Flick.
Gently Gawyn laid her down on a cloak already spread there on the hillside, in the manner of things in dreams. Kneeling beside her, he brushed a strand of hair from her cheek, let his fingers trail back to the corner of her mouth.
No! She was losing the little control she had! She had to get out! What are you afraid of? She was not sure whether that was her thought or the other Egwene’s. The barrier between them was gauze now. This is Gawyn. Gawyn.
"I love you," he said hesitantly. In the green coat again, still less handsome than he really was, he plucked at one of his buttons before letting his hand drop. He looked at her as though afraid of what he might see on her face, hiding it, but not well. "I have never said that to another woman, never wanted to say it. You have no idea how hard it is to say to you. Not that I don’t want to," he added hastily, flinging a hand toward her, "but to say it, with no encouragement, is like tossing aside my sword and baring my chest for a blade. Not that I think you would — Light! I can’t say this properly. Is there any chance that you… might come… in time… to feel some… regard… for me? Something… more than friendship?"
"You sweet idiot," she laughed softly. "I love you" I love you, echoed in the part of her that was really her. She felt the barrier vanishing, had a moment to realize she did not care, and then there was only one Egwene again, an Egwene who happily twined her arms around Gawyn’s neck.
Sitting on the stool in the dim moonlight, Nynaeve stuffed a yawn back into her mouth with her knuckles and blinked eyes that felt full of sand. This was going to work; oh, yes, it was. She would fall asleep saying hello to Theodrin, if not before! Her chin sank, and she jerked herself to her feet. The stool had begun feeling like stone — her bottom had gone numb — but that discomfort was apparently not enough anymore. Perhaps a walk outside. Arms outstretched, she felt her way to the door.
Abruptly a distant scream shattered the night, and as it did, the stool struck her hard in the back, knocking her against the rough door with a startled scream of her own. Stunned, she stared at the stool, lying on its side on the floor now, one leg shoved awry.
"What is it?" Elayne cried, coming bolt upright in her bed.
More screams and shouts sounded through Salidar, some from inside their own house, and a vague rumble and clatter that seemed to come from everywhere. Nynaeve’s empty bed rattled, then slid a foot across the floor. Elayne’s heaved, nearly tossing her out.
"A bubble of evil." Nynaeve was startled at how cool she sounded. There was no point leaping about and flapping her arms, but inside she was doing just that. "We have to wake anybody who’s still asleep." She did not know how anyone could sleep through this racket, but those who did could die before they knew it.
Not waiting for a reply, she hurried out and pushed open the next door down the hall — and ducked as a white washbasin hurtled through the space where her head had been to smash against the wall behind her. Four women shared this room, in two beds a little larger than her own. Now one bed lay with its legs in the air, two women trying to crawl from beneath it. On the other, Emara and Ronelle, another Accepted, thrashed and made choking sounds, wrapped tight in their own bedsheet.
Nynaeve grabbed the first woman out from under the overturned bed, a gaping skinny serving woman named Mulinda, and shoved her toward the door. "Go! Wake anybody in the house still sleeping, and help anybody you can! Go!" Mulinda went, stumbling, and Nynaeve hauled her trembling sleeping companion to her feet. "Help me, Satina. Help me with Emara and Ronelle."
Trembling she might have been, but the plump woman nodded and set to with a will. It was not just a matter of unwinding the sheet, of course. The thing seemed alive, like a vine that would tighten until it crushed what it held. Nynaeve and Satina together barely peeled it away from the two women’s throats; then the pitcher leaped from the washstand to crash against the ceiling, Satina jumped and lost her hold, and the sheet snapped out of Nynaeve’s hands, right back where it had been. The two women’s struggles were weakening; one made a rattling noise in her throat, the other no sound at all. Even by the little moonlight that came through the window their faces seemed swollen and dark.
Seizing the sheet again with both hands, Nynaeve opened herself to saidar, and found nothing. I’m surrendering, burn you! I am surrendering! I need the Power! Nothing. The bed shimmied against her knees, and Satina squeaked. "Don’t just stand there!" Nynaeve snapped. "Help me!"
