“I see,” Egwene said slowly. She realized that she was massaging the side of her head. The throb behind her eyes beat on. It would grow stronger. It always did. By nightfall, she was going to regret having sent Halima away. Bringing her hand down firmly, she moved the leather folder in front of her a half inch to the left, then slid it back. “What of the rest? They had six Sitters to replace.”
“Ferane Neheran was raised for the White,” Siuan admitted, “and Suana Dragand for the Yellow. They’ve both been in the Hall before. It was only a partial list, and I didn’t get to read it all.” Her back straightened, and her chin shot out stubbornly. “One or two raised before time would be unusual enough—it happens, but not often—but this makes eleven—maybe twelve, but eleven for sure—between us and the Tower. I don’t believe in coincidences that big. When the fishmongers are all buying at the same price, you can bet they were all drinking at the same inn last night.”
“You don’t have to convince me any more, Siuan.” With a sigh, Egwene sat back, automatically catching the chair leg that always tried to fold when she did that. Clearly, something odd was happening, but what did it mean? And who could influence the choice of Sitters in every Ajah? Every Ajah except the Blue, at least; they had chosen one new Sitter, but Moria had been Aes Sedai well over a hundred years. And maybe the Red was not affected; no one knew what changes if any had been made in the Red Sitters. The Black might be behind it, but what could they gain, unless all of those too-young Sitters were Black? That seemed impossible in any case; if the Black Ajah had had that much influence, the Hall would have been all Darkfriends long ago. Yet if there was a pattern and coincidence would not hold, then someone had to be at the heart of it. Just thinking about the possibilities, the impossibilities, made the dull pain behind her eyes grow a little sharper.
“If this turns out to be happenstance after all, Siuan, you’re going to regret ever thinking you saw a puzzle.” She forced a smile saying that, to take out any sting. An Amyrlin had to be careful with her words. “Now that you’ve convinced me there is a puzzle, I want you to solve it. Who is responsible, and what are they after? Until we know that, we don’t know anything.”
“Is that all you want?” Siuan said dryly. “Before supper, or after?”
“After will have to do, I suppose,” Egwene snapped, then took a deep breath at the abashed look on the other woman’s face. There was no point taking her headache out on Siuan. An Amyrlin’s words had power, and sometimes consequences; she had to remember that. “As soon as you can would be very good, though,” she said in a milder voice. “I know you’ll be as quick as you can.”
Chagrined or not, Siuan seemed to understand that Egwene’s outburst came from more than her own sarcasm. Despite her youthful appearance, she had years of practice at reading faces. “Shall I go find Halima?” she said, half rising. The lack of tartness attached to the woman’s name was a measure of her concern. “It won’t take a minute.”
“If I give way for every ache, I’ll never get anything done,” Egwene said, opening the folder. “Now, what do you have for me today?” She kept her hands on the papers, though, to stop from rubbing her head.
One of Siuan’s tasks each morning was to fetch what the Ajahs were willing to share from their networks of eyes-and-ears, along with whatever individual sisters had passed on to their Ajahs and the Ajahs had decided to pass on to Egwene. It was a strange process of sieving, yet it still gave a fair picture of the world when added to what Siuan put in. She had managed to hold on to the agents that had been hers as Amyrlin by the simple expedient of refusing to tell anyone who they were despite every effort by the Hall, and in the end, no one could gainsay that those eyes-and-ears were the Amyrlin’s, and that they should by rights report to Egwene. Oh, there had been no end of grumbling over it, and still was on occasion, but no one could deny the facts.
As usual, the first report came from neither the Ajahs nor Siuan, but Leane, written on thin sheets of paper in a flowing elegant hand. Egwene could not see exactly why, but you could never doubt that anything Leane wrote had been written by a woman. Those pages Egwene held to the table-lamp’s flame one by one as soon as she read them, letting the paper burn almost to her fingers, then crumpling the ash. It would hardly do for her and Leane to behave like near-strangers in public then allow one of her reports to fall into the wrong hands.
