A Crown of Swords

There can be no health in us, nor any good thing grow, for the land is one with the Dragon Reborn, and he one with the land. Soul of fire, heart of stone, in pride he conquers, forcing the proud to yield. He calls upon the mountains to kneel, and the seas to give way, and the very skies to bow. Pray that the heart of stone remembers tears, and the soul of fire, love.

—From a much-disputed translation of
The Prophecies of the Dragon
by the poet Kyera Termendal of Shiota,
believed to have been published
between FY 700 and FY 800

## Prologue

#### Lightnings

From the tall arched window, close onto eighty spans above the ground, not far below the top of the White Tower, Elaida could see for miles beyond Tar Valon, to the rolling plains and forests that bordered the broad River Erinin, running down from north and west before it divided around the white walls of the great island city. On the ground, long morning shadows must have been dappling the city, but from this prominence all seemed clear and bright. Not even the fabled “topless towers” of Cairhien had truly rivaled the White Tower. Certainly none of Tar Valon’s lesser towers did, for all that men spoke far and wide of them and their vaulting sky-bridges.

This high, an almost constant breeze lessened the unnatural heat gripping the world. The Feast of Lights past, snow should have covered the ground deep, yet the weather belonged in the depths of a hard summer. Another sign that the Last Battle approached and the Dark One touched the world, if more were needed. Elaida did not let the heat touch her even when she descended, of course. The breeze was not why she had had her quarters moved up here, despite the inconvenience of so many stairs, to these simple rooms.

Plain russet floor tiles and white marble walls decorated by a few tapestries could not compare with the grandeur of the Amyrlin’s study and the rooms that went with it far below. She still used those rooms occasionally—they held associations with the power of the Amyrlin Seat in some minds—but she resided here, and worked here more often than not. For the view. Not of city or river or forests, though. Of what was beginning in the Tower grounds.

Great diggings and foundations spread across what had been the Warders’ practice yard, tall wooden cranes and stacks of cut marble and granite. Masons and laborers swarmed over the workings like ants, and endless streams of wagons trailed through the gates onto the Tower grounds, bringing more stone. To one side stood a wooden “working model,” as the masons called it, big enough for men to enter crouching on their heels and see every detail, where every stone should go. Most of the workmen could not read, after all—neither words nor mason’s drawn plans. The “working model” was as large as some manor houses.

When any king or queen had a palace, why should the Amyrlin Seat be relegated to apartments little better than those of many ordinary sisters? Her palace would match the White Tower for splendor, and have a great spire ten spans higher than the Tower itself. The blood had drained from the chief mason’s face when he heard that. The Tower had been Ogier-built, with assistance from sisters using the Power. One look at Elaida’s face, however, set Master Lerman bowing and stammering that of course all would be done as she wished. As if there had been any question.

Her mouth tightened with exasperation. She had wanted Ogier masons again, but the Ogier were confining themselves to their stedding for some reason. Her summons to the nearest, Stedding Jentoine, in the Black Hills, had been met with refusal. Polite, yet still refusal, without explanation, even to the Amyrlin Seat. Ogier were reclusive at best. Or they might be withdrawing from a world full of turmoil; Ogier stayed clear of human strife.

Firmly Elaida dismissed the Ogier from her mind. She prided herself on separating what could be from what could not. Ogier were a triviality. They had no part in the world beyond the cities they had built so long ago and seldom visited now except to make repairs.

The men below, crawling beetle-like over the building site, made her frown slightly. Construction went forward by inches. Ogier might be out of the question, yet perhaps the One Power could be used again. Few sisters possessed real strength in weaving Earth, but not that much was required to reinforce stone, or bind stone to stone. Yes. In her mind, the palace stood finished, colonnaded walks and great domes shining with gilt and that one spire reaching to the heavens . . . Her eyes rose to the cloudless sky, to where the spire would peak, and she let out a long sigh. Yes. The orders would be issued today.

The towering case clock in the room behind her chimed Third Rise, and in the city gongs and bells pealed the hour, the sound faint here, so high above. With a smile, Elaida left the window, smoothing her red-slashed dress of cream silk and adjusting the broad, striped stole of the Amyrlin Seat on her shoulders.

On the ornately gilded clock, small figures of gold and silver and enamel moved with the chimes. Horned and snouted Trollocs fled from a cloaked Aes Sedai on one level; on another a man representing a false Dragon tried to fend off silver lightning bolts that had obviously been hurled by a second sister. And above the clockface, itself above her head, a crowned king and queen knelt before an Amyrlin Seat in her enameled stole, with the Flame of Tar Valon, carved from a large moonstone, atop a golden arch over her head.

She did not laugh often, but she could not help a quietly pleased chuckle at the clock. Cemaile Sorenthaine, raised from the Gray, had commissioned it dreaming of a return to the days before the Trolloc Wars, when no ruler held a throne without the Tower’s approval. Cemaile’s grand plans came to naught, however, as did Cemaile, and for three centuries the clock sat in a dusty storage room, an embarrassment no one dared display. Until Elaida. The Wheel of Time turned. What was once, could be again. Would be again.

The case clock balanced the door to her sitting room, and her bedchamber and dressing room beyond. Fine tapestries, colorful work from Tear and Kandor and Arad Doman, with thread-of-gold and thread-of-silver glittering among the merely dyed, hung each exactly opposite its mate. She had always liked order. The carpet covering most of the tiles came from Tarabon, patterned in red and green and gold; silk carpets were the most precious. In each corner of the room a marble plinth carved in unpretentious verticals held a white vase of fragile Sea Folk porcelain with two dozen carefully arranged red roses. To make roses bloom now required the One Power, especially with the drought and heat; a worthwhile use, in her opinion. Gilded carving covered both the only chair—no one sat in her presence now—and the writing table, but in the stark style of Cairhien. A simple room, really, with a ceiling barely two spans high, yet it would do until her palace was ready. With the view, it would.

The tall chairback held the Flame of Tar Valon picked out in moonstones above her dark head as she sat. Nothing marred the polished surface of the table except for three boxes of Altaran lacquerwork, arranged just so. Opening the box covered with golden hawks among white clouds, she removed a slim strip of thin paper from atop the pile of reports and correspondence inside.

For what must have been the hundredth time, she read the message come from Cairhien by pigeon twelve days ago. Few in the Tower knew of its existence. None but she knew its contents, or would have a glimmer of what it meant if they did. The thought almost made her laugh again.

The ring has been placed in the bull’s nose. I expect a pleasant journey to market.

No signature, yet she needed none. Only Galina Casban had known to send that glorious message. Galina, whom Elaida trusted to do what she would have trusted to no one else save herself; Not that she trusted anyone fully, but the head of the Red Ajah more than any other. She herself had been raised from the Red, after all, and in many ways still thought of herself as Red.

The ring has been placed in the bull’s nose.

Rand al’Thor—the Dragon Reborn, the man who had seemed on the point of swallowing the world, the man who had swallowed entirely too much of it—Rand al’Thor was shielded and in Galina’s control. And none who might support him knew. Even a chance of that, and the wording would have been different. By various earlier messages, it seemed he had rediscovered how to Travel, a Talent lost to Aes Sedai since the Breaking, yet that had not saved him. It had even played into Galina’s hands. Apparently he had a habit of coming and going without warning. Who would suspect that this time he had not gone, but been taken? Something very like a giggle rose in her.

Inside another week, two at most, al’Thor would be in the Tower, closely supervised and guided safely until Tarmon Gai’don, his ravaging of the world stopped. It was madness to allow any man who could channel to run free, but most of all the man prophecy said must face the Dark One in the Last Battle, the Light send that it lay years off yet in spite of the weather. Years would be needed to arrange the world properly, beginning with undoing what al’Thor had done.

Of course, the damage he had wrought was nothing beside what he could have caused, free. Not to mention the possibility that he might have gotten himself killed before he was needed. Well, that troublesome young man would be wrapped in swaddling and kept safe as an infant in his mother’s arms until time to take him to Shayol Ghul. After that, if he survived . . .

Elaida’s lips pursed. The Prophecies of the Dragon seemed to say he would not, which undeniably would be for the best.

“Mother?” Elaida almost gave a start as Alviarin spoke. Entering without so much as a knock! “I have word from the Ajahs, Mother.” Slim and cool-faced, Alviarin wore the Keeper’s narrow stole in white, matching her dress, to show she had been raised from the White, but in her mouth ‘Mother’ became less a title of respect and more an address to an equal.

Alviarin’s presence was enough to dent Elaida’s good mood. That the Keeper of Chronicles came from the White, not the Red, always served as a biting reminder of her weakness when she was first raised. Some of that had been dispelled, true, but not all. Not yet. She was tired of regretting that she had so few personal eyes-and-ears outside Andor. And that her predecessor and Alviarin’s had escaped—been helped to escape; they must have had help!—escaped before the keys to the Amyrlin’s great network could be wrested out of them.

She more than wanted the network that was hers by right. By strong tradition the Ajahs sent to the Keeper whatever dribbles from their own eyes-and-ears they were willing to share with the Amyrlin, but Elaida was convinced the woman kept back some of even that trickle. Yet she could not ask the Ajahs for information directly. Bad enough to be weak without going begging to the world. The Tower, anyway, which was as much of the world as really counted.

Elaida kept her own face every bit as cool as the other woman’s, acknowledging her only with a nod while she pretended to examine papers from the lacquered box. Slowly she turned them over one by one, returned them to the box slowly. Without really seeing a word. Making Alviarin wait was bitter, because it was petty, and petty ways were all she had to strike at one who should have been her servant.

An Amyrlin could issue any decree she wished, her word law and absolute. Yet as a practical matter, without support from the Hall of the Tower, many of those decrees were wasted ink and paper. No sister would disobey an Amyrlin, not directly at least, yet many decrees required a hundred other things ordered to implement them. In the best of times that could come slowly, on occasion so slowly it never happened, and these were far from the best.

Alviarin stood there, calm as a frozen pond. Closing the Altaran box, Elaida kept out the strip of paper that announced her sure victory. Unconsciously she fingered it, a talisman. “Has Teslyn or Joline finally deigned to send more than word of their safe arrival?”

That was meant to remind Alviarin that no one could consider herself immune. Nobody cared what happened in Ebou Dar, Elaida least of all; the capital of Altara could fall into the sea, and except for the merchants, not even the rest of Altara would notice. But Teslyn had sat in the Hall nearly fifteen years before Elaida had commanded her to resign her chair. If Elaida could send a Sitter—a Red Sitter—who had supported her rise off as ambassador to a flyspeck throne with no one sure why but a hundred rumors flowering, then she could come down on anyone. Joline was a different matter. She had held her chair for the Green only a matter of weeks, and everyone was sure the Greens had selected her to show they would not be cowed by the new Amyrlin, who had handed her a fearsome penance. That bit of insolence could not be allowed to pass, of course, and had not been. Everyone knew that, too.

It was meant to remind Alviarin that she was vulnerable, but the slim woman merely smiled her cool smile. So long as the Hall remained as it was, she was immune. She riffled through the papers in her hand, plucking one out. “No word from Teslyn or Joline, Mother, no, though with the news you have received so far from the thrones . . . ” That smile deepened into something dangerously close to amusement. “They all mean to try their wings, to see if you are as strong as . . . as your predecessor.” Even Alviarin had enough sense not to speak the Sanche woman’s name in her presence. It was true, though; every king and queen, even mere nobles, seemed to be testing the limits of her power. She must make examples.