Abruptly the sheet jerked out of her grip once more, but instead of winding around Emara and Ronelle again, it pulled the other way so hard they tumbled over one another, nearly blurring as it unwound. Noticing Elayne in the doorway, Nynaeve closed her mouth with a click of teeth. The sheet hung from the ceiling. The Power. Of course.
"Everybody’s awake," Elayne said, handing her a robe. She already had one over her own shift. "A few bruises and scrapes, one or two nasty cuts to be seen to when there’s time, and I think everybody is going to have bad dreams for a few days, but that’s the extent of it. Here." Screams and shouts still rang through the night. Satina jumped again as Elayne let the sheet fall, but it just lay there on the floor. The overturned bed shifted, though, creaking. Elayne bent over the groaning women on the bed. "I think they’re dizzy, mainly. Satina, help me get them on their feet."
Nynaeve glowered at the robe in her hands. Well they might be dizzy, spun about like tops. Light, but she was useless. Rushing in like a fool to take charge. Without the Power, she was just useless.
"Nynaeve, could you give me a hand?" Elayne held a swaying Emara upright, while Satina was more than half-carrying Ronelle to the door. "I think Emara’s going to sick up, and it better be outside. I think the chamber pots are broken." The smell said she was right. Pottery grated against the floor, trying to slither out from under the overturned bed.
Nynaeve thrust her arms angrily into her robe. She could sense the Source now, a warm glow just out of sight, but she deliberately ignored it. She had done without the Power for years. She could do without it now. Lifting Emara’s free arm over her shoulder, she helped guide the moaning woman toward the street. They almost made it.
When they got outside after wiping Emara’s mouth, everyone else was already huddled together in front of the house in robes or whatever they had slept in. The still full moon, hanging in a clear sky, gave a bright light. People were spilling out of the other houses in a bedlam of bellows and shrieks. One board in a fence rattled, then another. A bucket suddenly went bouncing down the street. A cart loaded with firewood abruptly rolled forward, shafts plowing shallow furrows in the hard ground. Smoke began to rise a house down the way, and voices began shouting for water.
The dark shape of someone lying in the street drew Nynaeve. One of the nightwatchmen, by the flickering lantern near his outstretched hand. She could see his staring eyes glittering in the moonlight, the blood covering his face, the dent in the side of his head where something had struck him like an axe. She felt his throat for a pulse anyway. She wanted to howl with fury. People should die after a long life, in their own beds, surrounded by family and friends. Anything else was waste. Pure miserable waste!
"So you’ve found saidar tonight, Nynaeve. Good."
Nynaeve jumped, and stared up at Anaiya. She did hold saidar, she realized. And useless even with it. Rising, she wearily dusted her knees and tried not to look at the dead man. If she had been quicker, could it have made a difference?
The glow of the Power surrounded Anaiya, but not only her; the single light enveloped as well two more fully clothed Aes Sedai, an Accepted in a robe, and three novices, two in their shifts. One of those in her shift was Nicola. Nynaeve could see other glowing groups, dozens and dozens of them, moving in the street. Some seemed all Aes Sedai, but most not.
"Open yourself to linking," Anaiya went on. "And you, Elayne, and… What is wrong with Emara and Ronelle?" On learning they were just dizzy, she muttered something under her breath, then told them to find a circle and link with it as soon as their
heads were steady. Hurriedly she chose out four more Accepted from the cluster around Elayne. "Sammael — if it is him instead of one of the others — will learn we are far from helpless. Quickly now. Embrace the Source, but hold yourself at the point of embracing. You are open and yielding."
"This isn’t one of the Forsaken," Nynaeve began, but the motherly Aes Sedai cut her off firmly.
"Don’t argue, child, just open yourself. We have expected an attack, if not exactly like this, and planned for it. Quickly, child. There is no time to squander on idle chatter."
Snapping her mouth shut, Nynaeve tried to put herself on that brink where you embraced saidar, on the moment of surrender. It was not easy. Twice she felt the Power flow not just into her, but through her into Anaiya, and twice it snapped back. Anaiya’s mouth tightened; she stared at Nynaeve as though thinking she did it on purpose. The third time was like being seized by the scruff of the neck. Saidar swept through Nynaeve to Anaiya, and when she attempted to pull back — it was her, she realized, not the flow itself — her flow was held, melting into a larger.
