Perrin had questions—What in the Light are the Soulless? Are they like a Trolloc, or a Fade? What?—but he left them unasked. When Moiraine decided enough had been said about something, she would not talk of it anymore. And when she shut her mouth, you could not pry Lan’s open with an iron bar. The Shienarans followed her lead, too. No one wanted to anger an Aes Sedai.

“Light!” Min muttered, uneasily eyeing the deepening darkness around them. “You don’t notice them? Light!”

“So nothing has changed,” Perrin said glumly. “Not really. We cannot go down to the plain, and the Dark One wants us dead.”

“Everything changes,” Moiraine said calmly, “and the Pattern takes it all in. We must ride on the Pattern, not on the changes of a moment.” She looked at them each in turn, then said, “Uno, are you certain your scouts missed nothing suspicious? Even something small?”

“The Lord Dragon’s Rebirth has loosed the bonds of certainty, Moiraine Sedai, and there is never certainty if you fight Myrddraal, but I will stake my life that the scouts did as good a job as any Warder.” It was one of the longest speeches Perrin had ever heard out of Uno without any curses. There was sweat on the man’s forehead from the effort.

“We all may,” Moiraine said. “What Rand did might as well have been a fire on the mountaintop for any Myrddraal within ten miles.”

“Maybe . . .” Min began hesitantly. “Maybe you ought to set wards that will keep them out.” Lan gave her a hard stare. He sometimes questioned Moiraine’s decisions himself, though he seldom did so where anyone could overhear, but he did not approve of others doing the same. Min frowned right back at him. “Well, Myrddraal and Trollocs are bad enough, but at least I can see them. I don’t like the idea that one of these . . . these Soulless might sneak in here and slit my throat before I even noticed him.”

“The wards I set will hide us from the Soulless as well as from any other Shadowspawn,” Moiraine said. “When you are weak, as we are, the best choice is often to hide. If there is a Halfman close enough to have. . . . Well, to set wards that would kill them if they tried to enter camp is beyond my abilities, and even if I could, such a warding would only pen us here. Since it is not possible to set two kinds of warding at once, I leave the scouts and the guards—and Lan—to defend us, and use the one warding that may do some good.”

“I could make a circuit around the camp,” Lan said. “If there is anything out there that the scouts missed, I will find it.” It was not a boast, just a statement of fact. Uno even nodded agreement.