Glancing at the paper, Alviarin went on. “There is word from Ebou Dar, however. Through the Gray.” Had she emphasized that, to drive the splinter deeper? “It appears Elayne Trakand and Nynaeve al’Meara are there. Posing as full sisters, with the blessings of the rebel . . . embassy . . . to Queen Tylin. There are two others, not identified, who may be doing the same. The lists of who is with the rebels are incomplete. Or they may just be companions. The Grays are uncertain.”

“Why under the Light would they be in Ebou Dar?” Elaida said dismissively. Certainly Teslyn would have sent news of that. “The Gray must be passing along rumors, now. Tarna’s message said they are with the rebels in Salidar.” Tarna Feir had reported Siuan Sanche there, too. And Logain Ablar, spreading those vicious lies no Red sister could lower herself to acknowledge, much less deny. The Sanche woman had a hand in that obscenity, or the sun would rise in the west tomorrow. Why could she not simply have crawled away and died, decently out of sight, like other stilled women?

It required effort not to draw a deep breath. Logain could be hanged quietly as soon as the rebels were dealt with; most of the world thought him dead long since. The filthy slander that the Red Ajah had set him up as a false Dragon would die with him. When the rebels were dealt with, the Sanche woman could be made to hand over the keys to the Amyrlin’s eyes-and-ears. And name the traitors who had helped her escape, A foolish hope to wish that Alviarin would be named among them. “I can hardly see the al’Meara girl running to Ebou Dar claiming to be Aes Sedai, much less Elayne, can you?”

“You did order Elayne found, Mother. As important as putting a leash on al’Thor, you said. When she was among three hundred rebels in Salidar, it was impossible to do anything, but she will not be so well protected in the Tarasin Palace.”

“I have no time for gossip and rumors.” Elaida bit off each word with contempt. Did Alviarin know more than she should, mentioning al’Thor, and leashing? “I suggest you read Tarna’s report again, then ask yourself whether even rebels would allow Accepted to pretend to the shawl.”

Alviarin waited with visible patience for her to finish, then examined her sheaf again and pulled out four more sheets. “The Gray agent sent sketches,” she said blandly, proffering the pages. “He is no artist, but Elayne and Nynaeve are recognizable.” After a moment, when Elaida did not take the drawings, she slipped them under the rest.

Elaida felt the color of anger and embarrassment rising in her cheeks. Alviarin had led her down this path deliberately by not bringing out those sketches at the first. She ignored that—anything else would only be more embarrassing still—but her voice became cold. “I want them taken, and brought to me.”

The lack of curiosity on Alviarin’s face made Elaida wonder again how much the woman knew that she was not supposed to. The al’Meara girl might well provide a handle on al’Thor, coming from the same village. All the sisters knew that, just as they knew that Elayne was Daughter-Heir of Andor, and that her mother was dead. Vague rumors linking Morgase to the Whitecloaks were so much nonsense, for she would never have gone to the Children of the Light for help. She was dead, leaving not even a corpse behind, and Elayne would be Queen. If she could be wrested away from the rebels before the Andoran Houses put Dyelin on the Lion Throne instead. It was not widely known what made Elayne more important than any other noble with a strong claim to a throne. Aside from the fact that she would be Aes Sedai one day, of course.

Elaida had the Foretelling sometimes, a Talent many thought lost before her, and long ago she had Foretold that the Royal House of Andor held the key to winning the Last Battle. Twenty-five years gone and more, as soon as it became clear that Morgase Trakand would gain the throne in the Succession, Elaida had fastened herself to the girl, as she was then. How Elayne was crucial, Elaida did not know, but Foretelling never lied. Sometimes she almost hated the Talent. She hated things she could not control.

“I want all four of them, Alviarin.” The other two were unimportant, certainly, but she would take no chances. “Send my command to Teslyn immediately. Tell her—and Joline—that if they fail to send regular reports from now on, they will wish they had never been born. Include the information from the Macura woman.” Her mouth twisted around that last.

The name made Alviarin shift uneasily, too, and no wonder. Ronde Macura’s nasty little infusion was something to make any sister uncomfortable. Forkroot was not lethal—at least you woke, if you drank enough to sleep—but a tea that deadened a woman’s ability to channel seemed aimed too directly at Aes Sedai. A pity the information had not been received before Galina went; if forkroot worked on men as well as it seemed to on women, it would have made her task considerably easier.

Alviarin’s ill ease lasted only a moment; a mere instant and she was all self-possession again, unyielding as a wall of ice. “As you wish, Mother. I am sure they will leap to obey, as of course they should.”

A sudden flash of irritation swept Elaida like fire in dry pasture. The fate of the world in her hands, and petty stumbling blocks kept rising beneath her feet. Bad enough that she had rebels and recalcitrant rulers to handle, but too many Sitters still brooded and grumbled behind her back, fertile ground for the other woman to plow. Only six were firmly under her own thumb, and she suspected as many at least listened closely to Alviarin before they voted. Certainly nothing of importance passed through the Hall unless Alviarin agreed to it. Not open agreement, not with any acknowledgment that Alviarin bore a shred more influence or power than a Keeper should, but if Alviarin opposed . . . At least they had not gone so far as to reject anything Elaida sent them. They simply dragged their feet and too often let what she wanted starve on the floor. A pitifully small thing for which to be happy. Some Amyrlins had become little more than puppets once the Hall acquired a taste for rejecting what they put forward.

Her hands clenched, and a tiny crackle came from the strip of paper.

The ring has been placed in the bull’s nose.

Alviarin looked as composed as a marble statue, but Elaida no longer cared. The shepherd was on his way to her. The rebels would be crushed and the Hall cowed, Alviarin forced to her knees and every fractious ruler brought to heel, from Tenobia of Saldaea, who had gone into hiding to avoid her emissary, to Mattin Stepaneos of Illian, who was trying to play all sides at once again, trying to agree with her and the Whitecloaks, and with al’Thor for all she knew. Elayne would be placed on the throne in Caemlyn, without her brother to get in the way and with a full knowledge of who had set her there. A little time back in the Tower would make the girl damp clay in Elaida’s hands.

“I want those men rooted out, Alviarin.” There was no need to say who she meant; half the Tower could talk of nothing but those men in their Black Tower, and the other half whispered about them in corners.

“There are disturbing reports, Mother.” Alviarin looked through her papers once more, but Elaida thought it was only for something to do. She did not pluck out any more pages, and if nothing else disturbed the woman for long, this unholy midden outside Caemlyn must.

“More rumors? Do you believe the tales of thousands flocking to Caemlyn in answer to that obscene amnesty?” Not the least of what al’Thor had done, but hardly cause for worry. Just a pile of filth that must be safely cleared before Elayne was crowned in Caemlyn.

“Of course not, Mother, but—”

“Toveine is to lead; this task belongs properly to the Red.” Toveine Gazal had been fifteen years away from the Tower, until Elaida summoned her back. The other two Red Sitters who had resigned and gone into a “voluntary” retreat at the same time were nervous-eyed women now, but unlike Lirene and Tsutama, Toveine had only hardened in her solitary exile. “She is to have fifty sisters.” There could not be more than two or three men at this Black Tower actually able to channel, Elaida was certain. Fifty sisters could overwhelm them easily. Yet there might be others to deal with. Hangers-on, camp followers, fools full of futile hopes and insane ambitions. “And she is to take a hundred—no, two hundred—of the Guard.”

“Are you certain that is wise? The rumors of thousands are certainly madness, but a Green agent in Caemlyn claims there are over four hundred in this Black Tower, A clever fellow. It seems he counted the supply carts that go out from the city. And you are aware of the rumors Mazrim Taim is with them.”

Elaida fought to keep her features smooth, and barely succeeded. She had forbidden mention of Taim’s name, and it was bitter that she did not dare—did not dare!—impose the penalty on Alviarin. The woman looked her straight in the eyes; the absence of so much as a perfunctory “Mother” this time was marked. And the temerity of asking whether her actions were wise! She was the Amyrlin Seat! Not first among equals; the Amyrlin Seat!

Opening the largest of the lacquered boxes revealed carved ivory miniatures laid out on gray velvet. Often just handling her collection soothed her, but more, like the knitting she enjoyed, it let whoever was attending her know their place, if she seemed to give more attention to the miniatures than to what they had to say. Fingering first an exquisite cat, sleek and flowing, then an elaborately robed woman with a peculiar little animal, some fantasy of the carver, almost like a man covered in hair, crouched on her shoulder, at length Elaida chose out a curving fish, so delicately carved that it seemed nearly real despite the aged yellow of the ivory.

“Four hundred rabble, Alviarin.” She felt calmer already, for Alviarin’s mouth had thinned. Just a fraction, but she savored any crack in the woman’s façade. “If there are that many. Only a fool could believe that more than one or two can channel. At most! In ten years, we have found only six men with the ability. Just twenty-four in the last twenty years. And you know how the land has been scoured. As for Taim . . . ” The name burned her mouth; the only false Dragon ever to escape being gentled once in the hands of Aes Sedai. Not a thing she wanted in the Chronicles under her reign, certainly not until she decided how it should be recorded. At present the Chronicles told nothing after his capture.

She stroked her thumb along the fish’s scales. “He is dead, Alviarin, else we would have heard from him long since. And not serving al’Thor. Can you think he went from claiming to be the Dragon Reborn to serving the Dragon Reborn? Can you think he could be in Caemlyn without Davram Bashere at least trying to kill him?” Her thumb moved faster on the ivory fish as she reminded herself that the Marshal-General of Saldaea was in Caemlyn taking orders from al’Thor. What was Tenobia playing at? Elaida held it all inside, though, presenting a face as calm as one of her carvings.

“Twenty-four is a dangerous number to speak aloud,” Alviarin said with an ominous quiet, “as dangerous as two thousand. The Chronicles record only sixteen. The last thing needed now is for those years to rear up again. Or for sisters who know only what they were told to learn the truth. Even those you brought back hold their silence.”

Elaida put on a bemused look. So far as she knew, Alviarin had learned the truth of those years only on being raised Keeper, but her own knowledge was more personal. Not that Alviarin could be aware of that. Not for certain, anyway. “Daughter, whatever comes out, I have no fear. Who is going to impose a penance on me, and on what charge?” That skirted truth nicely, but apparently it impressed the other woman not at all.

“The Chronicles record a number of Amyrlins who took on public penance for some usually obscure reason, but it has always seemed to me that is how an Amyrlin might have it written if she found herself with no choice except—”

Elaida’s hand slapped down on the table. “Enough, daughter! I am Tower law! What has been hidden will remain hidden, for the same reason it has for twenty years—the good of the White Tower.” Only then did she feel the bruise beginning on her palm; she lifted her hand to reveal the fish, broken in two. How old had it been? Five hundred years? A thousand? It was all she could do not to quiver with rage. Her voice certainly thickened with it. “Toveine is to lead fifty sisters and two hundred of the Tower Guards to Caemlyn, to this Black Tower, where they will gentle any man they find able to channel and hang him, along with as many others as they can take alive.” Alviarin did not even blink at the violation of Tower law. Elaida had spoken the truth as she meant it to be; with this, with everything, she was Tower law. “For that matter, hang up the dead as well. Let them be a warning to any man who thinks of touching the True Source. Have Toveine attend me. I will want to hear her plan.”

