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shelves full of filed reports in leather folders lined the pale red walls.
    Brown-coated clerks scurried along the aisles between the long, map-strewn tables that
    covered the green-tiled dancing-floor. A young officer, an under-lieutenant with no
    plume on her red-and-yellow helmet, raced past Suroth without so much as a move to
    prostrate herself. Clerks merely squeezed themselves out of her path. Galgan gave his
    people too much leeway. He claimed that what he called excessive ceremony at “the
    wrong time” hindered efficiency; she called it effrontery.
    Lunal Galgan, a tall man in a red robe richly worked with bright-feathered birds, the hair
    of his crest snow white and its tail plaited in a tight but untidy queue that hung to his
    shoulders, stood at a table near the center of the room with a knot of other high-ranking
    officers, some in breastplates, others in robes and nearly as disheveled as she. It seemed
    she was not the first to whom he had sent a messenger. She struggled to keep anger from
    her face. Galgan had come with Tuon and the Return, and thus she knew little of him
    beyond that his ancestors had been among the first to throw their support to Luthair
    Paendrag and that he owned a high reputation as a soldier and a general. Well, reputation
    and truth were sometimes the same. She disliked him entirely for himself.
    He turned at her approach and formally laid his hands on her shoulders, kissing her on
    either cheek, so she was forced to return the greeting while trying not to wrinkle her nose
    at the strong, musky scent he favored. Galgan’s face was as smooth as his creases would
    allow, but she thought she detected a hint of worry in his blue eyes. A number of the men
    and women behind him, mainly low Blood and commoners, wore open frowns.
    The large map of Tarabon spread out on the table in front of her and held flat by four
    lamps gave reason enough for worry. Markers covered it, red wedges for Seanchan forces
    on the move and red stars for forces holding in place, each supporting a small paper
    banner inked with their numbers and composition. Scattered across the map, across the
    entire map, lay black discs marking engagements, and even more white discs for enemy
    forces, many of those without the banners. How could there be any enemies in Tarabon?
    It was as secure as….
    “What happened?” she demanded.
    “Raken began arriving with reports from Lieutenant-General Turan about three hours
    ago,” Galgan began in conversational tones. Pointedly not making a report himself. He
    studied the map as he talked, never glancing in her direction. “They aren’t complete—
    each new one adds to the lists, and I expect that won’t change for a while—but what I’ve
    seen runs this way. Since dawn yesterday, seven major supply camps overrun and burned,
    along with more than two dozen smaller camps. Twenty supply trains attacked, the
    wagons and their contents put to the torch. Seventeen small outposts have been wiped
    out, eleven patrols have failed to report in, and there have been an additional fifteen
    skirmishes. Also a few attacks against our settlers. Only a handful of fatalities, mostly
    men who tried to defend their belongings, but a good many wagons and stores burned
    along with some half-built houses, and the same message delivered everywhere. Leave
    Tarabon. All this was done by bands of between two and perhaps five hundred men.
    Estimates are a minimum of ten thousand and perhaps twice that, nearly all Taraboners.
    Oh, yes,” he finished casually, “and most of them are wearing armor painted with
    stripes.”
    She wanted to grind her teeth. Galgan commanded the soldiers of the Return, yet she
    commanded the Corenne, the Forerunners, and as such, she possessed the higher rank in
    spite of his crest and red-lacquered fingernails. She suspected the only reason he did not
    claim that the Forerunners had been absorbed into the Return by its very arrival was that
    supplanting her meant