Chapter 1

First Snow

One of the horses snorted as we made our way down an ancient road that still had sections of pavement here and there. All nine of us rode out of Toman at a trot, three pack-horses in tow. But our most precious cargo wasn't in any of those packs, but in the brown bag attached to Verin's saddle.

I couldn't actually sense the artifact from here, not unless I called upon a miracle. But it still made me uneasy. That thing was ancient and the fact that it was here at all suggested this world was not as isolated as I'd assumed. And I'd already learned there were more recent connections as well. What else had come through over the centuries?

The young man who had blown the artifact shook his head as he looked at me and my horse. "You're one of the worst riders I've ever seen. Like you've never ridden a horse before," Mat Cauthon said.

"I've rarely had the need or opportunity," I replied. "Last time I rode was on the Ways and that didn't end well for poor Nosy." I grimaced at the memory. It had been quick, at least.

Mat made a face. "Right, the Black Wind." He shivered. Then his gaze turned suspicious. "But how did you get all the way out here then?"

"We walked, most days. Is‒" I turned to Gemiad and almost slipped out of the saddle. Catching myself, I found her speaking with Elayne who rode at her side. She hadn't glanced at me even when I'd almost taken a fall. She'd made it clear she wasn't ready to talk just yet. Now wasn't the time to push that. I turned back to Mat. "Is not the fastest way to get around, I'll grant you, but I did have a head start."

"Don't see how that helped you."

"I also didn't have to go cross-country chasing Trollocs," I said. I'd caught up with Loial before we'd set out. There hadn't been much time, we'd left even before Moiraine had shown up. Verin's argument that the Horn and Mat needed to go to the Tower as quickly as possible was convincing, but I wondered if she also wanted to avoid meeting Moiraine.

There had been one surprise when we met up with Verin and the Shienarans. Both Nidao and Changu had been part of the group that had chased Padan Fain and the Horn. So rather than dying to the Trollocs, they'd made it all the way here and had sworn themselves to Rand. Or they would as soon as he woke up. Two lives that were saved by me, even if there were plenty of opportunities for them to die in the coming years.

The other surprise had been Sheraine, who rode next to Verin even now. Ryma had stayed at Falme, trying to help and guide all the former damane she could find. Sheraine had come with us, though she hadn't said much about why except that she wanted to report the dangers of the Seanchan to the Amyrlin in person. I suppose she didn't want to reveal to everybody that she wasn't bound by the Oaths anymore. Though I think Verin suspected it.

"At least we won't have those on the way to Tar Valon. Light, just a bunch of Aes Sedai," he said.

"It's only two, the others aren't Aes Sedai yet," I pointed out.

"Two's more Aes Sedai than a decent man wants to be around," Mat said.

I couldn't help but roll my eyes. "Please, how many times would you be dead if not for Aes Sedai? You'll need more than two to get rid of that dagger before it eats your soul," I said, pointing at his belt. His cloak hid the dagger from view, but being this close to him I couldn't help but feel it. Like there was something sticky in the air, but only when I looked at Mat.

"Could you not say it like that." His hand disappeared beneath the cloak. "I'm sure it's nothing as bad as that."

I shook my head. "Oh, no, I'm afraid it is exactly that bad. But cheer up. We should reach Tar Valon before it hollows you out completely and souls grow back. I think," I finished. In some settings they did, but Mat had permanently lost memories in the books.

"I'm going to Tar Valon, I never said I wouldn't," Mat argued, before spurring his horse to catch up to Hurin.

Perhaps I should have been a little less blunt about his condition?

VVV

We traveled through days of sunshine and ones cursed with miserable weather where cold rain drizzled on our cloaks or slapped us in the face if the wind came from the east. And with each day it got a little colder as winter had arrived in truth now.

Our route took us north through Arad Doman, avoiding the bigger cities in favor of back roads and small towns. We were staying in one such inn today, the wind howling and shaking the very walls of the building.

We would continue our journey tomorrow, no one went out in a storm like this. It gave me some time to catch up on my reading. I still wasn't even halfway through the travelogue.

