Chapter 29: Eyes Without Pity

Elyas drives Perrin and Egwene south at speed, hiding fires, erasing campsites, and avoiding the ridgelines. He will not say what he fears. From a hilltop they see flock after flock of ravens sweeping the country, the Dark One's eyes, and watch a fox torn apart in seconds.

They spend the day hiding between sweeps and dropping stragglers with their slings. Wolves circling back for them are mauled by ravens and limp on with their wounds, and Perrin relays their warning aloud. Egwene hears him and knows he can talk to wolves. Perrin, watching her exhaustion, fingers his axe and wonders if he could spare her the fox's death.

With less than an hour before the ravens overrun them, they cross an unseen line into a stedding, where no creature of the Dark One will follow and the One Power cannot be touched. Beside their fire stands a soot-blackened lump of stone Egwene recognises as an eye. Elyas tells them it is all that remains of a giant statue raised here for Artur Hawkwing, who united the lands from the Blight to the Sea of Storms and laid a twenty-year siege to Tar Valon. The statue was finished the day Hawkwing died, and the War of the Hundred Years pulled it down.