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For countless years the second test faced by an Aiel woman who wanted to be a Wise One had been to enter the array of glittering glass columns, seeing exactly what the men saw. More women survived it than men – Bair said it was because women were tougher, Amys that those too weak to survive were wi
The first test, the first wi
A spoonful of hope and a cup of despair, she thought.
"I do not like seeing you like this," Lan said. From Mandarb's back and his own height, he looked down on her, disquiet creasing the corners of his eyes. For him that was near tears of frustration from another man.
Aiel streamed by on both sides of their horses, and gai'shain with pack animals. Moiraine was startled to realize that Kadere's water wagons had already gone by; she had not realized she had been staring at the plaza for so long.
"Like what?" she asked, turning her mare to join the throng. Rand and his escort were already out of the city.
"Worried," he said bluntly, no readable expression on that stone-carved face now. "Afraid. I've never seen you afraid, not when we had Trollocs and Myrddraal swarming over us, not even when you learned the Forsaken were loose and Sammael was sitting almost on top of us. Is the end coming?"
She gave a start, and immediately wished she had not. He was looking straight ahead over his stallion's ears, but the man never missed anything. Sometimes she thought he could see a leaf fall behind his back. "Do you mean Tarmon Gai'don? A redbird in Seleisin knows as well as I. The Light send, not so long as any of the seals remain unbroken." The pair she had were on one of Kadere's wagons, too, each packed by itself in a cask stuffed with wool. A different wagon than the redstone doorframe; she had made sure of that.
"What else could I mean?" he asked slowly, still not looking at her, and making her wish she had bitten her tongue. "You have become – impatient. I can remember when you could wait weeks for one tiny scrap of information, one word, without twitching a finger, but now —" He did look at her then, a blue-eyed gaze that would have intimidated most women. And most men as well. "The oath you gave to the boy, Moiraine. Whatever under the Light possessed you?"
"He has been drawing further and further away from me, Lan, and I must be close to him. He needs whatever guidance I can give, and I will do everything short of sharing his bed to see that he gets it." The rings had told her that that would be disaster. Not that she had ever considered it – the very idea still shocked her! – but in the rings it was something she would or could have considered in the future. It was a measure of her growing desperation, no doubt, and in the rings she had seen that it would bring ruination on everything. She wished she could remember how – there were keys to Rand al'Thor in anything she could learn about him – but only the simple fact of calamity remained in her mind.
"Perhaps it will help your humility grow, if he tells you to fetch his slippers and light his pipe."
She stared at him. Could that be a joke? If so, it was not amusing. She had never found that humility served very well in any situation. Siuan claimed that growing up in the Sun Palace in Cairhien had put arrogance deeply into Moiraine's bones, where she could not even see it – something she firmly denied – but for all that Siuan was a Tairen fisherman's daughter, she could match any queen stare for stare, and to her arrogance meant opposition to her own plans.
If Lan was attempting jokes, however feeble and wrongheaded, he was changing. For nearly twenty years he had followed her, and saved her life more times than she cared to count, often at great risk to his own. Always he had accounted his life a small thing, valuable only for her need of it; some said he wooed death the way a bridegroom wooed his bride. She had never held his heart, and never felt jealousy toward the women who seemed to throw themselves at his feet. He had long claimed that he had no heart. But he had found one this past year, found it when a woman tied it on a string to hang around her neck.
He denied her, of course. Not his love for Nynaeve al'Meara, once a Wisdom in the Two Rivers and now an Accepted of the White Tower, but that he could ever have her. He had two things, he said, a sword that would not break and a war that could not end; he would never gift a bride with those. That, at least, Moiraine had taken care of, though he would not know how until it was done. If he did, he would very probably try to change matters, stubborn fool man that he could be.
"This arid land seems to have withered your own humility, al'Lan Mandragoran. I shall have to find some water to make it grow again."
"My humility is honed to razor sharpness," he told her dryly. "You never let it grow too dull." Wetting a white scarf from his leather water bottle, he handed her the sodden cloth. She tied it around her temples without comment. The sun was begi
The thick column snaked up the barren side of Chaendaer, its tail still in Rhuidean when its head had crested the slope, then down onto rough, hilly flats dotted with rock spires and flat-topped buttes, some streaked with red or ocher through the gray or brown. The air was so clear that Moiraine could see for miles, even after they were down off Chaendaer. Great natural arches reared, and in every direction jagged mountains clawed at the sky. Dry gullies and hollows split a land sparsely dotted with low, thorny bushes and leafless spiny plants. The rare tree, gnarled and stunted, usually bore spines or thorns as well. The sun made it an oven. A hard land that had shaped a hard people. But Lan was not the only one changing, or being changed. She wished she could see what Rand would make of the Aiel in the end. There was a long journey ahead, for everyone.