Elayne felt Egwene tremble as they listened to Moiraine’s dispassionate report, but perhaps some of the trembling was her own. Bubbles of evil drifting through the Pattern. Reflections leaping out of mirrors. Rand a mass of blood and wounds. Almost as an afterthought, Moiraine added that she was sure Perrin and Mat had experienced something of the same, but escaped unharmed. The woman must have ice instead of blood. No, she was heated enough about Rand’s stubbornness. And she wasn’t cold when she spoke of marrying, however much she pretended to be. But now she could have been discussing whether a bolt of silk was the right color for a dress.
“And these … these things will keep on?” Egwene said when Moiraine finished. “Is there nothing you can do to stop it? Or that Rand can do?”
The small blue stone dangling from Moiraine’s hair swung as she shook her head. “Not until he learns to control his abilities. Perhaps not then. I do not know if even he will be strong enough to push the miasma away from himself. At the least, though, he will be better able to defend himself.”
“Can’t you do something to help him?” Nynaeve demanded. “You are the one of us who is supposed to know everything, or pretends to. Can’t you teach him? Some part of it, anyway? And don’t quote proverbs about birds teaching fish to fly.”
“You would know better,” Moiraine replied, “if you had taken the advantage of your studies that you should have. You should know better. You want to know how to use the Power, Nynaeve, but you do not care to learn about the Power. Saidin is not saidar. The flows are different, the ways of weaving are different. The bird has a better chance.”
This time Egwene took a turn at diffusing tension. “What is Rand being stubborn about, now?” Nynaeve opened her mouth, and she added, “He can be stubborn as a stone, sometimes.” Nynaeve shut her mouth with a snap; they all knew how true that was.
Moiraine eyed them, considering. At times, Elayne was not sure how much the Aes Sedai trusted them. Or anyone. “He must move,” the Aes Sedai said at last. “Instead, he sits here, and the Tairens already begin to lose their fear of him. He sits here, and the longer he sits, doing nothing, the more the Forsaken will see his inaction as a sign of weakness. The Pattern moves and flows; only the dead are still. He must act, or he will die. From a crossbow bolt in his back, or poison in his food, or the Forsaken banding together to rip his soul from his body. He must act or die.” Elayne winced at each danger on her list; that they were real only made it worse.
“And you know what he must do, don’t you?” Nynaeve said tightly. “You have this action planned.”
Moiraine nodded. “Would you rather he go haring off alone once more? I dare not risk it. This time he might be dead, or worse, before I find him.”
That was true enough. Rand hardly knew what he was doing. And Elayne was sure Moiraine had no wish to lose the little guidance she still gave him. The little he allowed her to give.
“Will you share your plan for him with us?” Egwene demanded. She was certainly not helping soothe the air now.
“Yes, do,” Elayne said, surprising herself with a cool echo of Egwene’s tone. Confrontation was not her way when it could be avoided; her mother always said it was better to guide people than try to hammer them into line.
If their manner irritated Moiraine, she gave no sign of it. “As long as you understand that you must keep it to yourselves. A plan revealed is a plan doomed to fail. Yes, I see you do understand.”
Elayne certainly did; the plan was dangerous, and Moiraine was not sure it would work.
“Sammael is in Illian,” the Aes Sedai went on. “The Tairens are always as ripe for w
ar with Illian as the other way around. They have been killing each other off and on for a thousand years, and they speak of their chance for it as other men speak of the next feastday. I doubt even knowing of Sammael’s presence would change that, not with the Dragon Reborn to lead them. Tear will follow Rand eagerly enough in that enterprise, and if he brings Sammael down, he—”
“Light!” Nynaeve exclaimed. “You not only want him to start a war, you want him to seek out one of the Forsaken! No wonder he is being stubborn. He is not a fool, for a man.”
“He must face the Dark One in the end,” Moiraine said calmly. “Do you truly think he can avoid the Forsaken now? As for war, there are wars enough without him, and every one worse than useless.”