A sense of awe came over her. She found herself looking at the faces of the others, wondering if they felt the same. She was a part of something more than herself, greater than herself. Not just the One Power. Emotions tumbled in her head, fear and hope and relief — and yes, awe, more than any other — a sense of calm that had to come from the Aes Sedai, and she could not tell which emotions were hers. It should have been chilling, but she felt closer to these women than she could have to any sister, as if they were all one flesh. A lanky Gray named Ashmanaille smiled warmly at her, seemingly recognizing her thoughts.
Nynaeve’s breath caught as it occurred to her that she no longer felt angry. Anger had vanished, swallowed in wonder. Yet somehow, now that control had passed to the Blue sister, the flow of saidar continued. Her eyes fell on Nicola and found no sisterly smile, only that considering study. Reflexively Nynaeve tried to pull back from the link, and nothing happened. Until Anaiya broke the circle she was part of it, and that was that.
Elayne joined much more easily, first slipping the silver bracelet into her robe’s pocket. Cold sweat broke out on Nynaeve’s face. What might have happened had Elayne entered the link already linked to Moghedien by the a’dam? She had no notion, which only made the question worse. Nicola frowned from Nynaeve to Elayne. Surely she could not separate out which emotions were which, not when Nynaeve could not tell her own. The final two were brought into the circle just as easily, Shimoku, a pretty dark-eyed Kandori who had become Accepted just before the Tower divided, and Calindin, a Taraboner with her black hair in a multitude of thin braids who had been Accepted for a good ten years. A woman little more than a novice and another who struggled for every scrap she learned, but they had no trouble linking.
Suddenly Nicola spoke, sounding half-asleep. "The lion sword, the dedicated spear, she who sees beyond. Three on the boat, and he who is dead yet lives. The great battle done, but the world not done with battle. The land divided by the return, and the guardians balance the servants. The future teeters on the edge of a blade."
Anaiya stared at her. "What was that, child?"
Nicola blinked. "Did I say something, Aes Sedai?" she asked weakly. "I feel… peculiar."
"Well, if you’re going to be sick," Anaiya said briskly, "get it over with. Linking takes some women funny the first time. We have no time to coddle your stomach." As if to prove it, she gathered her skirts and started down the street. "Stay close, now, all of you. And sing out if you see something that needs dealing with."
That was hardly a problem. People milled about in the streets and things moved. Doors slammed and windows banged open with no one touching them. Crashes and splinterings came from inside the houses. Pots, tools, stones, anything loose, might leap or dart at any moment. A stout cook in her shift snagged a hurtling bucket out of the air with a nearly hysterical laugh, but when a pale lean fellow in his smallclothes tried to knock away a stick of firewood, the result was the crack of his arm breaking. Ropes writhed their way about legs and arms, and even people’s clothes began to crawl. They found a hairy man with his shirt wrapped around his head, flailing about so hard he kept at bay those who were trying to peel it away before it smothered him. A woman who had managed to pull on a dress if not fasten it up clung to the thatch on the edge of a roof, shrieking at the top of her lungs as the dress tried to haul her across the house, or maybe into the sky.
Dealing with these things proved no more problem than finding them. The flows of Power Anaiya wielded through the link — and those from other circles — would have had no trouble stopping a herd of charging bulls, much less a kettle that took it in mind to fly. And once a thing was stopped, whether by the Power or by hand, it seldom stirred again. There were just so many of them. There was not even time to stop for Healing unless a life was in danger; bruises, bleeding and broken bones had to wait while another fence-board was slapped to the ground, hopefully before it split a head; another barrel halted in its wild rolling, before it broke a leg.
A sense of frustration grew in Nynaeve. So many things to quell; all small, but a man with his skull cracked by a frying pan or a woman strangled by her own shift was as dead as someone struck down by the Power. It was not just her frustration; she thought it came from every woman in the circle, even the Aes Sedai. But all she could do was march along with the others, watch Anaiya weave the combination of their flows to battle a thousand small dangers. Nynaeve lost herself in being a conduit, in being one with a dozen other women.
