with red on her skirts and breast, the other in gray. The sun reflected off something connecting them. So. A sul’dam and damane. There had been no mention of that in all the negotiations carried out through Tallanvor, but Perrin had counted on it.
“It’s time,” he said, gathering Stepper’s reins one-handed. “Before she decides we’re not coming.”
Annoura managed to get close enough to lay a hand on Berelain’s arm for a moment before the other woman could move her mare away. “You should let me come with you, Berelain. You may need my counsel, yes? This sort of negotiation, it is my specialty.”
“I suspect the Seanchan know an Aes Sedai face by now, don’t you, Annoura? I hardly think they’d negotiate with you. Besides,” Berelain added, in a too sweet voice, “you must remain here to assist Master Grady.”
Spots of color appeared briefly on the Aes Sedai s cheeks, and her wide mouth tightened. It had taken the Wise Ones to make her agree to take orders from Grady today, though Perrin was just as glad he did not know how they had done it, and she had been trying to wiggle out ever since leaving the camp.
“You stay, too,” Perrin said when Aram made to ride forward. “You’ve been hotheaded lately, and I won’t risk you saying or doing the wrong thing out there. I won’t risk Faile on it.” That was true. No need to say he would not risk the man carrying what was said out there back to Masema. “You understand?”
Bubbles of disappointment filled Aram’s scent, but he nodded, however reluctantly, and rested his hands on the pommel of his saddle. He might come close to worshiping Masema, but he would give his life a hundred times over rather than risk Faile’s. On purpose, anyway. What he did without thinking was another matter.
Perrin rode out of the trees flanked by Arganda on one side and Berelain and Gallenne on the other. The banners followed behind, and ten Mayeners and ten Ghealdanin in a column of twos. As they walked their mounts forward, the Seanchan started toward them, also in column, with Tallanvor riding beside the leaders, one on a roan, the other a bay. The horses’ hooves made no sound on the thick mat of dead grass. The forest had gone silent, even to Perrin’s ears.
While the Mayeners and Ghealdanin spread out in a line, and most of the Seanchan in their brightly painted armor did the same, Perrin and Berelain advanced toward Tallanvor and two of the armored Seanchan, one with three thin blue plumes on that lacquered helmet that was so like an insect’s head, the other with two. The sul’dam and damane came, too. They met in the middle of the meadow, surrounded by wildflowers and silence, with six paces between them.
As Tallanvor positioned himself to one side between the two groups, the armored Seanchan removed their helmets with hands in steel-backed gauntlets that were striped like the rest of their armor. The two-plumed helmet revealed a yellow-haired man with half a dozen scars seaming his square face. He was a hard-bitten man who smelled of amusement, strangely, but it was the other who interested Perrin. Mounted on the bay, a trained warhorse if he had ever seen one, she was tall and broad-shouldered for a woman, though lean otherwise, and not young. Gray marked the temples of her close-cut, tightly curled black hair. As dark as good topsoil, she displayed only two scars, one slanting across her left cheek. The other, on her forehead, had taken part of her right eyebrow. Some people thought scars a sign of toughness. It seemed to Perrin that fewer scars meant that you knew what you were doing. Confidence filled the scent of her in the breeze.
Her gaze flickered across the fluttering banners. He thought she paused slightly on Manetheren’s Red Eagle, and again on Mayene’s Golden Hawk, yet she quickly settled to studying him. Her expression never altered a whit, but when she noticed his yellow eyes, something unidentifiable entered her scent, something sharp and hard. When she saw the heavy blacksmith’s hammer in its loop on his belt, the strange scent grew.
“I give you Perrin t’Bashere Aybara, Lord of the Two Rivers, Liege Lord to Queen Alliandre of Ghealdan,” Tallanvor announced, raising a hand toward Perrin. He claimed the Seanchan were sticklers for formality, but Perrin had no idea whether this was a Seanchan ceremony or something from Andor. Tallanvor could have made it up for all of him. “I give you Berelain sur Paendrag Paeron, First of Mayene, Blessed of the Light, Defender of the Waves, High Seat of House Paeron.” With a bow to the pair of them, he shifted his reins and raised the other hand toward the Seanchan. “I give you Banner-General Tylee Khirgan of the Ever Victorious Army, in service to the Empress of Seanchan. I give you Captain Bakayar Mishima of the Ever Victorious Army, in service to the Empress of Seanchan.” Another bow, and Tallanvor turned his gray to ride back to a place beside the banners. His face was as grim as Aram’