“Any war is useless,” Elayne began, then faltered as comprehension suddenly filled her. Sadness and regret had to show on her face, too, but certainly comprehension. Her mother had lectured her often on how a nation was led as well as how it was governed, two very different things, but both necessary. And sometimes things had to be done for both that were worse than unpleasant, although the price of not doing them was worse still.
Moiraine gave her a sympathetic look. “It is not always pleasant, is it? Your mother began when you were just old enough to understand, I suppose, teaching you what you will need to rule after her.” Moiraine had grown up in the Royal Palace in Cairhien, not destined to reign, but related to the ruling family and no doubt overhearing the same lectures. “Yet sometimes it seems ignorance would be better, to be a farm woman knowing nothing beyond the boundaries of her fields.”
“More riddles?” Nynaeve said contemptuously. “War used to be something I heard about from peddlers, something far away that I didn’t really understand. I know what it is, now. Men killing men. Men behaving like animals, reduced to animals. Villages burned, farms and fields burned. Hunger, disease and death, for the innocent as the guilty. What makes this war of yours better, Moiraine? What makes it cleaner?”
“Elayne?” Moiraine said quietly.
She shook her head—she did not want to be the one to explain this—but she was not sure even her mother sitting on the Lion Throne could have kept silent under Moiraine’s compelling, dark-eyed stare. “War will come whether Rand begins it or not,” she said reluctantly. Egwene stepped back a pace, staring at her in disbelief no sharper than that on Nynaeve’s face; the incredulity faded from both women as she continued. “The Forsaken will not stand idly and wait. Sammael cannot be the only one to have seized a nation’s reins, just the lone one we know. They will come after Rand eventually, in their own persons perhaps, but certainly with whatever armies they command. And the nations that are free of the Forsaken? How many will cry glory to the Dragon banner and follow him to Tarmon Gai’don, and how many will convince themselves the fall of the Stone is a lie and Rand only another false Dragon who must be put down, a false Dragon perhaps strong enough to threaten them if they do not move against him first? One way or another, war will come.” She cut off sharply. There was more to it, but she could not, would not, tell them that part.
Moiraine was not so reticent. “Very good,” she said, nodding, “yet incomplete.” The look she gave Elayne said she knew Elayne had left out what she had on purpose. Hands folded calmly at her waist, she addressed Nynaeve and Egwene. “Nothing makes this war better, or cleaner. Except that it will cement the Tairens to him, and the Illianers will end up following him just as the Tairens do now. How could they not, once the Dragon banner flies over Illian? Just the news of his victory might decide the wars in Tarabon and Arad Doman in his favor; there are wars ended for you.
“In one stroke he will make himself so strong in terms of men and swords that only a coalition of every remaining nation from here to the Blight can defeat him, and with the same blow he shows the Forsaken that he is not a plump partridge on a limb for the netting. That will make them wary, and buy him time to learn to use his strength. He must move first, be the hammer, not the nail.” The Aes Sedai grimaced slightly, a hint of her earlier anger marring her calm. “He must move first. And what does he do? He reads. Reads himself into deeper trouble.”
Nynaeve looked shaken, as if she could see all the battles and death; Egwene’s dark eyes were large with horrified understanding. Their faces made Elayne shiver. One had watched Rand grow up, the other had grown up with him. And now they saw him starting wars. Not the Dragon Reborn, but Rand al’Thor.
Egwene struggled visibly, latching onto the smallest part, the most inconsequential, of what Moiraine had said. “How can reading put him in trouble?”
“He has decided to find out for himself what the Prophecies of the Dragon say.” Moiraine’s face remained cool and smooth, but suddenly she sounded almost as tired as Elayne felt. “They may have been proscribed in Tear, but the Chief Librarian had nine different translations in a locked chest. Rand has them all, now. I pointed out the verse that applies here, and he quoted it to me, from an old Kandori translation.
“‘Power of the Shadow made human flesh,
wakened to turmoil, strife and ruin.