I'd done some digging into the tablet after freeing Gemiad and the other women. The results were interesting. The document file was big, as in very big. That had worried me as I had no good way to tell how many chapters the text had. The index was one of the parts that didn't survive the restoration of the tablet, and I didn't want to lose where I was, but at some point the author had started to add images to the entries which helped to explain the size of the file.

But the other interesting thing I found was the file's creation date and the last time it was edited. They were identical, this text hadn't been written on this device, it was a copy. And if that were true, then the travelogue could have been passed along and spread around for decades or centuries before the Butcher and his people got a hand on it.

It left me wondering just how old the realms this traveler saw were. How had they changed, did they still exist? Like this one, a realm consisting of little more than a collection of small islands with Outer Night already encroaching upon it. But the ocean wasn't salt water, it was mercury. Somehow, water transitioned into this metal when it left the islands itself.

A muffled curse had me looking up from the tablet, it had come from the room next door. I'd thought everybody else had gone down to the common room to enjoy the singer. Well, everybody except Verin and Sheraine, but they had the bigger suites at the end of the hallway.

I hesitated a moment, but then I got up and stowed away the tablet as well as the Glasses of Translation. Leaving my room, I knocked on my neighbor's door. Egwene and Nynaeve had taken this one. "Hello, is everything alright?"

"Y-Yes. I'm fine," Egwene called back.

She did not sound fine. "That's good, but-uhm-can I come in?"

There came no immediate reply. "Alright," she sighed.

Entering I saw Egwene was sitting on the edge of her bed with a gray dress draped over her lap, some needles and a pair of scissors laying next to her. Egwene only had one other dress at the moment and she was wearing it now, but it was worn and grubby. It didn't offer much protection against the cold.

"Not joining the others in the common room?"

"I could ask you much the same question, Master Shen. Can I help you with something?"

"Ron, please. Only people I don't know or don't like have to call me Shen. And I wanted to get some reading in, not many other opportunities for it. Is that your reason as well? I heard you cursing."

The dark-haired young woman grimaced as she looked down at the article of clothing. "I'm trying to divide the skirts to make it a riding dress. But I pricked myself."

"Ah, that can smart. Not sticking yourself with the needle," I added when I caught her look. "Well, if you like, I can help you with that. Wouldn't take long." I stepped forward and motioned for her to hand it over to me.

"You?" She looked at me with surprise, which turned into one of more and more skepticism. "Have you ever even sewn anything?"

"I made all the disguises for breaking you and Gemiad out." I took the dress out of her lap and gathered one of the needles. Strictly speaking, I didn't need it, but it would speed up the work.

"I thought they'd stolen those sul'dam uniforms." Her eyes slipped past me and stared at something only she could see. Her expression turned blank. "They looked real."

"Thank you." I hesitated even as my hands flew, but this was an opening. "Would you like me to change the color of the dress as well? It does look like damane gray right now and I imagine you don't need any more reminders of the horror you've been through at the moment."

The color drained out of Egwene. "I-I'm fine."

I hummed. "I suppose you can indulge right now, not like you're an Aes Sedai yet. How about green, dark green?"

She shook her head. "I-What are you doing? What are you talking about? I'm fine! There's nothing wrong with me!"

"I didn't say there was," I said, doing my best to sound calm. "But you are lying to me when you say that you are fine. Nobody would be 'fine' after several weeks of physical and mental torture."

Egwene took a step back.

"If you don't want to talk about it with me, that's alright." I got up and held out the dress, it's skirts neatly divided. "But I advise you to talk to someone about what you went through. Don't let it just fester inside of you." A final pulse of my power, it didn't even amount to a miracle, and the dress turned from gray to dark green.

I handed it over to Egwene, who looked at it wide-eyed. "Fear of the past can chain you if you let it. And if you ever need help, if it is too much, I'm here to help." I left her with the dress and those words.

VVV

We left the year 998 behind when we finally saw the Mountains of Mist rise up on our right. We had passed the fuzzy border of Arad Doman and entered lands nobody even claimed.

That didn't mean it was devoid of people, however. We saw the smoke of the occasional hearth fire drifting up from places well away from the road and most days still found lodgings in small villages the road passed through that were barely more than five farms and an inn.