“It will be as you command, Mother.” The woman’s reply was as cool and smooth as her face. “Though if I may suggest, you might wish to reconsider sending so many sisters away from the Tower. Apparently the rebels found your offer wanting. They are no longer in Salidar. They are on the march. The reports come from Altara, but they must be into Murandy by now. And they have chosen themselves an Amyrlin.” She scanned the top sheet of her sheaf of papers as if searching for the name. “Egwene al’Vere, it seems.”

That Alviarin had left this, the most important piece of news, until now, should have made Elaida explode in fury. Instead, she threw back her head and laughed. Only a firm hold on dignity kept her from drumming her heels on the floor. The surprise on Alviarin’s face made her laugh harder, till she had to wipe her eyes with her fingers.

“You do not see it,” she said when she could speak between ripples of mirth. “As well you are Keeper, Alviarin, not a Sitter. In the Hall, blind as you are, within a month the others would be holding you in a cabinet and taking you out when they needed your vote.”

“I see enough, Mother.” Alviarin’s voice held no heat; if anything, it should have coated the walls with frost. “I see three hundred rebel Aes Sedai, perhaps more, marching on Tar Valon with an army led by Gareth Bryne, acknowledged a great captain. Discounting the more ridiculous reports, that army may number over twenty thousand, and with Bryne to lead they will gain more at every village and town they pass. I do not say they have hope of taking the city, of course, but it is hardly a matter for laughter. High Captain Chubain should be ordered to increase recruiting for the Tower Guard.”

Elaida’s gaze fell sourly on the broken fish, and she stood and stalked to the nearest window, her back to Alviarin. The palace under construction took away the bitter taste, that and the slip of paper she still clutched.

She smiled down on her palace-to-be. “Three hundred rebels, yes, but you should read Tarna’s account again. At least a hundred are on the point of breaking already.” She trusted Tarna to some extent, a Red with no room in her head for nonsense, and she said the rebels were ready to jump at shadows. Quietly desperate sheep looking for a shepherd, she said. A wilder, of course, yet still sensible. Tarna should be back soon, and able to give a fuller report. Not that it was needed. Elaida’s plans were already working among the rebels. But that was her secret.

“Tarna has always been sure she could make people do what it was clear they would not.” Had there been an emphasis in that, a significance of tone? Elaida decided to ignore it. She had to ignore too much from Alviarin, but the day would come. Soon.

“As for their army, daughter, she says two or three thousand men at most. If they had more, they would have made sure she saw them, to overawe us.” In Elaida’s opinion, eyes-and-ears always exaggerated, to make their information seem more valuable. Only sisters could be truly trusted. Red sisters, anyway. Some of them. “But I would not care if they did have twenty thousand, or fifty, or a hundred. Can you even begin to guess why?” When she turned, Alviarin’s face was all smooth composure, a mask over blind ignorance. “You seem to be conversant with all the aspects of Tower law. What penalty do rebels face?”

“For the leaders,” Alviarin said slowly, “stilling.” She frowned slightly, skirts swaying just barely as her feet shifted. Good. Even Accepted knew this, and she could not understand why Elaida asked. Very good. “For many of the rest, too.”

“Perhaps.” The leaders might themselves escape that, most of them, if they submitted properly. The minimum penalty in law was to be birched in the Grand Hall before the assembled sisters, followed by at least a year and a day in public penance. Yet nothing said the penance must be served all at once; a month here, a month there, and they would still be atoning their crimes ten years from now, constant reminders of what came of resisting her. Some would be stilled, of course—Sheriam, a few of the more prominent so-called Sitters—but only sufficient to make the rest fear putting a foot wrong again; not enough to weaken the Tower. The White Tower had to be whole, and it had to be strong. Strong, and firmly in her grasp.

“Only one crime among those they have committed demands stilling.” Alviarin opened her mouth. There had been ancient rebellions, buried so deep that few among the sisters knew; the Chronicles stood mute, the lists of stilled and executed confined to records open only to Amyrlin, Keeper and Sitters, aside from the few librarians who kept them. Elaida allowed Alviarin no opportunity to speak. “Any woman who falsely claims the title of Amyrlin Seat must be stilled. If they believed they had any chance of success, Sheriam would be their Amyrlin, or Lelaine, or Carlinya, or one of the others.” Tarna reported that Romanda Cassin had come out of her retirement; Romanda surely would have seized the stole with both hands if she saw the tenth part of a chance. “Instead, they have plucked out an Accepted.”

Elaida shook her head in wry amusement. She could quote every word of the law setting out how a woman was chosen Amyrlin—she had made good use of it herself, after all—and never once did it require that the woman be a full sister. Obviously she must be, so those who framed the law never stated it, and the rebels had squirmed through that crack. “They know their cause is hopeless, Alviarin. They plan to strut and bluster, try to dig out some protection against penalty for themselves, then yield the girl as a sacrifice.” Which was a pity. The al’Vere girl was another possible handle on al’Thor, and when she reached her full strength in the One Power, she would have been one of the strongest in a thousand years or more. A true pity.

“Gareth Bryne and an army hardly sound like strutting to me. It will take their army five or six months to reach Tar Valon. In that time, High Captain Chubain could increase the Guard—”

“Their army,” Elaida sneered. Alviarin was such a fool; for all her cool exterior, she was a rabbit. Next she would be spouting the Sanche woman’s nonsense about the Forsaken being loose. Of course, she did not know the secret, but just the same . . . “Farmers carrying pikes, butchers with bows and tailors on horseback! And every step of the way, thinking of the Shining Walls, that held Artur Hawkwing at bay.” No, not a rabbit. A weasel. Yet soon or late, she would be weasel-fur trim on Elaida’s cloak. The Light send it soon. “Every step of the way, they will lose a man, if not ten. I would not be surprised if our rebels appear with nothing more than their Warders.” Too many people knew of the division in the Tower. Once the rebellion was broken, of course, it could be made to seem all a ploy, a part of gaining control of young al’Thor perhaps. An effort of years, that, and generations before memories faded. Every last rebel would pay for that on her knees.

Elaida clenched her fist as though she held all the rebels by the throat. Or Alviarin. “I mean to break them, daughter. They will split open like a rotten melon.” Her secret assured that, however many farmers and tailors Lord Bryne hung on to, but let the other woman think as she would. Suddenly the Foretelling took hold of her, a certainty about things she could not see stronger than if they had been laid out before her. She would have been willing to step blindly over a cliff on that certainty. “The White Tower will be whole again, except for remnants cast out and scorned, whole and stronger than ever. Rand al’Thor will face the Amyrlin Seat and know her anger. The Black Tower will be rent in blood and fire, and sisters will walk its grounds. This I Foretell.”

As usual, the Foretelling left her trembling, gasping for breath. She forced herself to stand still and straight, to breathe slowly; she never let anyone see weakness. But Alviarin . . . Her eyes were wide as they could open, lips parted as if she had forgotten the words she meant to speak. A paper slid from the sheaf in her hands and almost fell before she could catch it. That recalled her to herself. In a flash she regained her serene mask, a perfect picture of Aes Sedai calm, but she definitely had been jolted to her heels. Oh, very good. Let her chew on the certain surety of Elaida’s victory. Chew and break her teeth.

Elaida drew a deep breath and seated herself behind her writing table again, putting the broken ivory fish to one side where she did not have to look at it. It was time to exploit her victory. “There is work to be done today, daughter. The first message is to go to the Lady Caraline Damodred . . . ”

Elaida spun out her plans, enlarging on what Alviarin knew, revealing some that she did not, because at the last an Amyrlin did have to work through her Keeper, however much she hated the woman. There was a pleasure in watching Alviarin’s eyes, watching her wonder what else she still did not know. But while Elaida ordered, divided and assigned the world between the Aryth Ocean and the Spine of the World, in her mind frolicked the image of young al’Thor on his way to her like a caged bear, to be taught to dance for his dinner.

The Chronicles could hardly record the years of the Last Battle without mentioning the Dragon Reborn, but she knew that one name would be written larger than all others. Elaida do Avriny a’Roihan, youngest daughter of a minor House in the north of Murandy, would go down in history as the greatest and most powerful Amyrlin Seat of all time. The most powerful woman in the history of the world. The woman who saved humankind.

The Aiel standing in a deep fold in the low, brown-grass hills seemed carved figures, ignoring sheets of dust sweeping ahead of a gusting wind. That snow should have been deep on the ground this time of year did not bother them; none had ever seen snow, and this oven heat, with the sun still well short of its peak, was less than where they came from. Their attention remained fixed on the southern rise, waiting for the signal that would announce the arrival of the destiny of the Shaido Aiel.

Outwardly, Sevanna looked like the others, though a ring of Maidens marked her out, resting easily on their heels, dark veils already hiding their faces to the eyes. She also waited, and more impatiently than she let on, but not to the exclusion of everything else. That was one reason why she commanded and the rest followed. The second was that she saw what could be if you refused to let outworn custom and stale tradition tie your hands.

A slight flicker of her green eyes to the left showed twelve men and one woman, each with round bull-hide buckler and three or four short spears, garbed in gray-and-brown cadin’sor that blended as well with the terrain here as in the Three-fold Land. Efalin, short graying hair hidden by the shoufa wrapped around her head, sometimes glanced Sevanna’s way; if a Maiden of the Spear could be said to be uneasy, Efalin was. Some Shaido Maidens had gone south, joining the fools capering around Rand al’Thor, and Sevanna did not doubt others talked of it. Efalin must be wondering whether providing Sevanna with an escort of Maidens, as if she had been Far Dareis Mai once herself, was enough to balance that. At least Efalin had no doubts where true power lay.

Like Efalin, the men led Shaido warrior societies, and they eyed one another between watching the rise. Especially blocky Maeric, who was Seia Doon, and scar-faced Bendhuin, of Far Aldazar Din. After today, no longer would anything hold back the Shaido from sending a man to Rhuidean, to be marked as the clan chief if he survived. Until that happened, Sevanna spoke as the clan chief since she was the widow of the last chief. Of the last two chiefs. And let those who muttered that she carried bad luck choke on it.

Gold and ivory bracelets clattered softly as she straightened the dark shawl over her arms and adjusted her necklaces. Most of those were gold and ivory too, but one was a mass of pearls and rubies that had belonged to a wetlander noblewoman—the woman now wore white and hauled and fetched alongside the other gai’shain back in the mountains called Kinslayer’s Dagger—with a ruby the size of a small hen’s egg nestled between her breasts. The wetlands held rich prizes. A large emerald on her finger caught sunlight in green fire; finger rings were one wetlander custom worth adopting, no matter the stares often aimed at hers. She would have more, if they matched this one for magnificence.

Most of the men thought Maeric or Bendhuin would be first to receive the Wise Ones’ permission to try Rhuidean. Only Efalin in that group suspected that none would, and she only suspected; she also was astute enough to voice her suspicions circumspectly to Sevanna and not at all to anyone else. Their minds could not encompass the possibility of shedding the old, and in truth, if Sevanna was impatient to don the new, she was also aware that she must bring them to it slowly. Much had changed already in the old ways since the Shaido crossed the Dragonwall into the wetlands—still wet, compared to the Three-fold Land—yet more would change. Once Rand al’Thor was in her hands, once she had wed the Car’a’carn, the chief of chiefs of all the Aiel—this nonsense of the Dragon Reborn was wetlander foolishness—there would be a new way of naming clan chiefs, and sept chiefs as well. Perhaps even the heads of the warrior societies. Rand al’Thor would name them. Pointing where she told him, of course. And that would be only the beginning. The wetlander notion of handing down rank to your children, and their children, for instance.

