He cautiously led Stayer forward into the center of the village. The Blight was radiating from this point, but the village itself showed no touch of it. Maidens scattered forward, veils in place, Sulin at their head. They did a quick inspection of the huts, signing to one another with quick gestures, then returned.

“Nobody?” Faile asked.

“No,” Sulin said, cautiously lowering her veil. “This place is deserted.”

“Who would build a village like this,” Perrin asked, “in Ghealdan of all places?”

“It wasn’t built here,” Masuri said.

Perrin turned toward the slender Aes Sedai.

“This village is not native to this area,” Masuri said. “The wood is unlike anything I’ve seen before.”

“The Pattern groans,” Berelain said softly. “The dead walking, the odd deaths. In cities, rooms vanish and food spoils.”

Perrin scratched his chin, remembering a day when his axe had tried to kill him. If entire villages were vanishing and appearing in other places, if the Blight was growing out of rifts where the Pattern was fraying…Light! How bad were things becoming?

“Burn the village,” he said, turning. “Use the One Power. Scour as many of the tainted plants as you can. Maybe we can keep it from spreading. We’ll move the army to that camp an hour away, and will stay there tomorrow if you need more time.”

For once, neither the Wise Ones nor the Aes Sedai voiced so much as a sniff of complaint at the direct order.

Hunt with us, brother.

Perrin found himself in the wolf dream. He vaguely remembered sitting drowsily by the dwindling light of an open lamp, a single flame shivering on its tip, waiting to hear a report from those dealing with the strange village. He had been reading a copy of The Travels of Jain Farstrider that Gaul had found among the salvage from Malden.

Now Perrin lay on his back in the middle of a large field with grass as tall as a man’s waist. He gazed up, grass brushing his cheeks and arms as it shivered in the wind. In the sky, that same storm brewed, here as in the waking world. More violent here.

Staring up at it—his vision framed by the stalks of brown and green grass and stems of wild millet—he could almost feel the storm growing closer. As if it was crawling down out of the sky to engulf him.

Young Bull! Come! Come hunt!

The voice was that of a wolf. Perrin by instinct knew that she was called Oak Dancer, named for the way she had scampered between saplings as a whelp. There were others, too. Whisperer. Morninglight. Sparks. Boundless. A good dozen wolves called to him, some living wolves who slept, others the spirits of wolves who had died.

They called to him with a mixture of scents and images and sounds. The smell of a spring buck, pocking the earth with its leaps. Fallen leaves crumbling beneath running wolves. The growls of victory, the thrill of a pack running together.