Very few sisters were aware that Leane had eyes-and-ears inside Tar Valon itself. She might have been the only sister who did. It was a human failing to watch keenly what was happening down the street while ignoring what lay right at your feet, and the Light knew Aes Sedai had as many human failings as anyone else. Unfortunately, Leane had little new to communicate.
Her people in the city complained of filthy streets that were increasingly dangerous after dark and little safer by daylight. Once crime had been all but unknown in Tar Valon, but now the Tower Guards had abandoned the streets to patrol the harbors and the bridge towers. Except for collecting the customs duties and buying supplies, both done through intermediaries, the White Tower seemed to have shut itself off from the city completely. The great doors that allowed the public to enter the Tower remained shut and barred, and no one had seen a sister outside the Tower to know her as Aes Sedai since the siege began, if not earlier. All confirmation of what Leane had reported before. The last page made Egwene’s eyebrows rise, though. Rumor in the streets said Gareth Bryne had found a secret way into the city and would appear inside the walls with his whole army any day.
“Leane would have said if anyone had breathed a word that sounded like they meant gateways,” Siuan said quickly when she saw Egwene’s expression. She had read all of these reports already, of course, and knew what Egwene was seeing by which page she held. Shifting on the unsteady stool, Siuan almost fell off onto the carpets, she was paying so little heed. It did not slow her down a hair, though. “And you can be sure Gareth hasn’t let anything slip,” she went on while still righting herself. “Not that any of his soldiers are fool enough to desert to the city now, but he knows when to keep his mouth shut. He just has the reputation for attacking where he can’t possibly be. He’s done the impossible often enough that people expect him to. That’s all.”
Hiding a smile, Egwene held the paper mentioning Lord Gareth to the flame and watched it curl and blacken. A few months past, Siuan would have offered an acid comment about the man instead of praise. He would have been “Gareth bloody Bryne,” not Gareth. She could not possibly miss doing his laundry and polishing his boots, but Egwene had seen her staring at him on those rare times when he came to the Aes Sedai camp. Staring, and then running away if he so much as glanced at her. Siuan! Running away! Siuan had been Aes Sedai for more than twenty years, and Amyrlin for ten, but she had no more idea how to deal with being in love than a duck had about shearing sheep.
Egwene crumbled the ash and dusted her hands together, her smile fading. She had no room to talk about Siuan. She was in love, too, but she did not even know where in the world Gawyn was, or what to do if she learned. He had his duty to Andor, and she hers to the Tower. And the one way to bridge that chasm, bonding him, might lead to his death. Better to let him go, forget him entirely. As easy as forgetting her own name. And she would bond him. She knew that. Of course, she could not bond the man without knowing where he was, without having her hands on him, so it all came full circle. Men were . . . a bother!
Pausing to press her fingers against her temples—it did nothing to lessen the pulsing pain—she put Gawyn out of her mind. As far out as she could. She thought she had a foretaste of what it was like having a Warder; there was always something of Gawyn in the back of her head. And liable to kick its way into her consciousness at the most inconvenient time. Concentrating on the business at hand, she picked up the next sheet.
Much of the world had vanished, as far as eyes-and-ears were concerned. Little news came from the lands held by the Seanchan, and that divided between fanciful descriptions of Seanchan beasts de
livered as proof they were using Shadowspawn, horrifying tales of women being tested to see whether they should be collared as damane, and depressing stories of . . . acceptance. The Seanchan, it seemed, were no worse rulers than any others and better than some—as long as you were not a woman who could channel—and all too many people appeared to have given up thoughts of resistance once it became clear the Seanchan would let them go on with their lives. Arad Doman was almost as bad, producing nothing but rumors, admitted as such by the sisters who wrote the reports but included just to show the state the country was in. King Alsalam was dead. No, he had begun channeling and gone mad. Rodel Ituralde, the Great Captain, also was dead, or he had usurped the throne, or was invading Saldaea. The Council of Merchants were all dead, as well, or had fled the country, or begun a civil war over who the next king was to be. Any of those might have been true. Or none. The Ajahs were accustomed to seeing everything, but now a third of the world had been enveloped in dense fog, with only the tiniest gaps. At least, if there were any clearer views, no Ajah had deigned to pass on what they saw there.