The wind swept higher for a moment, blowing south. It would cover the sound of the wetlanders’ horses and wagons.

She shifted her shawl again, then suppressed a grimace. At all costs she must not appear nervous. A glance to the right stilled worry as soon as begun. Over two hundred Shaido Wise Ones clustered there, and normally at least some would be watching her like vultures, but their eyes were all on the rise. More than one adjusted her shawl uneasily or smoothed bulky skirts. Sevanna’s lip curled. Sweat beaded on some of those faces. Sweat! Where was their honor that they showed nerves before every gaze?

Everyone stiffened slightly as a young Sovin Nai appeared above them, lowering his veil as he scrambled down. He came straight to her, as was proper, but to her irritation he raised his voice enough for all to hear. “One of their forward scouts escaped. He was wounded, but still on his horse.”

The society leaders began to move before he finished speaking. That would never do. They would lead in the actual fighting—Sevanna had never more than held a spear in her life—but she would not let them forget for a moment who she was. “Throw every last spear against them,” she ordered loudly, “before they can ready themselves.” They rounded on her as one.

“Every spear?” Bendhuin demanded incredulously. “You mean except for the screens—”

Glowering, Maeric spoke right on top of him. “If we keep no reserve, we can be—”

Sevanna cut them both off. “Every spear! These are Aes Sedai we dance with. We must overwhelm them immediately!” Efalin and most of the others schooled their faces to stillness, but Bendhuin and Maeric frowned, ready to argue. Fools. They faced a few dozen Aes Sedai, a few hundred wetlander soldiers, yet with the more than forty thousand algai’d’siswai they had insisted on, they still wanted their screens of scouts and their spears in reserve as if they faced other Aiel or a wetlander army. “I speak as the clan chief of the Shaido.” She should not have to say that, but a reminder could do no harm. “They are a handful.” She weighted every word with contempt now. “They can be run down if the spears move quickly. You were ready to avenge Desaine this sunrise. Do I smell fear now? Fear of a few wetlanders? Has honor gone from the Shaido?”

That turned their faces to stone, as intended. Even Efalin showed eyes like polished gray gems as she veiled; her fingers moved in Maiden handtalk, and as the society leaders sprinted up the rise, the Maidens around Sevanna followed. That was not what she had intended, but at least the spears were moving. Even from the bottom of the fold she could see what had seemed bare ground disgorging cadin’sor-clad figures, all hurrying south with the long strides that could run down horses. There was no time to waste. With a thought to have words with Efalin later, Sevanna turned to the Wise Ones.

Chosen from the strongest of the Shaido Wise Ones who could wield the One Power, they were six or seven for every Aes Sedai around Rand al’Thor, yet Sevanna saw doubt. They tried to hide it behind stony faces, but it was there, in shifting eyes, in tongues wetting lips. Many traditions fell today, traditions old and strong as law. Wise Ones did not take part in battles. Wise Ones kept far from Aes Sedai. They knew the ancient tales, that the Aiel had been sent to the Three-fold Land for failing the Aes Sedai, that they would be destroyed if ever they failed them again. They had heard the stories, what Rand al’Thor had claimed before all, that as part of their service to the Aes Sedai, the Aiel had sworn to do no violence.

Once Sevanna had been sure those stories were lies, but of late she believed the Wise Ones knew them for truth. None had told her so, of course. It did not matter. She herself had never made the two journeys to Rhuidean required to become a Wise One, but the others had accepted her, however reluctant some had been. Now they had no choice but to go on accepting. Useless traditions would be carved into new.

“Aes Sedai,” she said softly. They leaned toward her in a muted clatter of bracelets and necklaces, to catch her low words. “They hold Rand al’Thor, the Car’a’carn. We must take him from them.” There were scattered frowns. Most believed she wanted the Car’a’carn taken alive in order to avenge the death of Couladin, her second husband. They understood that, but they would not have come here for it. “Aes Sedai,” she hissed angrily. “We kept our pledge, but they broke theirs. We violated nothing, but they have violated everything. You know how Desaine was murdered.” And of course they did. The eyes watching her were suddenly sharper. Killing a Wise One ranked with killing a pregnant woman, a child or a blacksmith. Some of those eyes were very sharp. Therava’s, Rhiale’s, others’. “If we allow these women to walk away from that, then we are less than animals, we will have no honor. I hold my honor.”

On that she gathered her skirts with dignity and climbed the slope, head high, not looking back. She was certain the others would follow. Therava and Norlea and Dailin would see to that, and Rhiale and Tion and Meira and the rest who had accompanied her a few days past to see Rand al’Thor beaten and put back into his wooden chest by the Aes Sedai. Her reminder had been for those thirteen even more than the others, and they dared not fail her. The truth of how Desaine had died tied them to her.

Wise Ones with their skirts looped over their arms to free their legs could not keep up with the algai’d’siswai in cadin’sor however hard they ran, though race they did. Five miles across those low rolling hills, not a long run, and they topped a crest to see the dance of spears already begun. After a fashion.

Thousands of algai’d’siswai made a huge pool of veiled gray-and-brown surging around a circle of wetlander wagons, which itself surrounded one of the small clumps of trees that dotted this region. Sevanna drew an angry breath. The Aes Sedai had even had time to bring all of their horses inside. The spears encircled the wagons, pressed in on them, showered arrows toward them, but those at the front seemed to push against an invisible wall. At first the arrows that arched highest passed over this wall, but then they too began striking something unseen and bouncing back. A low murmur rose among the Wise Ones.

“You see what the Aes Sedai do?” Sevanna demanded, as though she also could see the One Power being woven. She wanted to sneer; the Aes Sedai were fools, with their vaunted Three Oaths. When they finally decided they must use the Power as a weapon instead of just to make barriers, it would be too late. Provided the Wise Ones did not stand too long staring. Somewhere in those wagons was Rand al’Thor, perhaps still doubled into a chest like a bolt of silk. Waiting for her to pick him up. If the Aes Sedai could hold him, then she could, with the Wise Ones. And a promise. “Therava, take your half to the west now. Be ready to strike when I do. For Desaine, and the toh the Aes Sedai owe us. We will make them meet toh as no one ever has before.”

It was a foolish boast to speak of making someone meet an obligation they had not acknowledged, yet in the angry mutters from the other women, Sevanna heard other furious promises to make the Aes Sedai meet toh. Only those who had killed Desaine on Sevanna’s orders stood silent. Therava’s narrow lips tightened slightly, but finally she said, “It will be as you say, Sevanna.”

At an easy lope, Sevanna led her half of the Wise Ones to the east side of the battle, if it could be called that yet. She had wanted to remain on a rise where she could have a good view—that was how a clan chief or battle leader directed the dance of spears—but in this one thing she found no support even from Therava and the others who shared the secret of Desaine’s death. The Wise Ones made a sharp contrast with the algai’d’siswai as she lined them up in their white algode blouses and dark wool skirts and shawls, their glittering bracelets and necklaces and their waist-length hair held back by dark folded scarves. For all their decision that if they were to be in the dance of the spears, they would be in it, not on a rise apart, she did not believe they yet realized that the true battle today was theirs to fight. After today, nothing would be the same again, and tethering Rand al’Thor was the smallest part.

Among the algai’d’siswai staring toward the wagons only height quickly told men from Maidens. Veils and shoufa hid heads and faces, and cadin’sor was cadin’sor aside from the differences of cut that marked clan and sept and society. Those at the outer edge of the encirclement appeared confused, grumbling among themselves as they waited for something to happen. They had come prepared to dance with Aes Sedai lightning, and now they milled impatiently, too far back even to use the horn bows still in leather cases on their backs. They would not have to wait much longer if Sevanna had her way.

Hands on hips, she addressed the other Wise Ones. “Those to the south of me will disrupt what the Aes Sedai are doing. Those to the north will attack. Forward the spears!” With the command, she turned to watch the destruction of the Aes Sedai who thought they had only steel to face.

Nothing happened. In front of her the mass of algai’d’siswai seethed uselessly, and the loudest sound was the occasional drumming of spears on bucklers. Sevanna gathered her anger, winding it like thread from the spinning. She had been so sure they were ready after Desaine’s butchered corpse was displayed to them, but if they still found attacking Aes Sedai unthinkable, she would chivvy them to it if she had to shame them all till they demanded to put on gai’shain white.

Suddenly a ball of pure flame the size of a man’s head arched toward the wagons, sizzling and hissing, then another, dozens. The knot in her middle loosened. More fireballs came from the west, from Therava and the rest. Smoke began to rise from burning wagons, first gray wisps, then thickening black pillars; the murmurs of the algai’d’siswai changed pitch, and if those directly in front of her moved little, there was a sudden sense of pressing forward. Shouts drifted from the wagons, men yelling in anger, bellowing in pain. Whatever barriers the Aes Sedai had made were down. It had begun, and there could be only one ending. Rand al’Thor would be hers; he would give her the Aiel, to take all of the wetlands, and before he died he would give her daughters and sons to lead the Aiel after her. She might enjoy that; he was quite pretty, really, strong and young.

She did not expect the Aes Sedai to go down easily, and they did not. Fireballs fell among the spears, turning cadin’sor-clad figures to torches, and lightnings struck from a clear sky, hurling men and earth into the air. The Wise Ones learned from what they saw, though, or perhaps they already knew and had hesitated before; most channeled so seldom, especially where anyone besides Wise Ones could see, that only another Wise One knew whether any given woman could. Whatever the reason, no sooner did lightning begin to fall among the Shaido spears than more struck toward the wagons.

Not all reached its target. Balls of fire streaking through the air, some large as horses now, silver lightning stabbing toward the ground like spears from the heavens, sometimes suddenly darted aside as if striking an invisible shield, or erupted violently in midair, or simply vanished altogether. Roars and crashes filled the air, warring with shouts and screams. Sevanna stared at the sky in delight. It was like the Illuminators’ displays she had read about.

Suddenly the world turned white in her eyes; she seemed to be floating. When she could see again, she was flat on the ground a dozen paces from where she had stood, aching in every muscle, struggling for breath and covered with a scattering of dirt. Her hair wanted to lift away from her.

Other Wise Ones were down as well, around a ragged hole a span across torn in the ground; thin tendrils of smoke rose from the dresses of some. Not everyone had fallen—the battle of fire and lightning continued in the sky—but too many. She had to throw them back into the dance.

Forcing herself to breathe, she scrambled to her feet, not bothering to brush off the dirt. “Push spears!” she shouted. Seizing Estalaine’s angular shoulders, she started to drag the woman to her feet, then realized from her staring blue eyes that she was dead and let her fall. She pulled a dazed Dorailla erect instead, then seized up a spear from a fallen Thunder Walker and waved it high. “Forward the spears!” Some of the Wise Ones seemed to take her literally, plunging into the mass of algai’d’siswai. Others kept their heads better, helping those who could rise, and the storm of fire and lightning continued as she raged up and down the line of Wise Ones, waving her spear and shouting. “Push spears! Forward the spears!”

She felt like laughing; she did laugh. With dirt all over her and the battle raging, she had never been so exhilarated before in her life. Almost she wished she had chosen to become a Maiden of the Spear. Almost. No Far Dareis Mai could ever be clan chief, any more than a man could be a Wise One; a Maiden’s route to power was to give up the spear and become a Wise One. As wife of a clan chief she had been wielding power at an age when a Maiden was barely trusted to carry a spear or a Wise One’s apprentice to fetch water. And now she had it all, Wise One and clan chief, though it would take some doing yet to have that last title in truth. Titles mattered little so long as she had the power, but why should she not have both?

