The Trollocs came in three columns.
Spencer saw them through Thread Sight before he heard them — dull red construct-threads moving between the trees, converging on Emond's Field from north, east, and south. Forty-plus beasts, maybe more, their fate-lines the color of dried blood and crackling with a wrongness that made his teeth ache.
And coordinating them, sliding through the darkness like oil on water, the frozen-void absence of a Myrddraal.
Three minutes, Spencer estimated. Maybe four. Then they hit the village edge.
He ran.
The Aybara forge was closest — the blacksmith's home, where Perrin lived with his family. Spencer pounded on the door with both fists, not caring about subtlety anymore.
"Raiders from the north! Get inside! Bar the doors!"
A face appeared in the window — Perrin's father, confusion giving way to alarm as Spencer's desperation registered. "What? Who—"
"RAIDERS. NOW. Get weapons, get your family, get INSIDE."
He didn't wait for a response. The door was already opening as he sprinted toward the next house, the Congars, and the red threads were getting closer.
Bang bang bang. "RAIDERS! North road! Get inside!"
The al'Seen farm. The Luhhan smithy. The Cauthon house, where Mat's sisters peered out with wide eyes as their mother dragged them back from the window.
Spencer's lungs burned. His legs screamed. The Thread Sight made everything too bright, too sharp, too real — every panicked face a story, every slammed door a life maybe saved or maybe not.
The first screams came from the Coplin house.
He was too late. He saw it happen through the threads — three red constructs converging on the farmhouse, the white threads inside flickering with terror, and then one of them winked out. Just gone. A life that existed and then didn't.
Spencer's feet kept moving. He couldn't help the Coplins. He could only help the next house, and the next, and the next.
---
The village erupted into chaos.
Fire bloomed against the night sky — a barn, then a house, then another. Trollocs crashed through doors and windows, their howls mixing with human screams in a symphony of slaughter. Villagers ran in every direction, some toward the inn, some toward the woods, some just running without direction or purpose.
Spencer counted threads winking out. Six. Eight. Twelve. Sixteen.
Fewer than canon, some cold part of his mind noted. The warnings helped. Some families barricaded in time.
The rest of him was too busy surviving to care about statistics.
A Trolloc burst from between two burning buildings — massive, boar-snouted, carrying an axe that looked like it weighed as much as Spencer did. Its construct-thread was dull red shot through with black, and its eyes fixed on Spencer with predator intelligence.
Move.
Spencer dove behind a water trough as the axe split the air where his head had been. He rolled, came up running, and heard the Trolloc crashing after him. The thing was fast — faster than something that big had any right to be — and Spencer was a systems engineer in a carpenter's body with no weapons and no combat training.
The inn. Get to the inn. There are fighters there—
Something crashed into the Trolloc from the side.
Tam al'Thor moved like water and struck like lightning. The heron-marked blade — heron-marked, blademaster, the books were right — flickered through the Trolloc's guard and opened its throat in a spray of black blood. The beast went down gurgling, and Tam was already turning, scanning for the next threat.
"Aldan. You're alive."
"Barely." Spencer gasped for breath. "More coming. I saw— from the east. Two of them, flanking through the—"
Tam moved before Spencer finished the sentence. The two Trollocs emerging from behind the burning barn met a blademaster instead of an undefended back, and the fight was short and brutal and exactly as one-sided as Spencer had expected.
But one of them got through.
The Thakan'dar blade — black steel forged in the shadow of Shayol Ghul — caught Tam across the ribs as he finished the second Trolloc. It wasn't a deep cut, but Spencer saw the effect immediately through Thread Sight: black tendrils spreading through Tam's white thread, poison eating at his fate-line the way Fain's corruption had eaten at his soul.
"Tam—"
"I'm fine." The older man's voice was tight with pain, but his sword arm was steady. "Get to the inn. Find my son."
"You're wounded."
"I'm fine. GO."