Another problem was that the Ajahs saw different things as having paramount importance, and largely ignored anything else. The Greens, for example, were particularly concerned over tales of Borderland armies near New Braem, hundreds of leagues from the Blight they were supposed to be guarding. Their report talked of the Borderlanders and only the Borderlanders, as if something had to be done and done now. Not that they suggested anything, or so much as hinted, yet frustrations came through in the cramped, hasty handwriting that spidered urgently across the page.
Egwene had the truth of that situation from Elayne, but she was content to let the Greens gnash their teeth for the moment, since Siuan had revealed why they were not rushing off to set matters straight. According to her agent in New Braem, the Borderlanders were accompanied by fifty or a hundred sisters, perhaps two hundred. The number of Aes Sedai might be uncertain, and it must be wildly inflated, of course, but their presence was a fact the Greens had to be aware of, though the reports they sent to Egwene never mentioned them. No Ajah had mentioned those sisters in their reports. In the end, though, there was little difference between two hundred sisters and two. No one could be certain who those sisters were or why they were there, yet poking a nose in would surely be seen as interfering. It seemed strange that they could be engaged in a war between Aes Sedai and still be held back from interfering with another sister by custom, but thankfully, it was so.
“At least they don’t suggest sending anyone to Caemlyn.” Egwene blinked, the pain behind her eyes sharpened by following the tight letters.
Siuan gave a derisive snort. “Why should they? As far as they know, Elayne is letting Merilille and Vandene guide her, so they’re sure they’ll get their Aes Sedai queen, and a Green at that. Besides, as long the Asha’man stay out of Caemlyn, no one wants to take the chance of stirring them up. The way things stand, we might as well try pulling wasp-jellies out of the water with our bare hands, and even the Greens know it. Anyway, that won’t stop some sister, Green or otherwise, from dropping into Caemlyn. Just a quiet visit to see one of her eyes-and-ears. Or to have a dress made, or buy a saddle, or the Light knows why else.”
“Even the Greens?” Egwene said tartly. Everyone thought of Browns being this way and Whites that, even when it was demonstrably not so, yet sometimes she bristled a little at hearing Greens lumped together as if they were all the same woman. Maybe she did think of herself as a Green, or as having been one, which was silly. The Amyrlin was of all Ajahs and none—she adjusted the stole on her shoulders, reminding herself of the fact represented by those seven stripes—and she had never belonged to one in the first place. Yet she did feel a—not fondness; that was too strong—a sense of sameness between herself and Green sisters. “How many sisters are unaccounted for, Siuan? Even the weakest can Travel wherever they want, linked, and I wish I knew where they went.”
For a moment, Siuan frowned in thought. “About twenty, I think,” she said finally. “Maybe a few less. The number changes day to day. No one keeps track, really. No sister would stand still for it.” She leaned forward, carefully balancing herself this time when the uneven legs made her stool lurch. “You’ve juggled matters beautifully, so far, Mother, but it can’t last. Eventually, the Hall will find out everything that’s going on in Caemlyn. They might accept keeping the Seanchan prisoners secret—that will be seen as Vandene’s business, or Merilille’s—but they already know there are Sea Folk in Caemlyn, and they’ll learn about the bargain with them sooner or later. And the Kin, if not your plans for them.” Siuan snorted again, though faintly. She was not certain how she herself felt about the idea of Aes Sedai retiring into the Kin, much less how other sisters would take to the notion. “My eyes-and-ears haven’t picked up a glimmer, yet, but somebody’s will, as sure as certain. You can’t delay much longer, or we’ll find ourselves wading through a school of silverpike.”
“One of these days,” Egwene muttered, “I’ll have to see these silverpike you’re always talking about.” She held up a hand as the other woman opened her mouth. “One day. The agreement with the Sea Folk will cause problems,” she confessed, “but when the Ajahs hear hints, they won’t realize right away what they’re hearing. Sisters teaching Sea Folk in Caemlyn? It’s unheard of, but who is going to ask questions or interfere, against all custom? I’m sure there will be all sorts of grumbling, maybe some questions called in the Hall, but before it comes out that there is a bargain, I will have introduced my plan for the Kin.”