Finally Anaiya halted, frowning. The link dissolving caught Nynaeve by surprise. For a moment she sagged where she stood, staring uncomprehendingly. Moans and weeping had replaced screams and shouts; the palely lit street was still except for people trying to help the injured. By the moon, less than an hour had passed, but it seemed to Nynaeve like ten. Her back ached where the stool had hit her, her knees wobbled, her eyes felt scrubbed. She yawned so hard she thought her ears would pop.
"Not at all what I expected from one of the Forsaken," Anaiya muttered only half under her breath. She sounded tired too, but she launched right into the next thing to be done, catching Nicola by the shoulder. "You can hardly stand. Bed for you. Off you go, child. I want to speak to you first thing in the morning, before breakfast. Angla, you stay; you can link again and lend a little strength for the Healing. Lanita, bed."
"It wasn’t the Forsaken," Nynaeve said. Mumbled, really. Light, she was tired. "It was a bubble of evil." The three Aes Sedai stared at her. For that matter, so did the rest of the Accepted, except for Elayne, and the novices too. Even Nicola, who had not yet gone. For once, Nynaeve did not care how much the woman weighed her with her eyes; she was too sleepy to care.
"We saw one in Tear," Elayne said, "in the Stone." Only the aftermath, really, but that was closer than either of them had ever hoped to be again. "If Sammael attacked us, he wouldn’t toss sticks about." Ashmanaille exchanged unreadable glances with Bharatine, a Green who managed to make rail-thin look gracefully slender and a long nose look elegant.
Anaiya never flickered an eyelid. "You seem to have plenty of energy left, Elayne. You can help with the Healing, too. And you, Nynaeve… You’ve lost it again, haven’t you? Well, you look as if you ought to be carried to bed, but you will have to find your own way. Shimoku, stand up and go to bed, child. Calindin, you come with me."
"Anaiya Sedai," Nynaeve said carefully, "Elayne and I found something tonight. If we could speak to you alo— "
"Tomorrow, child. To bed with you. Now, before you fall down." Anaiya did not even wait to see whether she was obeyed. Drawing Calindin after her, she strode to a groaning man lying with his head in a woman’s lap and bent over him. Ashmanaille pulled Elayne another way, and Bharatine took Angla a third. Before she vanished into the crowd, Elayne looked over her shoulder at Nynaeve and shook her head slightly.
Well, perhaps this was not the best time or place to bring up the bowl and Ebou Dar. There
had been something odd in Anaiya’s reaction, as though she would be disappointed to learn this truly had not been an attack by the Forsaken. Why? She was too tired to think straight. Anaiya might have controlled the flows, but saidar had passed through Nynaeve for a good hour, enough to weary someone who had had a good night’s sleep.
Swaying, Nynaeve caught sight of Theodrin. The Domani woman limped along with a pair of white-clad novices at her side, pausing where someone seemed to have an injury her skill at Healing could handle. She did not see Nynaeve.
I will go to bed, Nynaeve thought sullenly, Anaiya Sedai told me to. Why had Anaiya seemed disappointed? Some thought nuzzled at the corner of her mind, but she was too sleepy to catch it. Her steps dragged, nearly stumbling on level ground. She would go to sleep, and Theodrin could make of it what she wanted.
Chapter 15
(Spears and Shield)
A Pile of Sand
Egwene’s eyes opened, stared at nothing. For a moment she lay on her bedding, idly fingering the Great Serpent ring on its thong around her neck. Wearing it on her hand caused too many odd looks. Easier to fit in as a student of the Wise Ones if no one thought of her as Aes Sedai. Which she was not, of course. She was Accepted, yet had pretended to be Aes Sedai so long, she sometimes almost forgot that she was not.
A bit of early sunlight crept in at the door flap, barely lighting the tent’s interior. She might as well not have slept at all, and her temples were throbbing. Since the day Lanfear had nearly killed her and Aviendha, the day the Forsaken and Moiraine had killed each other, her head always hurt after a visit to Tel’aran’rhiod, though never enough to be a real bother. Anyway, back home Nynaeve had taught her something of herbs, and she had managed to find a few of the right sort here in Cairhien. Sleepwell root would make her drowsy — or maybe, as weary she was, it might put her under for hours — but it would clear any vestige of a headache.
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