The Wheel of Time

by Robert Jordan

  The Atha’an Miere clustered with Renaile again, most, like her, glaring hungrily at the Aes Sedai and the Bowl. The last three women stood at the rear, the apprentices with the air of those uncertain whether they had a right to be there at all, Rainyn folding her arms in imitation of Renaile, yet doing little better than the other two. The Windfinder on a darter, the least of the Sea Folk vessels, likely seldom found herself in company with the Windfinder to her clan Wavemistress, not to mention the Windfinder to the Mistress of the Ships. Rainyn was easily as strong as Lelaine or Romanda, and Metarra on a level with Elayne herself, while Talaan. . . . Talaan, so meek in her red linen blouse, with eyes that seemed permanently downcast, came very close to Nynaeve. Very close. More, Elayne knew she herself had not yet reached her full potential, and neither had Nynaeve. How close were Metarra and Talaan? She had grown accustomed to knowing that only Nynaeve and the Forsaken were stronger than she. Well, Egwene, but she had been forced, and her own potential, and Aviendha’s, matched Egwene’s. So much for complacency, she told herself ruefully. Lini would have said it was what she deserved for taking things for granted.

  Laughing softly at herself, Elayne turned back to check on Aviendha, but the Knitting Circle stood rooted to one spot in front of the gateway, twitching at cold stares from Careane and Sareitha. All but Sumeko, and she did not move away either for all that she had met the sisters’ gazes. Kirstian appeared ready to burst into tears.

  Suppressing a sigh, Elayne herded the Kinswomen out of the way of the stable folk waiting to bring the horses through. The Knitting Circle went along like sheep—she was the shepherd, Merilille and the rest the wolves—and they would have moved faster if not for Ispan.

  Famelle, one of only four among the Knitting Circle without a touch of gray or white in her hair, and Eldase, a fierce-eyed woman when she was not looking at an Aes Sedai, held Ispan by the arms. They could not seem to decide between holding her firmly enough to keep her upright and not clutching her too tightly, with the result that the Black sister moved in a bobbing fashion, sagging halfway to her knees when they loosened their grips, then pulled back up just before she fell completely.

  “Forgive me, Aes Sedai,” Famelle kept murmuring to Ispan with a faint Taraboner accent. “Oh, I am sorry, Aes Sedai.” Eldase winced and gave a little moan every time Ispan stumbled. Just as if Ispan had not helped murder two of their number and the Light alone knew how many others. They were fussing over a woman who was going to die. The killings in the White Tower that Ispan had conspired at were enough to condemn her by themselves.

  “Take her over there somewhere,” Elayne told them, waving away from the gateway into the clearing. They obeyed, bobbing curtsies and nearly dropping Ispan, murmuring apologies to Elayne and to the hooded prisoner. Reanne and the rest scurried along, anxiously eyeing the sisters around Merilille.

  Almost immediately the war of glares started up again, the Aes Sedai at the Kinswomen, the Knitting Circle at the Windfinders, and the Atha’an Miere at anybody their eyes fell on. Elayne clamped her teeth shut. She was not going to shout at them. Nynaeve always got better results with yells, anyway. But she did want to shake some sense into every one of them, shake them until their teeth rattled. Including Nynaeve, who was supposed to be getting everyone organized instead of staring into the trees. But what if it had been Rand who was going to die unless she could find a way to save him?

  Suddenly tears trembled on the edge of falling, stinging her eyes. Rand was going to die, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Peel the apple in your hand, girl, not the one on the tree, Lini’s thin voice seemed to whisper in her ear. Tears are for after; they just waste time before.

  “Thank you, Lini,” Elayne murmured. Her old nurse was an irritating woman sometimes, never admitting that any of her charges had really grown up, but her advice was always good. Just because Nynaeve was slacking her duties was no reason for Elayne to slack hers.

  Servants had started trotting horses through right on the heels of the Knitting Circle, beginning with the packhorses. None of those first animals carried anything so frivolous as clothes. They could walk if the riding horses needed to be abandoned on the other side of the gateway, and wear what they stood up in if the rest of the pack animals had to be left behind, but what was on those first horses could not be left for the Forsaken. Elayne motioned the leather-cheeked woman leading the very first to follow her aside, out of the way of the others.