Many had defenses, nothing more than a palisade or an earthen wall with sharpened stakes planted in them. Though they usually were clearly neglected, the wood rotten. They could probably stand off a Trolloc, if he was alone and injured.

The sun had set before we reached the next hamlet. Their palisade looked solid, and the gate had actually been closed when we arrived. It had taken some knocking to draw their attention, but for once, there was no argument before they let us in.

The inn itself was a small affair when compared to the Winespring Inn back in Emond's Field. Wooden shingles on the roof and a single chimney, but unlike any other building in this settlement, it had a second floor.

The innkeeper welcomed us to The Pewter Mug, offering to heat up some soup to warm us up while his bleary-eyed stable hand bedded down the horses with Mat's, Hurin's, and mine help. I couldn't help but notice that Hurin looked unhappier as time passed.

"Cheer up," I told him as we returned to the inn. "The soup smells good. That should warm us up a little."

"It's not that cold," the older sniffer said before ducking his head. "Begging your pardon, master Shen, but you southerners just aren't used to a real winter." I'd asked him multiple times to call me Ron, but it was one battle I hadn't won.

The inn wasn't that big, with us all now gathered together we took up more than half the inn. But nobody else was here, none of the locals even. The innkeepers himself was busy in the kitchen, I could hear him rustle up bowls and his wooden ladle hitting the pot as he stirred.

"And it's not soup I'm smelling," he whispered.

Mat laughed. "First, you say it's not that cold, and then you tell us you caught a cold?"

I wasn't laughing, though. Hurin was a sniffer, someone who could smell violence or perhaps the results of it. "Is it close by?" Had the Dark One managed to put some of its forces on the trial of the Horn?

"It's here," he said as we joined the women, then he turned to Verin. "Forgive me, Aes Sedai, but this inn smells quite bad. Violence happened here."

Verin blinked at him. "Oh? Can you be more precise than that? Was someone murdered?"

Hurin glanced at the door to kitchen, but the innkeeper hadn't appeared. "No, I don't think so. Not recently."

"Must have been some drunken brawl," Nynaeve said. "Men can drink too much and get into all sorts of silly arguments if there's no decent Wisdom around to keep the peace." She tugged her braid. "Me and the Women's Circle have had to settle more than one fight before it turned into a feud over the smallest thing."

Sheraine nodded as well. "Or a caravan guard that didn't get paid on time. I've heard of your talent, master Hurin. It's remarkable, but not precise. And you are certain you don't smell a murder?"

He sniffed. "Not a recent one, Sheraine Sedai."

Sheraine shook her head. "Then it shouldn't concern us. We should guard against thieves instead. Our cargo is too precious to lose it to some rat with sticky fingers."

"As you say, Aes Sedai," he said. The innkeeper came in a minute later to set the tables, easily squeezing through the gaps between chairs. The pot with soup he set down with a strained huff. It looked like split pea soup but without the sausage. It's not my favorite, but my rumbling stomach cared little for my palate right now. It was hot and filling; that was enough.

Afterwards, everybody retired upstairs. Sheraine and Verin each took a room for themselves, while the younger women, as well as the men, each had to share one room since the inn didn't have any other rooms available. Given that there were only two beds in each room, it meant Nynaeve, Egwene, and Gemiad would have to share. As for me, I just left Mat and Hurin to sleep in the beds.

"It would really be no issue, Master Shen," Hurin said. "I'm well used to sleeping on something harder than this floor."

"I have no doubt, but your warning sits ill with me," I said, sitting down in the only chair in the room. It creaked dangerously as my weight settled into it. "As I want to catch up on some reading anyway I'd like to stay up to see if anything happens."

Mat stopped disrobing and looked at us. "You think something might happen?" He frowned. "Come to think of it, that innkeeper is suspiciously thin. You can't trust a thin innkeeper." He blinked after he said that, as if he wasn't sure where that had come from. "So you want us to rotate standing guard?"