“You think that won’t sharpen their teeth?” Shifting her shawl, Siuan barely bothered to hide her incredulity. In fact, she scowled with it.
“It will cause argument,” Egwene allowed judiciously. A considerable understatement. It would cause an uproar was what it would do, once the whole was known. Likely as close to a riot as had ever been seen among Aes Sedai. But the Tower had been dwindling for a thousand years now, if not more, and she planned to put an end to that. “But I do intend to go slowly. Aes Sedai may be reluctant to talk about age, Siuan, but they’ll figure out soon enough that swearing on the Oath Rod shortens our lives by half at least. No one wants to die before they must.”
“If they’re convinced there really is a Kinswoman who’s six hundred years old,” Siuan said in grudging tones, and Egwene sighed with vexation. That was another thing the other woman was uncertain about, the Kin’s claims of longevity. She valued Siuan’s advice, valued that she did not just say what Egwene wanted to hear, but at times the woman seemed to drag her heels as hard as Romanda or Lelaine.
“If need be, Siuan,” she said irritably, “I’ll just let the sisters talk to a few women a hundred years or more older than any of them. They may try to dismiss them as wilders and liars, but Reanne Corly can prove she was in the Tower, and when. So can others. With luck, I’ll convince the sisters to accept being freed of the Three Oaths so they can retire into the Kin before they ever learn there’s a bargain with the Atha’an Miere. And once they accept any sister being freed of the Oaths, it won’t be nearly as hard to convince them to let the Sea Folk sisters go. Beside that, the rest of that agreement is small turnips. As you keep saying, skill and a deft hand are necessary to get anything done in the Hall, but luck is absolutely required. Well, I’ll be as skillful and deft as I can be, and as for luck, the odds seem to be in my favor for once.”
Siuan grimaced and hemmed and hawed, but she had to agree in the end. She even agreed that Egwene might pull it off, with luck, and timing. Not that she was convinced about the Kin or the agreement with the Atha’an Miere either one, but what Egwene proposed was so unprecedented that it seemed the greater part of it might pass the Hall before they realized what was falling on them. Egwene was willing to settle for that. Whatever was laid before the Hall, almost always enough Sitters stood in opposition to make finding a consensus hard work at best, and nothing was done in the Hall without at least the lesser consensus and usually not without the
greater. It seemed to her that most dealings with the Hall consisted of convincing them to do what they did not want to. There was certainly no reason for this to be any different.
While the Greens concentrated on the Borderlanders, the Grays focused south at present. Every Ajah was fascinated by the reports from Illian and Tear of large numbers of wilders among the Sea Folk, which they found interesting, if true, though there seemed strong doubt that it could be true, or else sisters would have known about it before this. After all, how could such a thing be hidden? No one mentioned that they had just accepted what they saw on the surface and never looked deeper. The Grays, though, were fascinated by the continued Seanchan threat to Illian and the recently begun siege of the Stone of Tear. Wars and threats of war always mesmerized Grays, since they were dedicated to ending strife. And to extending their influence, of course; every time the Grays stopped a war with a treaty, they increased the influence of all Aes Sedai, but of Grays most of all. The Seanchan seemed beyond negotiation, however, at least by Aes Sedai, and the Grays’ outraged sense of being thwarted came through in curt words about Seanchan incursions across the border and the increasing forces being gathered by Lord Gregorin, the Steward in Illian for the Dragon Reborn, a title that was a matter of some concern in itself. Tear had its own Steward for the Dragon Reborn, the High Lord Darlin Sisnera, and he was besieged in the Stone by nobles who refused to accept Rand. It was a very strange siege. The Stone had its own docks and Darlin’s enemies could not cut off supplies even holding the rest of the city as they did, and they seemed content to sit and wait in any event. Or perhaps they just could not see what to do next. Only the Aiel had ever taken the Stone by assault, and no one had ever starved it out. The Grays had some hopes in Tear.
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