Towers of Midnight (The Wheel of Time #13)

Light! How clever he’s become.

She released the True Power and embraced less-wonderful saidar. Quickly! She was so unsettled that her embrace nearly failed. She was sweating.

Go. She had to go.

She opened a new gateway. Aran’gar turned, staring through the walls in the direction of al’Thor. “So much power! What is he doing?”

Aran’gar. She and Delana had made the weaves of Compulsion.

Al’Thor must think Graendal dead. If he destroyed the place and those Compulsions remained, al’Thor would know that he’d missed and that Graendal lived.

Graendal formed two shields and slammed them into place, one for Aran’gar, one for Delana. The women gasped. Graendal tied off the weaves and bound the two in Air.

“Graendal?” Aran’gar said, voice panicked. “What are you—”

It was coming. Graendal leaped for the gateway, rolling through it, tumbling and ripping her dress on a branch. A blinding light rose behind her. She struggled to dismiss the gateway, and caught one glimpse of the horrified Aran’gar before everything behind was consumed in beautiful, pure whiteness.

The gateway vanished, leaving Graendal in darkness.

She lay, heart beating at a terrible speed, nearly blinded by the glare. She’d made the quickest gateway she could, one that led only a short distance away. She lay in the dirty underbrush atop a ridge behind the palace.

A wave of wrongness washed over her, a warping in the air, the Pattern itself rippling. A balescream, it was called—a moment when creation itself howled in pain.

She breathed in and out, trembling. But she had to see. She had to know. She rose to her feet, left ankle twisted. She hobbled to the treeline and looked down.

Natrin’s Barrow—the entire palace—was gone. Burned out of the Pattern. She couldn’t see al’Thor on his distant ridge, but she knew where he was.

“You,” she growled. “You have become far more dangerous than I assumed.”

Hundreds of beautiful men and women, the finest she’d gathered, gone. Her stronghold, dozens of items of Power, her greatest ally among the Chosen. Gone. This was a disaster.

No, she thought. I live. She’d anticipated him, if only by a few moments. Now he would think she was dead.

She was suddenly the safest she’d been since escaping the Great Lord’s prison. Except, of course, that she’d just caused the death of one of the Chosen. The Great Lord would not be pleased.

She limped away from the ridge, already planning her next move. This would have to be handled very, very carefully.

Galad Damodred, Lord Captain Commander of the Children of the Light, yanked his booted foot free of the ankle-deep mud with a slurping sound.

Bitemes buzzed in the muggy air. The stench of mud and stagnant water threatened to gag him with each breath as he led his horse to drier ground on the path. Behind him trudged a long, twisting column four men wide, each one as muddied, sweaty and weary as he was.

They were on the border of Ghealdan and Altara, in a swampy wetland where the oaks and spicewoods had given way to laurels and spidery cypress, their gnarled roots spread like spindly fingers. The stinking air was hot—despite the shade and cloud cover—and thick. It was like breathing in a foul soup. Galad steamed beneath his breastplate and mail, his conical helmet hanging from his saddle, his skin itching from the grime and salty sweat.

Miserable though it was, this route was the best way. Asunawa would not anticipate it. Galad wiped his brow with the back of his hand and tried to walk with head high for the benefit of those who followed him. Seven thousand men, Children who had chosen him rather than the Seanchan invaders.

Dull green moss hung from the branches, drooping like shreds of flesh from rotting corpses. Here and there the sickly grays and greens were relieved by a bright burst of tiny pink or violet flowers clustering around trickling streams. Their sudden color was unexpected, as if someone had sprinkled drops of paint on the ground.

It was strange to find beauty in this place. Could he find the Light in his own situation as well? He feared it would not be so easy.

He tugged Stout forward. He could hear worried conversations from behind, punctuated by the occasional curse. This place, with its stench and biting insects, would try the best of men. Those who followed Galad were unnerved by the place the world was becoming. A world where the sky was constantly clouded black, where good men died to strange twistings of the Pattern, and where Valda—the Lord Captain Commander before Galad—had turned out to be a murderer and a ra**st.

Galad shook his head. The Last Battle would soon come.

A clinking of chain mail announced someone moving up the line. Galad glanced over his shoulder as Dain Bornhald arrived, saluted, and fell into place beside him. “Damodred,” Dain said softly, their boots squishing in mud, “perhaps we should turn back.”

“Backward leads only to the past,” Galad said, scanning the pathway ahead. “I have thought about this much, Child Bornhald. This sky, the wasting of the land, the way the dead walk…There is no longer time to find allies and fight against the Seanchan. We must march to the Last Battle.”

“But this swamp,” Bornhald said, glancing to the side as a large serpent slid through the underbrush. “Our maps say we should have been out of it by now.”

“Then surely we are near the edge.”

“Perhaps,” Dain said, a trail of sweat running from his brow down the side of his lean face, which twitched. Fortunately, he’d run out of brandy a few days back. “Unless the map is in error.”

Galad didn’t respond. Once-good maps were proving faulty these days. Open fields would turn to broken hills, villages would vanish, pastures would be arable one day, then suddenly overgrown with vines and fungus. The swamp could indeed have spread.

“The men are exhausted,” Bornhald said. “They’re good men—you know they are. But they are starting to complain.” He winced, as if anticipating a reprimand from Galad.

Perhaps once he would have given one. The Children should bear their afflictions with pride. However, memories of lessons Morgase had taught—lessons he hadn’t understood in his youth—were nagging at him. Lead by example. Require strength, but first show it.

Galad nodded. They were nearing a dry clearing. “Gather the men. I will speak to those at the front. Have my words recorded, then passed to those behind.”

Bornhald looked perplexed, but did as commanded. Galad stepped off to the side, climbing up a small hill. He placed his hand on the hilt of his sword, inspecting his men as the companies at the front gathered around. They stood with slouched postures, legs muddied. Hands flailed at bitemes