“I don’t know. Brigands.” The horses were all gone. But brigands wanted to steal, not kill, and no Tinker would resist if you stole his last penny and his coat to boot. Mat forced his hands to ease their grip on his reins. There was nowhere to look without seeing a dead woman, a dead child. Whoever did this had not wanted any survivors. He rode a slow circuit around the site, trying to ignore the vultures that hissed and flared their wings when he passed—the ground was too dry to hold tracks well, although he thought horses had gone in several directions—and came back to Vanin. “You could have told me about it. I don’t need to see.” Light, but I don’t!

“I could’ve told you there was no good tracks,” Vanin said, turning his horse to wade the shallow stream. “Maybe you need to see this.”

Fire had taken most of the wagon lying on its side, but the wagon bed survived, propped on yellow wheels with red spokes. A man in a coat that still showed a little eye-wrenching blue lay hard against it, one sprawled hand black with blood. What he had written in shaky letters stood out darker than the wood of the wagon bottom.

TELL THE DRAGON REBORN

Tell him what? Mat thought. That somebody had killed a whole caravan of Tinkers? Or had the man died before he could write whatever it was? It would not have been the first time Tinkers had come onto important information. In a story he would have lived just long enough to scrawl the vital bit that meant victory. Well, whatever the message, nobody was ever going to know a word more now.

“You were right, Vanin.” Mat hesitated. Tell the Dragon Reborn what? No reason to start any more rumors than they already had. “See the rest of this wagon burns before you leave. And if anybody asks, there was nothing here but a lot of dead men.” And women, and children.

Vanin nodded. “Filthy savages,” he muttered, and spat through his teeth again. “Could have been some of them, I suppose.”

That band of Aielmen had caught up, three or four hundred strong. They trotted down the slope and crossed the stream no more than fifty paces from the wagons. A number raised a hand in greeting; Mat did not recognize them, but a good many Aiel had heard of Rand al’Thor’s friend, he who wore the hat and whom it was better not to gamble against. Across the stream and up the next slope, and all those bodies might as well not have existed.

Bloody Aiel, Mat thought. He knew that Aiel avoided Tinkers, ignored them, if not why, but this. . . . “I don’t think so,” he said. “See it burns, Vanin.”