  Untying and tossing back the stiff canvas cover on one of the wide wicker panniers revealed a great heap of what appeared to be rubbish stuffed in every which way, right up to the top, some of it wrapped in cloth that was falling to pieces. The greater part of it probably was rubbish. Embracing saidar, Elayne began sorting. A rusted breastplate quickly went onto the ground, along with a broken table leg, a cracked platter, a badly dented pewter pitcher, and a bolt of rotted, unidentifiable cloth that almost broke apart in her hands.

  The storeroom where they found the Bowl of the Winds had been stuffed full, things that should have been on a refuse heap jumbled in with more objects of the Power than just the Bowl, some in beetle-riddled casks or chests, some carelessly stacked. For hundreds and hundreds of years the Kin had hidden away all things they found that were connected to the Power, fearful of using them and fearful of delivering them to Aes Sedai. Until that very morning. This was the first chance Elayne had had to see what was worth keeping. The Light send that the Darkfriends had not gotten away with anything important; they had taken some, but certainly less than a quarter of what the room had held, rubbish included. The Light send she found something they could use. People had died to bring these things out of the Rahad.

  She did not channel, just held the Power as she lifted each item. A chipped clay cup, three broken plates, a child’s moth-eaten dress, and an old boot with a hole worn through the side all fell to the ground. A stone carving a little larger than her hand—it felt like stone; it might have been a carving, though it did not exactly look carved, for some reason—all deep blue curves vaguely like roots. It seemed to warm faintly at her touch; it held a . . . resonance . . . to saidar. That was the closest word she could think of. What it was meant to do, she had no idea, but it was a ter’angreal without any doubt. It went on the other side of her, away from the pile of rubbish.

  The heap of refuse continued to grow, but so did the other, if more slowly, things that had nothing in common except the faint warmth and the sense of echoing the Power. A small box that felt like ivory, covered in wavering red and green stripes; she set it down carefully without opening the hinged lid. You could never tell what might trigger a ter’angreal. A black rod no thicker than her little finger, a pace in length, stiff yet so flexible she thought she could have doubled it into a circle. A tiny stoppered vial that might have been crystal, with a dark red liquid inside. The figure of a stout, bearded man with a jolly smile, holding a book; two feet tall, it appeared to be age-darkened bronze and took both of her hands to move. Other things. Most was trash, though. And none was what she truly wanted. Not yet.

  “Is this the time to be doing that?” Nynaeve asked. She straightened hastily from the small cluster of ter’angreal, grimacing and rubbing her hand on her skirt. “That rod feels like . . . pain,” she muttered. The hard-faced woman holding the packhorse’s head blinked at the rod and edged away.

  Elayne eyed the rod—Nynaeve’s occasional impressions about objects she touched could be useful—but she did not stop sorting. There had been too much pain lately to need any more, surely. Not that what Nynaeve sensed was always that straightforward. The rod might have been present when a great deal of pain was caused without being the cause in itself. The pannier was almost empty; some of what was on the other side of the horse would have to be shifted to balance the weight. “If there’s an angreal in this somewhere, Nynaeve, I would like to find it before Moghedien taps one of us on the shoulder.”

  Nynaeve grunted sourly, but she peered into the wicker basket.


  Dropping another table leg—that made three, none of which matched—Elayne spared a glance for the clearing. All of the packhorses were out, and the mounts were coming through the gateway, now, filling the open space between the trees with bustle and confusion. Merilille and the other Aes Sedai already sat their saddles, barely concealing their impatience to be off, while Pol fussed hurriedly with her mistress’s saddlebags, but the Windfinders.