A sudden scream made her turn, and she gaped at the sight of a shaggy gray wolf ripping Dosera’s throat out. Without thought she plunged her spear into its side. Even as it twisted to snap at the spear haft, another waist-tall wolf bounded past her to hurl itself onto the back of one of the algai’d’siswai, then another wolf, and more, tearing into cadin’sor-clad figures wherever she looked.

Superstitious fear lanced through her as she pulled her spear free. The Aes Sedai had called wolves to fight for them. She could not take her gaze from the wolf she had killed. The Aes Sedai had . . . No. No! It could change nothing. She would not let it.

Finally she managed to pull her eyes away, but before she could shout encouragement to the Wise Ones again, something else stilled her tongue and made her stare. A knot of wetlander horsemen in red helmets and breastplates, laying about them with swords, thrusting with long lances, in the middle of the algai’d’siswai. Where had they come from?

She did not realize she had spoken aloud until Rhiale answered her. “I tried to tell you, Sevanna, but you would not listen.” The flame-haired woman eyed her bloody spear distastefully; Wise Ones were not supposed to carry spears. She ostentatiously laid the weapon in the crook of her elbow, the way she had seen chiefs do, as Rhiale went on. “Wetlanders have attacked from the south. Wetlanders and siswai’aman.” She imbued the word with all the scorn proper for those who would name themselves Spears of the Dragon. “Maidens as well. And . . . And there are Wise Ones.”

“Fighting?” Sevanna said incredulously before realizing how it sounded. If she could toss out decayed custom, surely those sun-blinded fools to the south who still called themselves Aiel could as well. She had not expected it, though. No doubt Sorilea had brought them; that old woman reminded Sevanna of a landslide plunging down a mountain, carrying all before it. “We must attack them at once. They will not have Rand al’Thor. Or ruin our vengeance for Desaine,” she added when Rhiale’s eyes widened.

“They are Wise Ones,” the other woman said in a flat tone, and Sevanna understood bitterly. Joining the dance of spears was bad enough, but Wise One attacking Wise One was more than even Rhiale would countenance. She had agreed that Desaine must die—how else could the other Wise Ones, not to mention the algai’d’siswai, be brought to attack Aes Sedai, which they must do to put Rand al’Thor in their hands, and with him all the Aiel?—yet that was done in secret, surrounded by like-minded women. This would be before everyone. Fools and cowards, all of them!

“Then fight those enemies you can bring yourself to fight, Rhiale.” She bit off every word with as much scorn as she could, but Rhiale merely nodded, adjusted her shawl with another glance at the spear on Sevanna’s arm and returned to her place in the line.

Perhaps there was a way to make the other Wise Ones move first. Better to attack by surprise, but better anything than that they should snatch Rand al’Thor from her very hands. What she would not give for a woman who could channel and would do as she was told without balking. What she would not give to be on a rise, where she could see how the battle went.

Keeping her spear ready and a wary eye out for wolves—those she could see were either killing men and women in cadin’sor or were dead themselves—she returned to shouting encouragement. To the south more fire and lightning fell among the Shaido than before, but it made no difference that she could tell. That battle, with its explosions of flame and earth and people, continued unabated.

“Push spears!” she shouted, waving hers. “Push spears!” Among the churning algai’d’siswai she could not make out any of the fools who had tied a bit of red cloth around their temples and named themselves siswai’aman. Perhaps they were too few to alter the course of events. The knots of wetlanders certainly seemed few and far between. Even as she watched, one was swarmed under, men and horses, by stabbing spears. “Push spears! Push spears!” Exultation filled her voice. If the Aes Sedai called ten thousand wolves, if Sorilea had brought a thousand Wise Ones and a hundred thousand spears, the Shaido would still emerge victorious today. The Shaido, and herself. Sevanna of the Jumai Shaido would be a name remembered forever.

Suddenly a hollow boom sounded amid the roar of battle. It seemed to come from the direction of the Aes Sedai wagons, but nothing told her whether they had caused it, or the Wise Ones. She disliked things she did not understand, yet she was not about to ask Rhiale or the others and flaunt her ignorance. And her lack of the ability all here had, save her. It counted for nothing among themselves, but another thing she did not like was for others to have power she did not.

A flicker of light among the algai’d’siswai, a sense of something turning, caught the corner of her eye, but when she turned to look, there was nothing. Again the same thing happened, a flash of light seen on the edge of vision, and again when she looked there was nothing to see. Too many things she did not understand.

Shouting encouragement, she eyed the line of Shaido Wise Ones. Some appeared bedraggled, head scarves gone and long hair hanging loose, skirts and blouses covered with dirt or even singed. At least a dozen lay stretched out in a row, groaning, and seven more were still, shawls laid over their faces. It was those on their feet that interested her. Rhiale, and Alarys with her rare black hair all awry, Someryn, who had taken to wearing her blouse unlaced to show even more generous cleavage than Sevanna herself, and Meira, with her long face yet more grim than usual. Stout Tion, and skinny Belinde, and Modarra, as tall as most men.

One of them should have told her if they did something new. The secret of Desaine bound them to her; even for a Wise One, revelation of that would lead to a lifetime of pain—and worse, shame—trying to meet toh, if the one revealed was not simply driven naked into the wilderness to live or die as she could, likely to be killed like a beast by any who found her. Even so, Sevanna was sure they took as much delight as the rest in concealing things from her, the things that Wise Ones learned during their apprenticeships, and in the journeys to Rhuidean. Something would have to be done about that, but later. She would not display weakness by asking what they did now.

Turning back to the battle, she found the balance changing, and in her favor it appeared. To the south fireballs and lightning bolts plummeted as heavily as ever, but not in front of her, and it seemed not to the west or north either. What struck toward the wagons still failed to reach the ground more often than not, yet there was a definite slackening of the Aes Sedai’s efforts. They had been forced onto the defensive. She was winning!

Even as the thought flushed through her like pure heat, the Aes Sedai went silent. Only to the south did fire and lightning still fall among the algai’d’siswai. She opened her mouth to shout victory, and another realization silenced her. Fire and lightning stormed down toward the wagons, stormed down and crashed against some unseen obstruction. Smoke from burning wagons was beginning to outline the shape of a dome as it streamed up and finally billowed from a hole in the top of the invisible enclosure.

Sevanna whirled to confront the line of Wise Ones, her face such that several flinched back from her, and maybe from the spear in her hand. She knew she looked ready to use it; she was ready. “Why have you let them do this?” she raged. “Why? You were to obstruct whatever they did, not allow them to make more walls!”

Tion looked ready to empty her stomach, but she planted her fists on broad hips and faced Sevanna directly. “It was not the Aes Sedai.”

“Not the Aes Sedai?” Sevanna spat. “Then who? The other Wise Ones? I told you we must attack them!”

“It was not women,” Rhiale said, her voice faltering. “It was not—” Face pale, she swallowed.

Sevanna turned slowly to stare at the dome, only then remembering to breathe again. Something had risen through the hole where the smoke gushed out. One of the wetlander banners. The smoke was not enough to obscure it completely. Crimson, with a disc half white and half black, the colors divided by a sinuous line, just like the piece of cloth the siswai’aman wore. Rand al’Thor’s banner. Could he possibly be strong enough to have broken free, overwhelmed all the Aes Sedai and raised that? It had to be.

The storm still battered at the dome, but Sevanna heard murmurs behind her. The other women were thinking of retreat. Not her. She had always known that the easiest path to power lay through conquering men who already possessed it, and even as a child she was sure she had been born with the weapons to conquer them. Suladric, clan chief of the Shaido, fell to her at sixteen, and when he died, she chose out those most likely to succeed. Muradin and Couladin each believed he alone had captured her interest, and when Muradin failed to return from Rhuidean, as so many men did, one smile convinced Couladin that he had overwhelmed her. But the power of a clan chief paled beside that of the Car’a’carn, and even that was nothing beside what she saw before her. She shivered as if she had just seen the most beautiful man imaginable in the sweat tent. When Rand al’Thor was hers, she would conquer the whole world.

“Press harder,” she commanded. “Harder! We will humble these Aes Sedai for Desaine!” And she would have Rand al’Thor.

Abruptly there was a roar from the front of the battle, men shouting, screaming. She cursed that she could not see what was happening. Again she shouted for the Wise Ones to press harder, but if anything, it seemed the fall of flame and lightning against the dome lessened. And then there was something she could see.

Close to the wagons, cadin’sor-clad figures and earth erupted into the air with a thunderous crash, not in one place, but in a long line. Again the ground exploded, and again, again, each time a little farther from the encircled wagons. Not a line, but a solid ring of exploding ground and men and Maidens that she had no doubt ran all the way around the wagons. Again and again and again, ever expanding, and suddenly algai’d’siswai were pushing past her, buffeting through the line of Wise Ones, running.

Sevanna beat at them with her spear, flailing at heads and shoulders, not caring when the spearhead came away redder than before. “Stand and fight! Stand, for the honor of the Shaido!” They rushed by unheeding. “Have you no honor! Stand and fight!” She stabbed a fleeing Maiden in the back, but the rest just trampled over the fallen woman. Abruptly she realized that some of the Wise Ones were gone, and others picking up the injured. Rhiale turned to run, and Sevanna seized the taller woman’s arm, threatening her with the spear. She did not care that Rhiale could channel. “We must stand! We can still have him!”

The other woman’s face was a mask of fear. “If we stand, we die! Or else we end chained outside Rand al’Thor’s tent! Stay and die if you wish, Sevanna. I am no Stone Dog!” Ripping her arm free, she sped eastward.

For a moment more, Sevanna stood there, letting the men and Maidens push her this way and that as they streamed by in panic. Then she tossed down the spear and felt her belt pouch, where a small cube of intricately carved stone lay. Well that she had hesitated over throwing that away. She had another cord for her bow yet. Gathering her skirts to bare her legs, she joined in the chaotic flight, but if all the rest fled in terror, she ran with plans whirling through her head. She would have Rand al’Thor on his knees before her, and the Aes Sedai as well.

Alviarin finally left Elaida’s apartments, as cool and collected as ever on the surface. Inside, she felt wrung out like a damp cloth. She managed to keep her legs steady down the long curving flights of stairs, marble even in the very heights. Liveried servants bowed and curtsied as they scurried about their tasks, seeing only the Keeper in all her Aes Sedai serenity. As she went lower, sisters began to appear, many wearing their shawls, fringed in the colors of their Ajahs, as if to emphasize by formality that they were full sisters. They eyed her as she passed, uneasy often as not. The only one to ignore her was Danelle, a dreamy Brown sister. She had been part of bringing down Siuan Sanche and raising Elaida, but lost in her own thoughts, a solitary with no friends even in her own Ajah, she seemed unaware that she had been shoved aside. Others were all too aware. Berisha, a lean and hard-eyed Gray, and Kera, with the fair hair and blue eyes that appeared occasionally among Tairens and all the arrogance so common to Greens, went so far as to curtsy. Norine made as if to, then did not; big-eyed and nearly as dreamy as Danelle at times, and as friendless, she resented Alviarin; if the Keeper came from the White, in her eyes it should have been Norine Dovarna.

