The Reborn One, marked and bleeding,
dances the sword in dreams and mist,
chains the Shadowsworn to his will,
from the city, lost and forsaken,
leads the spears to war once more,
breaks the spears and makes them see,
truth long hidden in the ancient dream.’”
She grimaced. “It applies to this as well as it does to anything. Illian under Sammael is surely a forsaken city. Lead the Tairen spears to war, chain Sammael, and he has fulfilled the verse. The ancient dream of the Dragon Reborn. But he will not see it. He even has a copy in the Old Tongue, as if he understood two words. He runs after shadows, and Sammael, or Rahvin, or Lanfear may have him by the throat before I can convince him of his mistake.”
“He is desperate.” Nynaeve’s gentle tone was not for Moiraine, Elayne was sure, but for Rand. “Desperate and trying to find his way.”
“So am I desperate,” Moiraine said firmly. “I have dedicated my life to finding him, and I will not let him fail if I can prevent it. I am almost desperate enough to—” She broke off, pursing her lips. “Let it be enough that I will do what I must.”
“But it isn’t enough,” Egwene said sharply. “What is it you’ll do?”
“You have other matters to concern you,” the Aes Sedai said. “The Black Ajah—”
“No!’ Elayne’s voice was knife-edged and commanding, her knuckles a hard white where she gripped her soft blue skirts. “You keep many secrets, Moiraine, but tell us this. What do you mean to do to him?” An image flashed in her mind of seizing Moiraine and shaking the truth out of her if need be.
“Do to him? Nothing. Oh, very well. There is no reason you should not know. You have seen what the Tairens call the Great Holding?”
Oddly for a people that feared the Power so, the Tairens held in the Stone a collection of objects connected to the Power second only to that in the White Tower. Elayne, for one, thought it was because they had been forced to guard Callandor so long, whether they wanted or not. Even the Sword That Is Not a Sword might seem less than what it was when it was one among many. But the Tairens had never been able to make themselves display their prizes. The Great Holding was kept in a filthy series of crowded rooms buried even deeper than the dungeons. When Elayne had first seen them the locks on the doors had long since rusted shut, where the doors had not simply collapsed from dry rot.
“We spent an entire day down there,” Nynaeve said. “To see if Liandrin and her friends took anything. I don’t think they did. Everything was buried in dust and mold. It will take ten riverboats to transport all of it to the Tower. Perhaps they can make some sense of it there; I surely could not.” The temptation to prod Moiraine was apparently too great to avoid, for she added, “You would know all this if you had given us a little more of your time.”
Moiraine took no notice. She seemed to be looking inward, examining her own thoughts, and she spoke almost to herself. “There is one particular ter’angreal in the Holding, a thing like a redstone doorframe, subtly twisted to the eye. If I cannot make him reach some decision, I may have to step through.” The small blue stone on her forehead trembled, sparkling. Apparently she was not eager to take that step.
At the mention of ter’angreal, Egwene instinctively touched the bodice of her dress. She had sewn a small pocket there herself, to hide the stone ring it now held. That ring was a ter’angreal, powerful in its way if small, and Elayne was one of only three women who knew she had it. Moiraine was not one of the three.
They were strange things, ter’angreal, fragments of the Age of Legends like angreal and sa’angreal, if more numerous. Ter’angreal used the One Power instead of magnifying it. Each had apparently been made to do one thing and one thing alone, but though some were used now, no one was sure if those uses were anything like what they had been made for. The Oath Rod, on which a woman took the Three Oaths on being raised Aes Sedai, was a ter’angreal that made those oaths a part of her flesh and bone. The last test a novice took on being raised to Accepte
d was inside another ter’angreal that ferreted out her most heartfelt fears and made them seem real—or perhaps took her to a place where they were real. Odd things could happen with ter’angreal. Aes Sedai had been burned out or killed, or had simply vanished, in studying them. And in using them.
“I saw that doorway,” Elayne said. “In the last room at the end of the hall. My lamp went out, and I fell three times before I made it to the door.” A slight flush of embarrassment reddened her cheeks. “I was afraid to channel in there, even to relight the lamp. Much of it looks rubbish, to me—I think the Tairens simply grabbed anything that anyone hinted might be connected to the Power—but I thought if I channeled, I might accidentally empower something that wasn’t rubbish, and who knows what it might do.”
“And if you had stumbled in the dark and fallen through the twisted doorway?” Moiraine said wryly. “That needs no channeling, only to step through.”
“To what purpose?” Nynaeve asked.
“To gain answers. Three answers, each true, about past, present or future.”
Elayne’s first thought was for the children’s tale, Bili Under the Hill, but only because of the three answers. A second thought came on its heels, and not to her alone. She spoke while Nynaeve and Egwene were still opening their mouths. “Moiraine, this solves our problem. We can ask whether Joiya or Amico is telling the truth. We can ask where Liandrin and the others are. The names of the Black Ajah still in the Tower—”
“We can ask what this thing is that is dangerous to Rand,” Egwene put in, and Nynaeve added, “Why haven’t you told us of this before? Why have you let us go on listening to the same tales day after day when we could have settled it all by now?”
The Aes Sedai winced and threw up her hands. “You three rush in blindly where Lan and a hundred Warders would tread warily. Why do you think I have not stepped through? Days ago I could have asked what Rand must do to survive and triumph, how he can defeat the Forsaken and the Dark One, how he can learn to control the Power and hold off madness long enough to do what he must.” She waited, hands on hips, while it sank in. None of them spoke. “There are rules,” she went on, “and dangers. No one may step through more than once. Only once. You may ask three questions, but you must ask all three and hear the answers before you may leave. Frivolous questions are punished, it seems, but it also seems what may be serious for one can be frivolous coming from another. Most importantly, questions touching the Shadow have dire consequences.
“If you asked about the Black Ajah, you might be returned dead, or come out a gibbering madwoman, if you came out at all. As for Rand … . I am not certain it is possible to ask a question about the Dragon Reborn that does not touch the Shadow in some way. You see? Sometimes there are reasons for caution.”
“How do you know all this?” Nynaeve demanded. Planting fists on hips she confronted the Aes Sedai. “The High Lords surely never let Aes Sedai study anything in the Holding. From the filth down there, none of it has seen sunlight in a hundred years or more.”
“More, I should think,” Moiraine told her calmly. “They ceased their collecting nearly three hundred years gone. It was just before they stopped completely that they acquired this ter’angreal. Up until then it was the possession of the Firsts of Mayene, who used its answers to help keep Mayene out of Tear’s grasp. And they allowed Aes Sedai to study it. In secret, of course; Mayene has never dared anger Tear too openly.”