A Memory of Light

wrinkled; he’d grabbed them as the tent started to explode around him.
    Fool man, she thought. Risking his life for a couple of pieces of paper.
    . . . from reports,” said General Haerm, the new commander of the Illianer Companions. “I’m sorry, my Lord. The scouts don’t dare sneak too close to the old camp.”
    “No sign of the Amyrlin?” Siuan asked.
    Bryne and Haerm both shook their heads.
    “Keep looking, young man.” Siuan wagged a finger at Haerm. He raised an eyebrow at her use of the word “young.” Burn this youthful face she’d been given. “I mean it. The Amyrlin is alive. You find her, you hear me?”
    “I . . . Yes, Aes Sedai.” He showed some measure of respect, but not enough. These Illianers didn’t know how to treat Aes Sedai.
    Bryne waved the man off, and for once, it didn’t look as if anyone was waiting to meet with him. Everyone was probably too exhausted. Their “camp” looked more like a collection of refugees from a terrible fire than it did an army. Most of the men had rolled themselves in cloaks and gone to sleep. Soldiers were better than sailors at sleeping whenever, and wherever, they could.
    She couldn’t blame them. She’d been exhausted before the Sharans arrived. Now she was tired as death itself. She sat down on the ground beside Bryne’s stump.
    “Arm still hurting you?” Bryne asked, reaching down to rub her shoulder. “You can feel that it is,” Siuan grumbled.
    “Merely trying to be pleasant, Siuan.”
    “Don’t think I have forgotten that you’re to blame for this bruise.”
    “Me?” Bryne said, sounding amused.
    “You pushed me through the hole.”
    “You didn’t seem ready to move.”
    “I was just about to jump. I was almost there.”
    “I’m certain,” Bryne said.
    “It’s your fault,” Siuan insisted. “I tumbled. I hadn’t intended to tumble. And Yukiri’s weave . . . horrible thing.”
    “It worked,” Bryne said. “I doubt many people can claim to have fallen three hundred paces and survived.”
    “She was too eager,” Siuan said. “She was probably longing to make us jump, you know. All that talk about Traveling and weaves of movement . . .” She trailed off, partly because she was annoyed at herself. This day had gone poorly enough without her griping at Bryne. “How many did we lose?” Not a much better topic, but she needed to know. “Do we have reports yet?
    Nearly one in two of the soldiers,” Bryne said softly.
    Worse than she’d suspected. “And the Aes Sedai?”
    “We have somewhere around two hundred and fifty left,” Bryne said. “Though a number of those are in shock at having lost Warders.”
    That was more of a disaster. A hundred and twenty Aes Sedai dead in a matter of hours? The White Tower would require a very long time to recover from that.
    “I’m sorry, Siuan,” Bryne said.
    “Bah,” Siuan said, “most of them treated me like fish guts anyway. They resented me as Amyrlin, laughed when I was cast down, and then made a servant of me when I returned.”
    Bryne nodded, still rubbing her shoulder. He could feel that she was hurt, despite her words. There were good women among the dead. Many good sisters.
    “She’s out there,” Siuan said stubbornly. “Egwene will surprise us, Bryne. You watch.”
    “If I’m watching, it won’t be much of a surprise, will it?”
    Siuan grunted. “Fool man.”
    “You’re right,” he said solemnly. “On both counts. I think Egwene will surprise us. I’m also a fool.”
    “Bryne . . .”
    “I am, Siuan. How could I miss that they were stalling? They wanted to occupy us until this other force could gather. The Trollocs pulled back into those hills. A defensive move. Trollocs aren’t defensive. I assumed they were trying to set up an ambush only, and that was why they were pulling back corpses and preparing to wait. If I’d attacked them earlier, this could have been avoided. I was too careful.”
    “A man who thinks all day about the catch he missed because of stormy weather ends up wasting time when the sky is clear.”
    “A clever proverb, Siuan,” he said. “But there’s a saying among generals, written by Fogh the Tireless. ‘If you do not learn from your losses, you will be ruled by them.’ I can’t see how I let this happen. I’ve trained better than this, prepared better than this! It’s not just a mistake I can ignore, Siuan. The Pattern itself is at stake.”
    He rubbed his forehead. In the dim light of the setting sun, he