The courtesy was not required toward the Keeper, not from a sister, but no doubt they hoped she might intercede with Elaida should that become necessary. The others merely wondered what commands she carried, whether another sister was to be singled out today for some failure in the Amyrlin’s eyes. Not even Reds went within five levels of the Amyrlin’s new apartments unless summoned, and more than one sister actually hid when Elaida came below. The very air seemed heated, thick with a fear that had nothing to do with rebels or men channeling.

Several sisters tried to speak, but Alviarin brushed past, barely polite, hardly noticing worry bloom in their eyes when she refused to pause. Elaida filled her mind as much as theirs. A woman of many layers, Elaida. The first look at her showed a beautiful woman filled with dignified reserve, the second a woman of steel, stern as a bared blade. She overwhelmed where others persuaded, bludgeoned where others tried diplomacy or the Game of Houses. Anyone who knew her saw her intelligence, but only after a time did you realize that for all her brains, she saw what she wanted to see, would try to make true what she wanted to be true. Of the two indisputably frightening things about her, the lesser was that she so often succeeded. The greater was her Talent for Foretelling.

So easy to forget that, erratic and infrequent; it had been so long since the last Foretelling that the very unpredictability made it strike like a thunderbolt. No one could say when it would come, not even Elaida, and no one could say what it would reveal. Now Alviarin almost felt the woman’s shadowy presence following and watching.

It might be necessary to kill her yet. If so, Elaida would not be the first she had killed in secret. Still, she hesitated to take that step without orders, or at least permission.

She entered her own apartments with a sense of relief, as though Elaida’s shade could not cross the threshold. A foolish thought. If Elaida had a suspicion of the truth, a thousand leagues would not keep her from Alviarin’s throat. Elaida would expect her to be hard at work, personally penning orders for the Amyrlin’s signature and seal—but which of those orders were actually to be carried out had yet to be decided. Not by Elaida, of course. Nor by herself.

The rooms were smaller than those Elaida occupied, though the ceilings reached higher, and a balcony looked over the great square in front of the Tower from a hundred feet up. Sometimes she went out on the balcony to see Tar Valon spread out before her, the greatest city in the world, filled with countless thousands who were less than pieces on a stone’s board. The furnishings were Domani, pale striped wood inlaid with pearlshell and amber, bright carpets in patterns of flowers and scrolls, brighter tapestries of forest and flowers and grazing deer. They had belonged to the last occupant of these rooms, and if she retained them for any reason beyond not wanting to waste time choosing new, it was to remind herself of the price of failure. Leane Sharif had dabbled in schemes and failed, and now she was cut off from the One Power forever, a helpless refugee dependent on charity, doomed to a life of misery until she either ended it or simply put her face to the wall and died. Alviarin had heard of a few stilled women who managed to survive, but she would doubt those stories until she met one. Not that she had the slightest desire to do so.

Through the windows she could see the brightness of early afternoon, yet before she was halfway across her sitting room, the light suddenly faded into dim evening. The darkness did not surprise her. She turned and went to her knees immediately. “Great Mistress, I live to serve.” A tall woman of dark shadow and silver light stood before her. Mesaana.

“Tell me what happened, child.” The voice was crystal chimes.

On her knees, Alviarin repeated every word that Elaida had said, though she wondered why it was necessary. In the beginning she had left out unimportant bits, and Mesaana knew every time, demanded every word, every gesture and facial expression. Plainly she eavesdropped on those meetings. Alviarin had tried to work out the logic of it and failed. Some things did work to logic, though.

She had met others of the Chosen, whom fools called the Forsaken. Lanfear had come within the Tower, and Graendal, imperious in their strength and knowledge, making it clear without words that Alviarin was far beneath them, a scullery maid to run errands and wriggle with pleasure if she received a kind word. Be’lal had snatched Alviarin away in the night while she slept—to where she still did not know; she had wakened back in her own bed, and that had terrified her even more than being in the presence of a man who could channel. To him she was not even a worm, not even a living thing, just a piece in a game, to move at his command. First had been Ishamael, years before the others, plucking her out of the hidden mass of the Black Ajah to place her at its head.

To each she had knelt, saying that she lived to serve and meaning it, obeying as they commanded, whatever the command. After all, they stood only a step below the Great Lord of the Dark himself, and if she wanted the rewards of her service, the immortality it seemed they already possessed, it was well to obey. To each she knelt, and only Mesaana had appeared with an inhuman face. This cloak of shadow and light must be woven with the One Power, but Alviarin could see no weave. She had felt the strength of Lanfear and Graendal, had known from the first instant how much stronger in the Power they were than she, but in Mesaana she sensed . . . nothing. As if the woman could not channel at all.

The logic was clear, and stunning. Mesaana hid herself because she might be recognized. She must reside in the Tower itself. On the face of it, that seemed impossible, yet nothing else fit. Given that, she must be one of the sisters; surely she was not among servants, bound to labor and sweat. But who? Too many women had been out of the Tower for years before Elaida’s summons, too many had no close friends, or none at all. Mesaana must be one of those. Alviarin very much wanted to know. Even if she could make no use of it, knowledge was power.

“So our Elaida has had a Foretelling,” Mesaana chimed, and Alviarin realized with a start that she had reached the end of her recital. Her knees hurt, but she knew better than to rise without permission. A finger of shadow tapped silver lips thoughtfully. Had she seen any sister make that gesture? “Strange that she should be so clear and so erratic at the same time. It was always a rare Talent, and most who had it spoke so only poets could understand. Usually until it was too late to matter, at least. Everything always became clear then.” Alviarin kept silent. None of the Chosen conversed; they commanded or demanded. “Interesting predictions. The rebels breaking—like a rotten melon?—was that part of it?”

“I am not certain, Great Mistress,” she said slowly—had it been?—but Mesaana only shrugged.

“Either it is or it is not, and either way can be used.”

“She is dangerous, Great Mistress. Her Talent could reveal what should not be revealed.”

Crystalline laughter answered her. “Such as? You? Your Black Ajah sisters? Or perhaps you think to safeguard me? You are a good girl sometimes, child.” That silvery voice was amused. Alviarin felt her face heat and hoped that Mesaana read the shame, not the anger. “Do you suggest that our Elaida should be disposed of, child? Not yet, I think. She has her uses still. At least until young al’Thor reaches us, and very likely after. Write out her orders and see to them. Watching her play her little games is certainly amusing. You children almost match the ajah at times. Will she succeed in having the King of Illian and the Queen of Saldaea kidnapped? You Aes Sedai used to do that, didn’t you, but not for—what?—two thousand years? Who will she try to put on the throne of Cairhien? Will the offer of being king in Tear overcome the High Lord Darlin’s dislike of Aes Sedai? Will our Elaida choke on her own frustration first? A pity she resists the idea of a larger army. I’d have thought her ambitions would leap at that.”

The interview was coming to a close—they never lasted longer than for Alviarin to report and be given her own orders—but she had a question yet to ask. “The Black Tower, Great Mistress.” Alviarin wet her lips. She had learned much since Ishamael appeared to her, not least that the Chosen were neither omnipotent nor all-knowing. She had risen because Ishamael killed her predecessor in his wrath at discovering what Jarna Malari had begun, yet it had not ended for another two years, after the death of another Amyrlin. She often wondered whether Elaida had had any hand in the death of that one, Sierin Vayu; certainly the Black Ajah had not. Jarna had had Tamra Ospenya, the Amyrlin before Sierin, squeezed like a bunch of grapes—obtaining little juice, as it turned out—and made her appear to have died in her sleep, but Alviarin and the other twelve sisters of the Great Council had paid in pain before they could convince Ishamael they had no responsibility for it. The Chosen were not all-powerful, and they did not know everything, yet sometimes they knew what no one else did. Asking could be dangerous, though. “Why” was the most dangerous; the Chosen never liked to be asked why. “Is it safe to send fifty sisters to deal with them, Great Mistress?”

Eyes glowing like twin full moons regarded her in silence, and a chill slid up Alviarin’s spine. Jarna’s fate flashed into her mind. Publicly Gray, Jarna had never shown any interest in the ter’angreal no one knew a use for—until the day she became snared in one untried for centuries. How to activate it remained a mystery still. For ten days no one could reach her, only listen to her throat-wrenching shrieks. Most of the Tower thought Jarna a model of virtue; when what could be recovered was buried, every sister in Tar Valon and every one who could reach the city in time attended the funeral.

“You have curiosity, child,” Mesaana said finally. “That can be an asset, properly directed. Wrongly directed . . . ” The threat hung in the air like a gleaming dagger.

“I will direct it as you command, Great Mistress,” Alviarin breathed hoarsely. Her mouth was dry as dust. “Only as you command.” But she would still see that no Black sisters went with Toveine. Mesaana moved, looming over her so she had to crane her neck to look up at that face of light and shadow, and suddenly she wondered whether the Chosen knew her thoughts.

“If you would serve me, child, then you must serve and obey me. Not Semirhage or Demandred. Not Graendal or anyone else. Only me. And the Great Lord, of course, but me above all save him.”

“I live to serve you, Great Mistress.” That came out in a croak, but she managed to emphasize the added word.

For a long moment silvery eyes stared down at her unblinking. Then Mesaana said, “Good. I will teach you, then. But remember that a pupil is not a teacher. I choose who learns what, and I decide when they can make use of it. Should I find you have passed on the smallest scrap or used even a hair of it without my direction, I will extinguish you.”

Alviarin worked moisture back into her mouth. There was no anger in those chimes, only certainty. “I live to serve you, Great Mistress. I live to obey you, Great Mistress.” She had just learned something about the Chosen that she could hardly credit. Knowledge was power.

“You have a little strength, child. Not much, but enough.”

A weave appeared seemingly from nowhere.

“This,” Mesaana chimed, “is called a gateway.”

Pedron Niall grunted as Morgase placed a white stone on the board with a smile of triumph. Lesser players might set two dozen more stones each yet, but he could see the inevitable course now, and so could she. In the beginning the golden-haired woman seated on the other side of the small table had played to lose, to make the game close enough to be interesting for him, but it had not taken her long to learn that that led to obliteration. Not to mention that he was clever enough to see through the subterfuge and would not tolerate it. Now she plied all her skill and managed to win nearly half their games. No one had beaten him so often in a good many years.

“The game is yours,” he told her, and the Queen of Andor nodded. Well, she would be Queen again; he would see to that. In green silk, with a high lace collar brushing her chin, she looked every inch a queen despite the sheen of perspiration on her smooth cheeks. She hardly appeared old enough to have a daughter Elayne’s age, though, much less a son Gawyn’s.

“You did not realize I saw the trap you were laying from your thirty-first stone, Lord Niall, and you took my feint from the forty-third stone to be my real attack.” Excitement sparkled in her blue eyes; Morgase liked to win. She liked playing to win.

It was all meant to lull him, of course, the playing at stones, the politeness. Morgase knew she was a prisoner in the Fortress of the Light in all but name, albeit a luxuriously pampered prisoner. And a secret one. He had allowed stories of her presence to spread, but issued no proclamations. Andor had too strong a history of opposing the Children of the Light. He would announce nothing until legions moved into Andor, with her their figurehead. Morgase certainly knew that, as well. Very probably she also knew he was aware of her attempts to soften him. The treaty she had signed gave the Children rights in Andor they had never possessed anywhere except here in Amadicia, and he expected that she already planned how to lighten his hand on her land, how to remove his hand altogether as soon as she could. She had only signed because he backed her into a corner, yet confined in that corner, she fought on as skillfully as she maneuvered on a stones board. For one so beautiful, she was a tough woman. No, she was tough, and that was that. She did let herself be caught up for the pure pleasure of the game, but he could not count that a fault when it gave him so many pleasant moments.

