Eventually they came to a small dale nestled amid three hillsides. Perrin pulled Stayer to a halt; the others bunched up around him. There was a strange village here. The buildings were huts built from an odd type of wood, like large reeds, and the roofs were thatch—but thatch built from enormous leaves, as wide as two man’s palms.
There were no plants here, only a very sandy soil. Perrin slid free of the saddle and stooped down to feel it, rubbing the gritty stuff between his fingers. He looked at the others. They smelled confused.
He cautiously led Stayer forward into the center of the village. The Blight was radiating from this point, but the village itself showed no touch of it. Maidens scattered forward, veils in place, Sulin at their head. They did a quick inspection of the huts, signing to one another with quick gestures, then returned.
“Nobody?” Faile asked.
“No,” Sulin said, cautiously lowering her veil. “This place is deserted.”
“Who would build a village like this,” Perrin asked, “in Ghealdan of all places?”
“It wasn’t built here,” Masuri said.
Perrin turned toward the slender Aes Sedai.
“This village is not native to this area,” Masuri said. “The wood is unlike anything I’ve seen before.”
“The Pattern groans,” Berelain said softly. “The dead walking, the odd deaths. In cities, rooms vanish and food spoils.”
Perrin scratched his chin, remembering a day when his axe had tried to kill him. If entire villages were vanishing and appearing in other places, if the Blight was growing out of rifts where the Pattern was fraying…Light! How bad were things becoming?
“Burn the village,” he said, turning. “Use the One Power. Scour as many of the tainted plants as you can. Maybe we can keep it from spreading. We’ll move the army to that camp an hour away, and will stay there tomorrow if you need more time.”
For once, neither the Wise Ones nor the Aes Sedai voiced so much as a sniff of complaint at the direct order.
Hunt with us, brother.
Perrin found himself in the wolf dream. He vaguely remembered sitting drowsily by the dwindling light of an open lamp, a single flame shivering on its tip, waiting to hear a report from those dealing with the strange village. He had been reading a copy of The Travels of Jain Farstrider that Gaul had found among the salvage from Malden.
Now Perrin lay on his back in the middle of a large field with grass as tall as a man’s waist. He gazed up, grass brushing his cheeks and arms as it shivered in the wind. In the sky, that same storm brewed, here as in the waking world. More violent here.
Staring up at it—his vision framed by the stalks of brown and green grass and stems of wild millet—he could almost feel the storm growing closer. As if it was crawling down out of the sky to engulf him.
Young Bull! Come! Come hunt!
The voice was that of a wolf. Perrin by instinct knew that she was called Oak Dancer, named for the way she had scampered between saplings as a whelp. There were others, too. Whisperer. Morninglight. Sparks. Boundless. A good dozen wolves called to him, some living wolves who slept, others the spirits of wolves who had died.
They called to him with a mixture of scents and images and sounds. The smell of a spring buck, pocking the earth with its leaps. Fallen leaves crumbling beneath running wolves. The growls of victory, the thrill of a pack running together.
The invitations awakened something deep within him, the wolf he tried to keep locked away. But a wolf could not be locked up for long. It either escaped or it died; it would not stand captivity. He longed to leap to his feet and send his joyous acceptance, losing himself in the pack. He was Young Bull, and he was welcome here.
“No!” Perrin said, sitting up, holding his head. “I will not lose myself in you.”
Hopper sat in the grass to his right. The large gray wolf regarded Perrin, golden eyes unblinking, reflecting flashes of lightning from above. The grass came up to Hopper’s neck.
Perrin lowered a hand from his head. The air was heavy, full of humidity, and it smelled of rain. Above the scent of the weather and that of the dry field, he could smell Hopper’s patience.
You are invited, Young Bull, Hopper sent.
“I can’t hunt with you,” Perrin explained. “Hopper, we spoke of this. I’m losing myself. When I go into battle, I become enraged. Like a wolf.”
Like a wolf? Hopper sent. Young Bull, you are a wolf. And a man. Come hunt.
“I told you I can’t! I will not let this consume me.” He thought of a young man with golden eyes, locked in a cage, all humanity gone from him. His name had been Noam—Perrin had seen him in a village called Jarra.
Light, Perrin thought. That’s not far from here. Or at least not far from where his body slumbered in the real world. Jarra was in Ghealdan. An odd coincidence.
With a ta’veren nearby, there are no coincidences.
He frowned, rising and scanning the landscape. Moiraine had told Perrin there was nothing human left inside of Noam. That was what awaited a wolfbrother if he let himself be completely consumed by the wolf.
“I must learn to control this, or I must banish the wolf from me,” Perrin said. “There is no time left for compromise, Hopper.”
Hopper smelled dissatisfied. He didn’t like what he’d called a human tendency to wish to control things.
Come, Hopper sent, standing up in the grass. Hunt.
“I—”
Come learn, Hopper sent, frustrated. The Last Hunt comes.
Hopper’s sendings included the image of a young pup making his first kill. That and a worry for the future—a normally unwolflike attribute. The Last Hunt brought change.
