“The Dragon left us!” Takai said. “I refuse to follow the memory of a man my greatfathers barely knew. We made no oaths to follow his foolish pact. We—”

“Peace, Takai,” Jorshem said. The last of the three clan chiefs was a small, hawk-faced man with some Andoran blood in him from his greatfather. “Only the Three-fold Land holds any hope for us, now. The war against the Ravens has been lost.”

The tent fell still.

“They said they’d hunt us,” Takai said. “When they demanded surrender, they warned us against retreat. You know that. They said they would destroy any place where three Aiel gathered.”

“We will not surrender,” Ladalin said firmly. More firmly than she felt, to be honest.

“Surrender would make us gai’shain,” Tamaav said. They used the word to mean one without honor, though that was not the way Ladalin’s mother had used it. “Ladalin. What is your advice?”

The other four looked at her. She was of the lineage of the Dragon, one of the last living. The other three lines had been killed off.

“If we become slaves to the Seanchan, the Aiel as a people will be no more,” she said. “We cannot win, so we must retreat. We will return to the Three-fold Land and build up our strength. Perhaps our children can fight where we cannot.”

Silence again. They all knew her words to be optimistic at best. After decades of war, the Aiel were a bare fraction of the number they had once been.

Seanchan channelers were brutal in their effectiveness. Though the Wise Ones and Dragon Blooded used the One Power in battle, it was not enough. Those cursed a’dam! Each channeler the Aiel lost to capture was eventually turned against them.

The real turning point in the war had been the entry of the other nations. After that, the Seanchan had been able to seize wetlander peoples and cull more channelers from their ranks. The Ravens were unstoppable; now that Tar Valon had fallen, every realm in the wetlands was subject to the Seanchan. Only the Black Tower still fought, though the Asha’man did so in secret, as their fortress had fallen years before.

Aiel could not fight in secret. There was no honor to that. Of course, what did honor matter now? After deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands? After the burning of Cairhien and the scouring of Illian? It had been twenty years since the Seanchan had gained the Andoran war machines. The Aiel had been tumbling toward defeat for decades; it was a testament to their tenacious nature that they had lasted so long.

“This is his fault,” Takai said, still looking sullen. “The Car’a’carn could have led us to glory, but he abandoned us.”

“His fault?” Ladalin said, understanding—perhaps for the first time—why that statement was wrong. “No. Aiel take responsibility for themselves. This is our fault, and not that of my distant greatfather. We have forgotten who we are. We are without honor.”