Spencer went.
---
The path to the Winespring Inn was a gauntlet of fire and death.
Spencer ran through smoke and screaming, Thread Sight showing him the battle in terrible clarity. White threads fighting, fleeing, dying. Red threads converging, striking, feeding. The frozen-void of the Myrddraal, directing its forces from somewhere Spencer couldn't quite pinpoint.
He found a child hiding under a collapsed fence — couldn't have been more than six, face streaked with tears and ash. Spencer pulled her out, hoisted her onto his hip, and kept running. The girl clung to his neck and didn't make a sound.
Good girl. Smart girl. Stay quiet and we might both live.
The inn appeared through the smoke. Villagers were streaming toward it, a defensive perimeter forming around the entrance. Spencer spotted familiar faces — Master al'Vere directing people inside, Haral Luhhan with a hammer in each hand, the village Council organizing what resistance they could.
He handed the child to the nearest woman and turned back toward the chaos.
"Where are you going?" someone shouted.
"Tam al'Thor is wounded." Spencer didn't wait for a response. "I'm bringing him in."
---
He found Tam halfway between the burning edge of town and the al'Thor farmstead.
The older man was still standing, still fighting, but the poison was spreading. Spencer could see it through Thread Sight — the black tendrils creeping deeper into Tam's fate-thread, weakening the fundamental structure of his existence.
Thakan'dar poison. The only cure is Aes Sedai Healing.
Moiraine should be here soon. She should be—
"Aldan." Tam's voice was hoarse. "I told you to go."
"You're bleeding."
"I noticed." A grim smile, there and gone. "The wound is... worse than it looks."
Spencer got under Tam's arm, taking some of the older man's weight. "The inn. Lean on me."
They moved through the burning village together, Spencer half-carrying the man who'd raised the Dragon Reborn. Trollocs appeared twice — both times Spencer saw them coming through Thread Sight and steered them down side paths, avoiding the converging construct-threads.
I can see the whole battle, he realized. Not perfectly, not completely, but enough. I can see where the safe paths are.
This is what the Codex gives me. Information. The ability to navigate chaos.
The inn was in sight when Rand came sprinting toward them from the opposite direction.
---
The reunion was brief and desperate.
"Father!" Rand's face was streaked with soot and blood that probably wasn't his own. "What happened? Are you—"
"Trolloc blade." Tam's voice was fading. "Get me inside, boy."
They carried him together — Spencer on one side, Rand on the other — through the inn's reinforced doors and into the chaos of the common room. Wounded villagers covered every surface. Nynaeve al'Meara moved between them, her face hard with concentration, doing what she could with herbs and bandages.
"Put him here." She pointed to a clear space near the fire. "That wound — let me see it."
Her face went pale when she saw the black edges spreading from the cut.
"This isn't... I can't treat this." Her voice cracked slightly before firming. "This needs— I don't know what this needs."
Spencer looked at Tam's thread. The black was spreading faster now. The white was fraying at the edges.
Moiraine. Where is Moiraine?
And then, through the Thread Sight, he saw it: something golden approaching from the north road. Not ta'veren gold — this was different, silver-blue shot through with brilliance, the thread of a full Aes Sedai radiating power and purpose.
"Someone's coming," Spencer said quietly.
Rand looked up. "What?"
"From the north. Someone powerful." He couldn't explain how he knew. Didn't have to — moments later, the inn door swung open and a woman walked in.
She was small, dark-haired, ageless in the way all Aes Sedai were ageless. Her blue traveling cloak was dusty from the road, and behind her loomed a figure in color-shifting warder's cloak — Lan Mandragoran, the last king of Malkier, moving with the dangerous grace of a hunting cat.
Moiraine Damodred surveyed the wounded villagers, and her gaze settled on Tam.
"Thakan'dar blade," she said. Not a question. "Move aside. I can help him."
Spencer stepped back and watched an Aes Sedai work.
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