“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 hap?pening, but what did it mean? And who could influence the choice of Sitters inevery 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 Sitterswere 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, thensomeone 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 pro?cess 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 ele?gant 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. Unfor?tunately, 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, theWhiteTowerseemed 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 confirma?tion 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 polish?ing 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 run?ning 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 tohis death. Better to lethim go, forgethim entirely. As easy as forgetting her own name. And shewould bond him. She knew that. Of course, she could not bond the man without know?ing where he was, without having her hands on him, so it all came full circle. Men were . . . abother!
Pausing to press her fingers against her temples - it did noth?ing 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 delivered as proof they were using Shadowspawn, horrifying tales of women being tested to see whether they should be collared asdamane, 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 resis?tance 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 theBlight 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