Had he been even twenty years younger, he might have played more to her true game. Long years as a widower stretched behind him, and the Lord Captain Commander of the Children of the Light had little time for pleasantries with women, little time for anything except being Lord Captain Commander. Had he been twenty years younger—well, twenty-five—and she not trained by the Tar Valon witches. It was easy to forget that, in her presence. The White Tower was a sink of iniquity and the Shadow, and she touched deeply by it. Rhadam Asunawa, the High Inquisitor, would have tried her for her months in the White Tower and hanged her without delay, had Niall allowed it. He sighed regretfully.

Morgase kept her victorious smile, but those big eyes studied his face with an intelligence she could not hide. He filled her goblet and his own with wine from the silver pitcher sitting in a bowl of cool water that had been ice a little while ago.

“My Lord Niall . . . ” The hesitation was just right, the slim hand half-stretched across the table toward him, the added respect in how she addressed him. Once she had called him simply Niall, with more contempt than she would have handed a drunken groom. The hesitation would have been just right had he not had the measure of her. “My Lord Niall, surely you can order Galad to Amador so I may see him. Just for a day.”

“I regret,” he replied smoothly, “that Galad’s duties keep him in the north. You should be proud; he is one of the best young officers among the Children.” Her stepson was a lever to use on her at need, one best used now by keeping him away. The young man was a good officer, perhaps the best to join the Children in Niall’s time, and there was no need to put strains on his oath by letting him know his mother was here, and a “guest” only by courtesy.

No more than a slight tightening of her mouth, quickly gone, betrayed her disappointment. This was not the first time she had made that request, nor would it be the last. Morgase Trakand did not surrender just because it was plain she was beaten. “As you say, my Lord Niall,” she said, so meekly that he nearly choked on his wine. Submissiveness was a new tactic, one she must have worked up with difficulty. “It is just a mother’s—”

“My Lord Captain Commander?” a deep, resonant voice broke in from the doorway. “I fear I have important news that cannot wait, my Lord.” Abdel Omerna stood tall in the white-and-gold tabard of a Lord Captain of the Children of the Light, bold face framed by wings of white at his temples, dark eyes deep and thoughtful. From head to toe he was fearless and commanding. And a fool, though that was not apparent at a glance.

Morgase drew in on herself at the sight of Omerna, so small a motion most men would not have noticed. She believed him spymaster for the Children, as everyone did, a man to be feared almost as much as Asunawa, perhaps more. Even Omerna himself did not know he was but a decoy to keep eyes away from the true master of spies, a man known only to Niall himself. Sebban Balwer, Niall’s dry little stick of a secretary. Yet decoy or not, something useful did pass through Omerna’s hands on occasion. On rare occasions, something dire. Niall had no doubts what the man had brought; nothing else except Rand al’Thor at the gates would have sent him barging in this way. The Light send it was all a rug merchant’s madness.

“I fear our gaming is done for this morning,” Niall told Morgase, standing. He offered her a slight bow as she rose, and she acknowledged it by inclining her head.

“Until this evening, perhaps?” Her voice still held that almost docile tone. “That is, if you will dine with me?”

Niall accepted, of course. He did not know where she was leading with this new tactic—not where an oaf might suppose, he was sure—but it would be amusing to find out. The woman was full of surprises. Such a pity she was tainted by the witches.

Omerna advanced as far as the great sunflare of gold, set in the floor, that had been worn by feet and knees over centuries. It was a plain room aside from that and the captured banners that lined the walls high beneath the ceiling, age-tattered and worn. Omerna watched her skirt around him without really acknowledging his presence, and when the door closed behind her, he said, “I have not yet found Elayne or Gawyn, my Lord.”

“Is that your important news?” Niall demanded irritably. Balwer reported Morgase’s daughter in Ebou Dar, still mired to her neck with the witches; orders concerning her had already been sent to Jaichim Carridin. Her other son still toiled with the witches as well, it seemed, in Tar Valon, where even Balwer possessed few eyes-and-ears. Niall took a long swallow of cool wine. His bones felt old and brittle and cold of late, yet the Shadowspawned heat made his skin sweat enough, and dried his mouth.

Omerna gave a start. “Ah . . . no, my Lord.” He fumbled in a pocket of his white undercoat and pulled, out a tiny bone cylinder with three red stripes running its length. “You wanted this brought as soon as the pigeon arrived in the—” He cut off as Niall snatched the tube.

This was what he had been waiting for, the reason a legion was not already on its way to Andor with Morgase riding at its head, if not leading. If it was not all Varadin’s madness, the ravings of a man unbalanced by watching Tarabon collapse into anarchy, Andor would have to wait. Andor, and maybe more.

“I . . . I have confirmation that the White Tower truly has broken,” Omerna went on. “The . . . the Black Ajah has seized Tar Valon.” No wonder he sounded nervous, speaking heresy. There was no Black Ajah; all of the witches were Darkfriends.

Niall ignored him and broke the wax sealing the tube with his thumbnail. He had used Balwer to start those rumors, and now they came back to him. Omerna believed every rumor his ears caught, and his ears caught them all.

“And there are reports that the witches are conferring with the false Dragon al’Thor, my Lord.”

Of course the witches were conferring with him! He was their creation, their puppet. Niall shut out the fool’s blather and moved back to the gaming table while he drew a slim roll of paper from the tube. He never let anyone know more of these messages than that they existed, and few knew that much. His hands trembled as they unrolled the thin paper. His hands had not trembled since he was a boy facing his first battle, more than seventy years ago. Those hands seemed little more than bone and sinew now, but they still possessed enough strength for what he had to do.

The writing was not that of Varadin, but of Faisar, sent to Tarabon for a different purpose. Niall’s stomach twisted into a knot as he read; it was in clear language, not Varadin’s cipher. Varadin’s reports had been the work of a man on the brink of madness if not over, yet Faisar confirmed the worst of it and more. Much more. Al’Thor was a rabid beast, a destroyer who must be stopped, but now a second mad animal had appeared, one that might be even more dangerous than the Tar Valon witches with their tame false Dragon. But how under the Light could he fight both?

“It . . . it seems that Queen Tenobia has left Saldaea, my Lord. And the . . . the Dragonsworn are burning and killing across Altara and Murandy. I have heard the Horn of Valere has been found, in Kandor.”

Still half-distracted, Niall looked up to find Omerna at his side, licking his lips and wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. No doubt he hoped for a glance at what was in the message. Well, everyone would know soon enough.

“It seems one of your wilder fancies wasn’t so wild after all,” Niall said, and that was when he felt the knife go in under his ribs.

Shock froze him long enough for Omerna to pull the dagger free and plunge it in again. Other Lord Captain Commanders had died this way before him, yet he had never thought it would be Omerna. He tried to grapple with his killer, but there was no force in his arms. He hung on to Omerna with the man supporting him, the pair of them eye to eye.

Omerna’s face was red; he looked ready to weep. “It had to be done. It had to be. You let the witches sit there in Salidar unhindered, and . . . ” As if suddenly realizing that he had his arms around the man he was murdering, he pushed Niall away.

Strength had gone from Niall’s legs now as well as his arms. He fell heavily against the gaming table, turning it over. Black and white stones scattered across the polished wooden floor around him; the silver pitcher bounced and splashed wine. The cold in his bones was leaching out into the rest of him.

He was not certain whether time had slowed for him or everything really did happen so quickly. Boots thudded across the floor, and he lifted his head wearily to see Omerna gaping and wide-eyed, backing away from Eamon Valda. Every bit as much the picture of a Lord Captain as Omerna in his white-and-gold tabard and white undercoat, Valda was not so tall, not so plainly commanding, but the dark man’s face was hard, as ever, and he had a sword in his hands, the heron-mark blade he prized so highly.

“Treason!” Valda bellowed, and drove the sword through Omerna’s chest.

Niall would have laughed if he could; breath came hard, and he could hear it bubbling in the blood in his throat. He had never liked Valda—in fact, he despised the man—but someone had to know. His eyes shifted, found the slip of paper from Tanchico lying not far from his hand; it might be missed there, but not if his corpse clutched it. And that message had to be read. His hand seemed to crawl across the floorboards so slowly, brushing the paper, pushing, it as he fumbled to take hold. His vision was growing misty. He tried to force himself to see. He had to . . . The fog was thicker. Part of him tried to shake that thought; there was no fog. The fog was thicker, and there was an enemy out there, unseen, hidden, as dangerous as al’Thor or more. The message. What? What message? It was time to mount and out sword, time for one last attack. By the Light, win or die, he was coming! He tried to snarl.

Valda wiped his blade on Omerna’s tabard, then suddenly realized the old wolf still breathed, a rasping, bubbling sound. Grimacing, he bent to make an end—and a gaunt, long-fingered hand caught his arm.

“Would you be Lord Captain Commander now, my son?” Asunawa’s emaciated face belonged on a martyr, yet his dark eyes burned with a fervor to unnerve even those who did not know who he was. “You may well be, after I attest that you killed Pedron Niall’s assassin. But not if I must say that you ripped open Niall’s throat as well.”

Baring teeth in what could pass for a smile, Valda straightened. Asunawa had a love of truth, a strange love; he could tie it into knots, or hang it up and flay it while it screamed, but so far as Valda knew, he never actually lied. A look at Niall’s glazed eyes, and the pool of blood spreading beneath him, satisfied Valda. The old man was dying.

“May, Asunawa?”

The High Inquisitor’s gaze burned hotter as Asunawa stepped back, moving the snowy cloak away from Niall’s blood. Even a Lord Captain was not supposed to be that familiar. “I said may, my son. You have been oddly reluctant to agree that the witch Morgase must be given to the Hand of the Light. Unless you give that assurance—”

“Morgase is needed yet.” Breaking in gave Valda considerable pleasure. He did not like Questioners, the Hand of the Light as they called themselves. Who could like men who never met an enemy not disarmed and in chains? They held themselves apart from the Children, separate. Asunawa’s cloak bore only the scarlet shepherd’s crook of the Questioners, not the flaring golden sun of the Children that graced his own tabard. Worse, they seemed to think their work with racks and hot irons was the only true work of the Children. “Morgase gives us Andor, so you cannot have her before we have it. And we cannot take Andor until the Prophet’s mobs are crushed.” The Prophet had to be first, preaching the coming of the Dragon Reborn, his mobs burning villages too slow to proclaim for al’Thor. Niall’s chest barely moved, now. “Unless you want to trade Amadicia for Andor, instead of holding both? I mean to see al’Thor hung and the White Tower ground to dust, Asunawa, and I did not go along with your plan just to see you toss it all on the midden.”

Asunawa was not taken aback; he was no coward. Not here, with hundreds of Questioners in the Fortress and most of the Children wary of putting a foot wrong around them. He ignored the sword in Valda’s hands, and that martyr’s face took on a look of sadness. His sweat seemed to be tears of regret. “In that case, since Lord Captain Canvele believes that the law must be obeyed, I fear—”

“I fear Canvele agrees with me, Asunawa.” Since dawn he did, since he realized that Valda had brought half a legion into the Fortress. Canvele was no fool. “The question is not whether I will be Lord Captain Commander when the sun sets today, but who will guide the Hand of the Light in its digging for truth.”