Perrin hesitated. In a previous visit to the wolf dream, Perrin had demanded that Hopper train him to master the place. Very inappropriate for a young wolf—a kind of challenge to the elder’s seniority—but this was a response. Hopper had come to teach, but he would do it as a wolf taught.
“I’m sorry,” Perrin said. “I will hunt with you—but I must not lose myself.”
These things you think, Hopper sent, displeased. How can you think such images of nothing? The response was accompanied by images of blankness—an empty sky, a den with nobody in it, a barren field. You are Young Bull. You will always be Young Bull. How can you lose Young Bull? Look down, and you will see his paws beneath. Bite, and his teeth will kill. There is no losing this.
“It is a thing of humans.”
The same empty words over and over, Hopper sent.
Perrin took a deep breath, sucking in and releasing the too-wet air. “Very well,” he said, hammer and knife appearing in his hands. “Let’s go.”
You hunt game with your hooves? An image of a bull ignoring its horns and trying to leap onto the back of a deer and stomp it to the ground.
“You’re right.” Perrin was suddenly holding a good Two Rivers longbow. He wasn’t as good a shot as Jondyn Barran or Rand, but he could hold his own.
Hopper sent a bull spitting at a deer. Perrin growled, sending back a wolf’s claws shooting from its paws and striking a deer at a distance, but this only seemed to amuse Hopper further. Despite his annoyance, Perrin had to admit that it was a rather ridiculous image.
The wolf sent the image to the others, causing them to howl in amusement, though most of them seemed to prefer the bull jumping up and down on the deer. Perrin growled, chasing after Hopper toward the distant woods, where the other wolves waited.
As he ran, the grasses seemed to grow more dense. They held him back, like snarled forest undergrowth. Hopper soon outpaced him.
Run, Young Bull!
I’m trying, Perrin sent back.
Not as you have before!
Perrin continued to push his way through the grass. This strange place, this wonderful world where wolves ran, could be intoxicating. And dangerous. Hopper had warned Perrin of that more than once.
Dangers for tomorrow. Ignore them for now, Hopper sent, growing more distant. Worry is for two-legs.
I can’t ignore my problems! Perrin thought back.
Yet you often do, Hopper sent.
It struck true—more true, perhaps, than the wolf knew. Perrin burst into a clearing and pulled to a halt. There, lying on the ground, were the three chunks of metal he’d forged in his earlier dream. The large lump the size of two fists, the flattened rod, the thin rectangle. The rectangle glowed faintly yellow-red, singeing the short grass around it.
The lumps vanished immediately, though the simmering rectangle left a burned spot. Perrin looked up, searching for the wolves. Ahead of him, in the sky above the trees ahead, a large hole of blackness opened up. He could not tell how far it was away, and it seemed to dominate all he could see while being distant at the same time.
Mat stood there. He was fighting against himself, a dozen different men wearing his face, all dressed in different types of fine clothing. Mat spun his spear, and never saw the shadowy figure creeping behind him, bearing a bloody knife.
“Mat!” Perrin cried, but he knew it was meaningless. This thing he was seeing, it was some kind of dream or vision of the future. It had been some time since he’d seen one of these. He’d almost begun to think they would stop coming.
He turned away and another darkness opened in the sky. He saw sheep, suddenly, running in a flock toward the woods. Wolves chased them, and a terrible beast waited in the woods, unseen. He was there, in that dream, he sensed. But who was he chasing, and why? Something looked wrong with those wolves.
A third darkness, to the side. Faile, Grady, Elyas, Gaul…all walked toward a cliff, followed by thousands of others.
The vision closed. Hopper suddenly shot back through the air, landing beside Perrin, skidding to a stop. The wolf wouldn’t have seen the holes; they had never appeared to his eyes. Instead, he regarded the burned patch with disdain and sent the image of Perrin, unkempt and bleary-eyed, his beard and hair untrimmed and his clothing disheveled. Perrin remembered the time; it had been during the early days of Faile’s captivity.
Had he really looked that bad? Light, but he seemed ragged. Almost like a beggar. Or…like Noam.
“Stop trying to confuse me!” Perrin said. “I became that way because I was dedicated to finding Faile, not because I was giving in to the wolves!”
The newest pups always blame the elders of the pack. Hopper bounded through the grasses again.
What did that mean? The scents and images confused him. Growling, Perrin charged forward, leaving the clearing and reentering the grasses. Once again the stalks resisted him. It was like fighting against a current. Hopper shot on ahead.
“Burn you, wait for me!” Perrin yelled.
If we wait, we lose the prey. Run, Young Bull!
Perrin gritted his teeth. Hopper was a speck in the distance now, almost to the trees. Perrin wanted to think on those visions, but there wasn’t time. If he lost Hopper, he knew that he would not see him again this night. Fine, he thought with resignation.
The land lurched around him, grasses speeding by in a flash. It was as if Perrin had leaped a hundred paces in one step. He stepped again, shooting forward. He left a faint blur behind him.
The grasses parted for him. The wind blew in his face with a comfortable roar. That primal wolf inside of him sparked to wakefulness. Perrin reached the woods and slowed. Each step now took him a jump of only about ten feet. The other wolves were there, and they formed up and ran with him, excited.