Ahead, the Band’s camp sat on a small series of hills, entrenched around the largest of them at the center. Mat’s force had met up with Estean and the others that had gone ahead to Andor, and the Band was well and truly whole again. Fires burned; there was no trouble finding dead wood for fires these days. Smoke lingered in the air, and Mat heard men chatting and calling. It was not too late yet, and Mat did not enforce a curfew. If he could not relax, at least his men could. It might be the last chance they got before the Last Battle.

Trollocs in the Borderlands, Mat thought. We need those dragons. Soon.

Mat returned salutes from a few guard posts and parted with Thom, meaning to go find a bed and sleep on his problems for the night. As he did, he noted a few changes he could make to the camp. The way the hillsides were arranged, a light cavalry charge could come galloping through the corridor between them. Only someone very bold would try such a tactic, but he had done just that during the Battle of Marisin Valley back in old Coremanda. Well, not Mat himself, but someone in those old memories.

More and more, he simply accepted those memories as his own. He had not asked for them—no matter what those bloody foxes claimed—but he had paid for them with the scar around his neck. They had been useful on more than one occasion.

He finally reached his tent, intending to get fresh smallclothes before finding a different tent for the night, when he heard a woman’s voice calling to him. “Matrim Cauthon!”

Bloody ashes. He had almost made it. He turned reluctantly.

Teslyn Baradon was not a pretty woman, though she might have made a passable paperbark tree, with those bony fingers, those narrow shoulders and that gaunt face. She wore a red dress, and over the weeks her eyes had lost most of the nervous skittishness she had shown since spending time as a damane. She had a glare so practiced she could have won a staring contest with a post.

“Matrim Cauthon,” she said, stepping up to him. “I do be needing to speak with you.”

“Well, seems that you’re doing so already,” Mat said, dropping his hand from his tent flap. He had a slight fondness for Teslyn, against his better judgment, but he was not about to invite her in. No more than he would invite a fox into his hen house, regardless of how kindly he thought of the fox in question.

“So I do be,” she replied. “You’ve heard the news of the White Tower?”

“News?” Mat said. “No, I’ve heard no news. Rumors, though…I’ve a brainful of those. Some say the White Tower has been reunified, which is what you’re probably talking about. But I’ve also heard just as many claiming that it is still at war. And that the Amyrlin fought the Last Battle in Rand’s place, and that the Aes Sedai have decided to raise an army of soldiers by giving birth to them, and that flying monsters attacked the White Tower. That last one is probably just stories of raken drifting up from the south. But I think the one about Aes Sedai raising an army of babies holds some water.”