No coward, Asunawa, and even less a fool than Canvele. He neither flinched nor demanded how Valda thought to bring this about. “I see,” he said after a moment, and then, mildly, “Do you mean to flout the law entirely, my son?”

Valda almost laughed. “You can examine Morgase, but she is not to be put to the question. You can have her for that when I am done with her.” Which might take a little time; finding a replacement for the Lion Throne, one who understood her proper relationship to the Children as King Ailron did here, would not happen overnight.

Perhaps Asunawa understood and perhaps not. He opened his mouth, and there was a gasp from the doorway. Niall’s pinch-faced secretary stood there, purse-mouthed and knobby, narrow eyes trying to stare at everything except the bodies stretched out on the floor.

“A sad day, Master Balwer,” Asunawa intoned, his voice sorrowful iron. “The traitor Omerna has slain our Lord Captain Commander Pedron Niall, the Light illumine his soul.” Not an advance on the truth; Niall’s chest no longer moved, and killing him had been treason. “Lord Captain Valda entered too late to save him, but he did slay Omerna in the full depth of his sin.” Balwer gave a start and began dry-washing his hands.

The birdlike fellow made Valda itch. “Since you are here, Balwer, you may as well be useful.” He disliked useless people, and the scribbler was the very form of uselessness. “Carry this message to each Lord Captain in the Fortress. Tell them the Lord Captain Commander has been murdered, and I call for a meeting of the Council of the Anointed.” His first act on being named Lord Captain Commander would be to boot the dried-up little man out of the Fortress, boot him so far he bounced twice, and choose a secretary who did not twitch. “Whether Omerna was bought by the witches or the Prophet, I mean to see Pedron Niall avenged.”

“As you say, my Lord.” Balwer’s voice was dry and narrow. “It shall be as you say.” He apparently found himself able to look on Niall’s body at last; as he bowed himself out jerkily, he hardly looked at anything else.

“So it seems you will be our next Lord Captain Commander after all,” Asunawa said once Balwer was gone.

“So it seems,” Valda answered dryly. A tiny slip of paper lay next to Niall’s outstretched hand, the sort used in sending messages by pigeon. Valda bent and picked it up, then exhaled in disgust. The paper had been sitting in a puddle of wine; whatever had been written on it was lost, the ink a blur.

“And the Hand will have Morgase when your need for her is done.” That was not in the slightest a question.

“I will hand her to you myself.” Perhaps a little something might be arranged to sate Asunawa’s appetite for a while. It might make sure Morgase remained amenable, too. Valda dropped the bit of rubbish on Niall’s corpse. The old wolf had lost his cunning and his nerve with age, and now it would be up to Eamon Valda to bring the witches and their false Dragon to heel.

Flat on his belly on a rise, Gawyn surveyed disaster beneath the afternoon sun. Dumai’s Wells lay miles to the south now, across rolling plain and low hills, but he could still see the smoke from burning wagons. What had happened there after he led what he could gather of the Younglings in breaking out, he did not know. Al’Thor had seemed well in charge, al’Thor and those black-coated men who appeared to be channeling, taking down Aes Sedai and Aiel alike. It had been the realization that sisters were fleeing that told him it was time to go.

He wished he could have killed al’Thor. For his mother, dead by the man’s doing; Egwene denied it, but she had no proof. For his sister. If Min had spoken the truth—he should have made her leave the camp with him, whatever she wanted; there was too much he should have done differently today—if Min was right, and Elayne loved al’Thor, then that dreadful fate was reason enough to kill. Maybe the Aiel had done the work for him. He doubted it, though.

With a sour laugh he raised the tube of his looking glass. One of the golden bands bore an inscription. “From Morgase, Queen of Andor, to her beloved son, Gawyn. May he be a living sword for his sister and Andor.” Bitter words, now.

There was not much to see beyond sere grass and small, scattered clumps of trees. The wind still gusted, raising waves of dust. Occasionally a flash of movement in a crease between squat ridges spoke of men on the move. Aiel, he was sure. They blended with the land too well to be green-coated Younglings. The Light send that more had escaped than those he had brought out.

He was a fool. He should have killed al’Thor; he had to kill him. But he could not. Not because the man was the Dragon Reborn, but because he had promised Egwene not to raise a hand against al’Thor. As a lowly Accepted, she had vanished from Cairhien, leaving Gawyn only a letter that he had read and reread until the paper was ready to tear along the folds, and he would be unsurprised to learn she had gone to aid al’Thor in some way. He could not break his word, least of all to the woman he loved. Never his word to her. Whatever the cost to himself. He hoped she would accept the compromise he had made with his honor; he had raised not a hand to harm, but none to help, either. The Light send she never asked that of him. It was said that love addled men’s brains, and he was the proof.

Suddenly he pressed the looking glass to his eye as a woman galloped a tall black horse into the open. He could not make out her face, but no servant would be wearing a dress divided for riding. So at least one Aes Sedai had managed to escape. If sisters had made it out of the trap alive, maybe more of the Younglings had too. With luck, he could find them before they were killed in small groups by the Aiel. First there was the matter of this sister, though. In many ways he would rather have gone on without her, but leaving her alone, maybe to take an arrow she never saw coming, was not an option he could allow himself. As he started to rise and wave to her, though, the horse stumbled and fell, pitching her over its head.

He cursed, then again when the looking glass showed him an arrow standing up from the black’s side. Hastily he scanned the hills, and bit down on another curse; maybe two dozen veiled Aiel stood on a crest staring toward downed horse and rider, less than a hundred paces from the Aes Sedai. Quickly he glanced back. The sister rose unsteadily to her feet. If she kept her wits and used the Power, there should be no way a few Aiel could harm her, especially if she took shelter against more arrows behind the fallen horse. Even so, he would feel better when he had gathered her in. Rolling away from the crest to lessen the chances of the Aiel seeing him, he slid down the reverse slope until he could stand.

He had brought five hundred and eighty-one Younglings south, almost every one who was far enough along in training to leave Tar Valon, but fewer than two hundred waited on their horses in the hollow. Before disaster struck at Dumai’s Wells, he was certain there had been a plot afoot to see that he and the Younglings died without returning to the White Tower. Why, he did not know, nor whether the scheme came from Elaida or Galina, but it had succeeded well enough, if not exactly in the way its devisers had thought. Small wonder that he would have preferred to go on without Aes Sedai, had he any choice.

He stopped beside a tall gray gelding with a young rider. Young, as indeed all the Younglings were—many did not need to shave beyond every third day, and a few still only pretended even that—but Jisao wore the silver tower on his collar, marking him a veteran of the fighting when Siuan Sanche was deposed, and scars beneath his clothes from fighting since. He was one of those who could skip the razor most mornings; his dark eyes belonged to a man thirty years older, though. What did his own eyes look like, Gawyn wondered.

“Jisao, we have a sister to pull out of the—”

The hundred or so Aiel who came trotting over the low rise to the west recoiled in surprise at finding the Younglings below, but neither surprise nor the Younglings’ superior numbers held them back. In a flash they veiled and plunged down the slope, darting in with spears stabbing at horses as often as riders, working in pairs. Yet if the Aiel knew how to fight men on horseback, the Younglings had recently had rough lessons in how to fight Aiel, and slow learners did not live long in their ranks. Some carried slender lances, ending in a foot and a half of steel with a crossguard to prevent the head penetrating too deeply, and all could use their swords as well as any but a blademaster. They fought in twos and threes, each man watching another’s back, keeping their mounts moving so the Aiel could not hamstring the animals. Only the quickest Aiel managed to get inside those circles of flashing steel. The war-trained horses themselves were weapons, splitting skulls with their hooves, seizing men with their teeth and shaking them like dogs worrying rats, jaws tearing away half a man’s face. The horses screamed as they fought, and men grunted with effort, shouted with the fever that overtook men in battle, the fever that said they were alive and would live to see another sunrise if they had to wade waist-deep in blood. They shouted as they killed, shouted as they died; there seemed little difference.

Gawyn had no time to watch or listen, though. The only Youngling afoot, he attracted attention. Three cadin’sor-clad figures dodged through the horsemen, rushing at him with spears ready. Perhaps they thought him easy meat, three on one. He disabused them. His sword left the scabbard smoothly, as smoothly as he flowed from The Falcon Stoops to The Creeper Embraces the Oak to The Moon Rises Over the Lakes. Three times he felt the shock in his wrists of blade meeting flesh, and that quickly three veiled Aielmen were down; two still moving weakly, but they were out of the fight as much as the other. The next to confront him was a different matter.

A lean fellow, overtopping Gawyn by a hand, he moved like a snake, spear flickering while his buckler darted and slanted to deflect sword strokes with a force Gawyn could feel to his shoulders. The Wood Grouse Dances became Folding the Air became The Courtier Taps His Fan, and the Aielman met each of them at the cost of a slash along his ribs, while Gawyn took a gash on his thigh that only a quick twist kept from being a stab clean through.

They circled one another, oblivious to whatever happened around them. Blood oozed hot down Gawyn’s leg. The Aielman feinted, hoping to draw him off balance, feinted again; Gawyn shifted from stance to stance, sword now high, now low, hoping the man would extend one of those half-thrusts just a little too far.

In the end, it was chance that decided matters. The Aielman abruptly stumbled a step, and Gawyn ran him through the heart before he even saw the horse that had backed into the man.

Once he would have felt regret; he had grown up believing that if two men must fight, the duel should proceed honorably and cleanly. More than half a year of battles and skirmishes had taught him better. He put a foot on the Aielman’s chest and wrenched his blade free. Ungallant, but fast, and in battle, slow was often dead.

Only, when his sword was free, there was no need for speed. Men were down, Younglings and Aielmen, some groaning, some still, and the rest of the Aiel streaming away to the east, harried by two dozen Younglings, including some who should know better. “Hold!” he shouted. If the idiots allowed themselves to become separated, the Aiel would cut them to dogmeat. “No pursuit! Hold, I said! Hold, burn you!” The Younglings pulled up reluctantly.

Jisao reined his gelding around. “They just thought to cut a path through us on the way wherever they’re going, my Lord.” His sword dripped red from half its length.

Gawyn caught the reins of his own bay stallion and swung into the saddle, not waiting to clean or sheath his blade. No time to see who was dead, who might live. “Forget them. That sister is waiting for us. Hal, keep your half-troop to look after the wounded. And watch those Aiel; just because they’re dying doesn’t mean they have quit. The rest, follow me.” Hal saluted with his sword, but Gawyn was already digging in his spurs.

The skirmish had not lasted long, yet too long however short. When Gawyn reached the crest, only the dead horse was to be seen, its saddlebags turned out. Scanning through his looking glass revealed not a sign of the sister, the Aiel or anything else living. All that moved was windblown dust and a dress on the ground near the horse, stirring in the gusts. The woman must have sprinted to be so completely out of sight so quickly.

“She can’t have gone far, even running,” Jisao said. “We can find her if we fan out.”

“We’ll search after we see to the wounded,” Gawyn replied firmly. He was not about to split up his men with Aiel roaming loose. Only a few hours yet till sunset, and he wanted a tight camp on high ground before then. It might be as well if he did manage to find a sister or two; someone was going to have to explain this catastrophe to Elaida, and he would as soon it was an Aes Sedai facing her wrath, not him.

Turning his bay with a sigh, he rode back down to see what the butcher’s bill had been this time. That had been his first real lesson as a soldier. You always had to pay the butcher. He had a feeling there would be bigger bills due soon. The world would forget Dumai’s Wells in what was coming.