  Graceful afoot, graceful on their ships, they were unused to horses. Renaile was trying to mount from the wrong side, and the gentle bay mare chosen for her danced slow circles around the liveried man who was gripping the bridle with one hand while tugging his hair in frustration with the other and vainly trying to correct the Windfinder. Two of the stablewomen were attempting to hoist Dorile, who served the Wavemistress of Clan Somarin, into her saddle, while a third, holding the gray’s head, wore the tight face of someone trying not to laugh. Rainyn was on the back of a leggy brown gelding, but somehow without either foot in the stirrups or the reins in her hands and having considerable trouble finding any of them. And those three seemed to be having the easiest time of it. Horses whinnied and danced and rolled their eyes, and Windfinders shouted curses in voices that could have been heard over a gale. One of them knocked a serving man flat with her fist, and three more stable folk were trying to catch mounts that had gotten free.

  There was also what she had expected to see, if Nynaeve was no longer keeping her private watch. Lan stood by his black warhorse, Mandarb, dividing his gaze between the treeline, the gateway, and Nynaeve. Birgitte came striding out of the woods shaking her head, and a moment later, Cieryl, trotted from the trees, but with no sense of urgency. There was nothing out there to threaten or inconvenience them.

  Nynaeve was watching her, eyebrows raised high.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Elayne said. Her hand closed on something small, wrapped in rotting cloth that might have been white once. Or brown. She knew immediately what was inside.

  “A good thing for you,” Nynaeve grumbled, not quite far enough under her breath. “I can’t abide women who poke their noses into other people’s business.” Elayne let it pass without so much as a start; she was proud that she did not have to bite her tongue.

  Stripping away the decayed cloth revealed a small amber brooch in the shape of a turtle. It looked like amber, anyway, and it might have been amber once, but when she opened herself to the Source through it, saidar rushed into her, a torrent compared to what she could draw safely on her own. Not a strong angreal, but far better than nothing. With it, she could handle twice as much of the Power as Nynaeve, and Nynaeve herself would do better still. Releasing the extra flow of saidar, she slipped the brooch into her belt pouch with a smile of delight and went back to searching. Where there was one, there might be more. And now that she had one to study, she might be able to reason out how to make an angreal. That was something she had wished for. It was all she could do not to take the brooch out again and begin probing it right there.

  Vandene had been eyeing Nynaeve and her for some time, and now she heeled her slab-sided gelding over to them and dismounted. The groom at the packhorse’s head managed a decent if awkward curtsy, more than she had for Elayne or Nynaeve. “You’re being careful,” Vandene said to Elayne, “and that’s very good. But it might be better to leave these things alone until they’re in the Tower.”

  Elayne’s mouth tightened. In the Tower? Until they could be examined by someone else, was what she meant. Someone older and supposedly more experienced. “I do know what I’m doing, Vandene. I have made ter’angreal, after all. Nobody else living has done that.” She had taught the basics to some sisters, but no one had managed the trick of it by the time she left for Ebou Dar.

  The older Green nodded, flipping her reins idly against the palm of her riding glove. “Martine Janata also knew what she was doing, so I understand,” she said casually. “She was the last sister to really make a business of studying ter’angreal. She did it for over forty years, almost from the time she reached the shawl. She was careful, too, so I was told. Then one day, Martine’s maid found her unconscious on the floor of her sitting room. Burned out.” Even in a conversational tone, those words were a sharp slap. Vandene’s voice did not alter a hair, though. “Her Warder was dead from the shock. Not unusual in cases like that. When Martine came to, three days later, she couldn’t recall what she had been working with. She couldn’t remember the preceding week at all. That was more than twenty-five years ago, and no one since has had the nerve to touch any of the ter’angreal that were in her rooms. Her notes mentioned every last one, and everything she had discovered was innocuous, innocent, even frivolous, but. . . .” Vandene shrugged. “She found something she wasn’t expecting.”

  Elayne peeked at Birgitte, and found Birgitte looking back at her. She did not need to see the worried frown on the other woman’s face; it was mirrored in her mind, in the small patch of her mind that was Birgitte and in the rest. Birgitte felt her worry, and she felt Birgitte’s, until sometimes it was hard to say which was which. She risked more than herself. But she did know what she was doing. More than anyone else there, at least. And even if none of the Forsaken appeared, they needed all the angreal she could find.