I hesitated, then shook my head. "No, I'll stay awake for a couple of hours. If nothing happens by midnight, nothing will happen at all. Only one us needs to sacrifice some of their sleep and as I said, I have some reading I need doing anyway. You two go to sleep, I'll be fine."

I donned my Glasses of Translation while they settled in and retrieved a book from my pack. It was a little larger, had to be to hide the crystal slate I actually wanted to read. And it wasn't just the fake book that hid the true nature of my reading material.

I'd also changed some of the crystal slate's settings, adjusting not just the brightness but also the color of its glow. There was also a data transfer menu, but it could find no connections. This slate wasn't really a traditional magical item, but more like magitech. Or perhaps a simple example of theotechnology?

As the hours passed, I considered spending some of my pool of Gift points. There was one that would do away with the need for sleep as well as many other needs like breathing and eating. Except I liked doing those, and there could be some advantages to dreaming in this world. But also dangers.

I could get a Word related to dreaming, or even a Dream Word. It should exist, but would it be available to me? A godbound started not with Words, but with a concept. That concept defined what Words they would get and how those Words were interpreted. But some Words can't work within certain concepts.

The words on the slate broke through my musings.

So hopeful when I … strong defenses …. Another world, another ruined city. Though the immediate … not clear to … surprised to learn the source was recent. One of the locals I met told …. Some sort of Uncreated had poisoned the magic the people of this world used, but it only affected the men.

I stopped and read that part again. Could it be? My eyes flew over the text.

Rest of this world's foundation … stable. Given that, I've decided to leave one of my caches here. I found a dimensional anchor that would be perfect … city nearby was called Nol Caimaine, but it is a ruin. Other orientation point is the entrance to Night … used.

The text went on to detail the devastation that had to be the Breaking, but that wasn't what I was looking for right now. The next page had the jackpot, a drawing in black and white of something very familiar. A Portal Stone, the illustration was detailed enough to show the symbols on it. If I could figure out which Portal Stone this was, I could perhaps find what this traveler had left behind. And if I read this right, a Night Road shouldn't be too far away either.

The window shutter rattled as a gust of wind slammed into it and some of the cold slipped into the room. The candle that provided some light flickered out. I glanced at Hurin and Mat, but they were vast asleep.

Hard to tell the time, but I'd gotten through quite a few pages and I felt tired. Midnight could not be far off, yet nothing had happened. That was a good thing, probably meant I hadn't changed things for this journey to the White Tower.

The next moment the whole inn shook as a clap of thunder deafened me. I jumped out of my chair, heart racing, even as Hurin and Mat bolted upright as well. The Two Rivers lad blinked at me, eyes still heavy with sleep. "Whuh?"

But my attention was on the weathered man in our room, his breath escaping into the air in quick, sharp bursts. The door behind him had opened only so far as to allow him to slip in. It hadn't made a sound, those hinges one of the few things that were well maintained in this place.

I snapped the book in my hand shut, and he raised a club of polished blackthorn above his head and lunged for me. Raising my arm was instinct, and the weapon bounced off of my lower arm as if it had hit an iron bar. It still hurt.

But it wasn't the pain that struck me. "Gemiad." It wasn't just us that had an intruder. It couldn't be. Our intruder was still recovering. I stepped forward and dropped the book before grabbing him. Then threw him over my shoulder and through the window shutter like the trash he was. "Get up, arm yourselves," I ordered Hurin and Mat, who had jumped out of their beds by now. We should have listened to Hurin.

I didn't bother with opening the door, I went through it. "Gemiad!" The hinges tore loose from the frame and I don't know who was more surprised; me or the two men that had been standing right behind it. They cried out as they were squashed between the door and the wall. More people were in the rest of the hallway, mostly armed with clubs though one had an axe.

The source of that initial explosion was clear now as well as I could smell several different kinds of flowers and the door to the room Gemiad shared with the other young women had been blasted into small pieces with a dazed man lying flat on his back amid the debris.

A quick check told me a there were two more standing by the opened doors to Verin and Sheraine's rooms. But they could take care of themselves.

I didn't know how this had happened, the original journey had been uneventful, hadn't it? But it stood to reason that Darkfriends would try something. The Dark One would want to deny the good guys the Horn even if they couldn't use it for themselves.

The one closest to me held a lantern and his eyes were wide. "By the Light!" He took a step away from me.

With a snarl, I swung the door to face the larger group to my right and started running. The bottom scraped along the grimy floorboards, and I felt the impacts as I swept the hallway clean. They threw their weight against me, but even together, they weighed far less than a ship, and I could lift that. They stumbled over the man who had already been knocked down and fell over each other. Still, I pushed forward. Only when the weight disappeared and I could hear the bodies roll down the stairs, did I stop and set the door aside.

A check behind me told me Hurin had the two I'd knocked out initially under guard and the two that had been posted by the Aes Sedai's rooms stood still as statues while the two channelers swept past them. Closer to me, Nynaeve had stormed out of her room as well closely followed by Elayne and Gemiad who seemed a little shaky. Egwene stuck her head out as well, though still blinking the sleep out of her eyes.

"More darkfriends!" Nynaeve said, her first clenching around her braid. "How did they find us? How did they sneak so many in?"

"Darkfriends! We walk in the Light!" One of the men guarded by Hurin exclaimed. As I approached I took of my Glasses of Translation and put them back in their traveling case.

"Sadly, people can commit evil even without pledging themselves to the Shadow," Verin said, studying everything and everyone. Her gaze lingered a little longer on where the door used to be and where it now rested. Only then did she glance down at the man that had defended his allegiance like an owl spotting a mouse. "You only meant to rob us, I believe?"

"Yes, Aes Sedai," the man answered quickly. His sheepskin coat wasn't decorated like we'd seen on Almoth Plain and looked worn in places. "Nothing more! There's no darkfriends in Haerelar!"

"Just bandits! As if that's much better," Nynaeve spat. "But you'll face justice now. How many have you stolen from? What did you do them? Just throw them out with only the clothes on their backs? Did you leave them even that?"

"Nynaeve," Elayne said, "there's no king or queen to dispense that justice. Might be some local noble around, but I'm not sure how much good they'll be or even how to find them."

"We don't need some noble for justice," Nynaeve said, drawing herself up as she faced Elayne. "We didn't need one in Emond's Field, and we won't need one now. Just have to find whatever Women's Circle or Wisdom they have around here."

"No," Sheraine said, "We won't be doing that. Think, child, in a village this small few things remain secret. Certainly not something like this."

Nynaeve sputtered. "You can't mean…"

"The whole village is in on it," Gemiad said, giving the two men on the floor a hard look. "Might not do the robbing, but they looked the other way and profited from the wealth it brought in. And they might do more when they see what we did to their friends and neighbors."

"We should hurry then," Verin said. "Quickly, clothe yourselves and grab your belongings. We can't afford to fight the whole village. Well, what are you waiting for?"

All of us ran after that, even the Aes Sedai. However, they tried to do it with more dignity. True to her prediction, Haerelar stirred as we hurried out of the inn. The people I'd thrown down the stairs had mostly scurried away and had spread the word of us.

Lights went up in most of the houses and shadowy figures gathered. Many of them brandishing things that glinted in the light of the torches. They shouldn't be a threat, but I didn't want to show too much in front of Verin right now.

Sheraine, however, did not have that problem. I hadn't stopped smelling flowers but it still came something of a surprise to suddenly see a red light flare into being above the village. Then Sheraine's voice thundered through the hamlet. "People of Haerelar. You have interfered with business of the White Tower. Return to your homes or you will face the consequences of your choices."

The gathering mob drew back and I decided I could add a little here. Drawing both parts of my weapon with a spin, I snapped them together to form a full short spear that caught the light of the red orb still floating above us. Then I took a few steps forward as I spun it again before holding it at my side. "Who wants to die first?" I said with a loud voice, trying to project as much arrogance as I could.

Nobody came forward and when the rest came out with the horses I quickly joined them. Before the good people of Haerelar could gather their courage we raced away, the One Power blasting the northern gate open as we neared it.

As Haerelar grew smaller behind us, I could feel something cold and wet strike my nose. Looking up, I saw thick snowflakes drifting down out of the dark sky.