  “What happened to Martine?” Nynaeve asked quietly. “Afterward, I mean.” She could seldom hear of anyone being hurt without wanting to Heal them; she wanted to Heal everything.

  Vandene grimaced. She might have been the one to bring up Martine, but Aes Sedai did not like talking about women who had been burned out or stilled. They did not like remembering them. “She vanished once she was well enough to slip out of the Tower,” she said hurriedly. “The important thing to remember is that she was cautious. I never met her, but I’ve been told she treated every ter’angreal as if she had no idea what it might do next, even the one that makes the cloth for Warders’ cloaks, and nobody has ever been able to make that do anything else. She was careful, and it did her no good.”

  Nynaeve laid an arm across the nearly empty pannier. “Maybe you really should,” she began.

  “No-o-o-o!” Merilille shrieked.

  Elayne spun, instinctively opening herself through the angreal again, only half conscious of saidar flooding into Nynaeve and Vandene. The glow of the Power sprang up around every woman in the clearing who could embrace the Source. Merilille was straining forward in her saddle, eyes bulging, one hand reaching toward the gateway. Elayne frowned. There was nothing there except Aviendha, and the last four Warders, startled in the middle of walking away, searching for the threat with swords half-drawn. Then she realized what Aviendha was doing and nearly lost saidar in her shock.

  The gateway trembled as Aviendha carefully picked apart the weave that had made it. It shivered and flexed, the edges wavering. The last flows came loose, and instead of winking out, the opening shimmered, the view through it of the courtyard fading away until it evaporated like mist in the sun.

  “That is impossible!” Renaile said incredulously. An astonished murmur of agreement broke out among the Windfinders. The Kinswomen gaped at Aviendha, mouths working soundlessly.

  Elayne nodded slowly in spite of herself. Clearly it was possible, but one of the first things she had been told as a novice was that never, ever, under any circumstances was she to try what Aviendha had just done. Picking apart a weave, any weave, rather than simply letting it dissipate, could not be done, she had been told, not without inevitable disaster. Inevitable.

  “You fool girl!” Vandene snapped, her face a thunderhead. She strode toward Aviendha dragging her gelding behind. “Do you realize what you almost did? One slip—one!—and there’s no saying what the weave will snap into, or what it will do! You could have completely destroyed everything for a hundred paces! Five hundred! Everything! You could have burned yourself out and—”

  “It was necessary,” Aviendha cut in. A babble erupted from the mounted Aes Sedai crowding around her and Vandene, but she glared at them and raised he
r voice over theirs. “I know the dangers, Vandene Namelle, but it was necessary. Is this another thing you Aes Sedai cannot do? The Wise Ones say any woman can learn, if she is taught, some women more and some less, but any woman, if she can pick out embroidery.” She did not quite sneer. Not quite.

  “This is not embroidery, girl!” Merilille’s voice was deep winter ice. “Whatever so-called training you received among your people, you cannot possibly know what you are playing with! You will promise me—swear to me!—that you will never do this again!”

  “Her name should be in the novice book,” Sareitha said firmly, glaring across the Bowl still held firmly to her bosom. “I’ve always said it. She should be entered in the book.” Careane nodded, her stern gaze measuring Aviendha for a novice dress.

  “That might not be necessary for the moment,” Adeleas told Aviendha, leaning forward in her saddle, “but you must let yourself be guided by us.” The Brown sister’s tone was much milder than the others’, yet she was not making a suggestion.

  A month or so earlier, Aviendha might have begun to wilt under all that Aes Sedai disapproval, but not now. Elayne hurriedly pushed in among the horses before her friend decided to draw the knife she was fondling. Or to do something worse. “Maybe somebody should ask why she thought it was necessary,” she said, slipping an arm around Aviendha’s shoulders as much to keep her arms at her sides as for comfort.

  Aviendha did not quite include her in the exasperated look she gave the other sisters. “This leaves no residue,” she said patiently. Too patiently. “The residues of a weave this large might be read two days from now.”