Crossroads of Twilight

haired Tomas sat next to a grizzled fellow with only a fringe of white hair remaining. “Darner, he wanted to try his Healing on her, but Daigian refused. She may never have had a Warder before, but she knows that the grieving over a dead Warder is part of remembering him. I am surprised that Corele would consider allowing it.”

With a shake of her head, the Taraboner sister returned to studying Jahar. Other sisters’ Warders did not really interest her, at least not like her own. “Asha’man, they grieve as Warders do. I thought perhaps Jahar and Darner merely followed the lead of the others, but Jahar, he says it is their way, too. I did not intrude, of course, but I watched them drink in memory of Daigian’s young Eben. They never mentioned his name, but they had a full winecup sitting for him. Bassane and Nethan, they know they can die on any day, and they accept that. Jahar expects to die; every day he expects it. To him, every hour is most assuredly his last.”

Cadsuane barely refrained from glancing at the other woman. Merise did not often go on at such length. The other woman’s face was smooth, her manner unruffled, but something had upset her. “I know you practice linking with him,” she said delicately, peering down into the courtyard. Delicacy was required in talking to another sister about her Warder. That was part of the reason she stared into the courtyard, frowning. “Have you decided yet whether the al’Thor boy succeeded at Shadar Logoth? Did he really manage to cleanse the male half of the Source?”

Corele practiced linking with Damer, too, but the Yellow was so focused on her futile efforts to reason out how to do with saidar what he did with saidin that she would not have noticed the Dark One’s taint sliding down her throat. A pity she herself had not come to the shawl fifty years later than she had, or she would have bonded one of the men herself and had no need to ask. But fifty years would have meant that Norla died in her little house in the Black Hills before Cadsuane Melaidhrin ever went to the White Tower. That would have altered a great deal of history. For one thing, it would have been unlikely that she would be in anything approaching her present circumstances. So she asked, delicately, and waited.

Merise was quiet, and still, for a long moment, and then she sighed. “I do not know, Cadsuane. Saidar is a calm ocean that will take you wherever you want so long as you know the currents and let them carry you. Saidin… An avalanche of burning stone. Collapsing mountains of ice. It feels cleaner than when I first linked with Jahar, but anything could hide in that chaos. Anything.”

Cadsuane nodded. She was not sure she had expected any other answer. Why should she find any certainty about one of the two most important questions in the world when she could find none on so many simpler matters? In the courtyard, Lan’s wooden blade stopped, not with a crack this time, just touching Jahar’s throat, and the bigger man flowed back to his waiting stance. Nethan stood again, and again Jahar waved him back, angrily raising his sword and setting himself. Merise’s third, Bassane, a short wide fellow nearly as sun-dark as Jahar for all he was Cairhienin, laughed and made a rude comment about over-ambitious men tripping on their own blades. Tomas and Darner exchanged glances and shook their heads; men of that age usually had given up taunting long ago. The clack of wood on wood began once more.

The other four Warders were not the only audience for Lan and Jahar in the courtyard. The slim girl with her dark hair in a long braid, watching anxiously from a red bench, was the focus of Cadsuane’s frown. The child would need to flash her Great Serpent ring under people’s noses to be taken for Aes Sedai, which she was, if just technically. It was not only because Nynaeve’s face was a girl’s face; Beldeine still seemed as young. Nynaeve bounced on the bench, always on the point of leaping up. Occasionally her mouth moved as if she were silently shouting encouragement, and sometimes her hands twisted as though demonstrating how Lan should have moved his sword. A frivolous girl, full of passions, who only rarely demonstrated that she had a brain. Min was not the only one to have thrown her heart and head both down the well over a man. By the customs of dead Malkier, the red dot painted on Nynaeve’s forehead indicated her marriage to Lan, though Yellows seldom married their Warders. Very few sisters did, for that matter. And of course, Lan was not Nynaeve’s Warder, however much he and the girl pretended otherwise. Who he did belong to was a matter they evaded like thieves slipping through the night.

More interesting, more disturbing, was the jewelry Nynaeve wore, a long gold necklace and slim gold belt, with matching bracelets and finger rings, the gaudy red and green and blue gems that studded them clashing with her yellow-slashed dress. And she wore that peculiar piece as well, on her left hand, golden rings attached to a golden bracelet by flat chains. That was an angreal, much stronger than Cadsuane’s shrike hair ornament. The others were much like her own decorations, too, ter’angreal and plainly made at the same time, during the Breaking of the World, when an Aes Sedai might find many hands turned against her, most especially those of men who could channel. Strange to think that they had been called Aes Sedai, too. It would be like meeting a man called Cadsuane.

The question — her morning seemed filled with questions, and the sun not halfway to noon yet — the question was, did the girl wear her jewelry because of the al’Thor boy, or the Asha’man? Or because of Cadsuane Melaidhrin? Nynaeve had demonstrated her loyalty to a young man from her own village, and she had shown her wariness of him as well. She did have a brain, when she chose to use it. Until that question was answered, however, trusting the girl too far was dangerous. The trouble was, little these days did not seem dangerous.

“Jahar is growing stronger,” Merise said abruptly.

For an instant, Cadsuane frowned at the other Green. Stronger? The young man’s shirt was beginning to cling damply to his back, while Lan appeared not to have broken his first sweat. Then she understood. Merise meant in the Power. Cadsuane only raised a questioning eyebrow, though. She could not recall the last time she had let shock reach her face. It might have been all those years ago, in the Black Hills, when she began earning the ornaments she now wore.

“At first, I thought the way these Asha’man train, the forcing, had pushed him to his full strength already,” Merise said, frowning down at the two men working their practice blades. No; it was at Jahar she was frowning. Just a faint crinkle of her eyes, but she reserved her frowns for those who could see and know her displeasure. “At Shadar Logoth, I thought I must be imagining it. Three or four days ago, I was half convinced I was mistaken. Now, I am sure I am correct. If men gain strength by fits and starts, there is no saying how strong he will become.”

She did not voice her obvious worry, of course: that he might grow stronger than she. Saying such a thing would have been unthinkable on many different levels, and while Merise had become somewhat accustomed to doing the unthinkable — most sisters would faint at the very idea of bonding a man who could channel — she was never comfortable giving them voice. Cadsuane was, yet she kept her voice neutral. Light, but she hated being delicate. Hated the necessity, anyway.

“He seems content, Merise.” Merise’s Warders always seemed content; she handled them well.

“He is in a fury of…” The other woman touched the side of her head as though fingering the bundle of sensations she felt through the bond. She really was upset! “Not rage. Frustration.” Reaching into her green worked-leather belt pouch, she took out a small enameled pin, a sinuous figure in red and gold, like a snake with legs and a lion’s mane. “I do not know where the al’Thor lad got this, but he gave it to Jahar. Apparently, for Asha’man, it is akin to attaining the shawl. I had to take it away, of course; Jahar, he is still at the stage where he has to learn to accept only what I say he can. But he is so agitated over the thing… Should I give it back to him? In a way, it would come from my hand, then.”

Cadsuane’s eyebrows began to climb before she could control them. Merise was asking advice about one of her Warders? Of course, Cadsuane had suggested she sound the man out in the first place, but this degree of intimacy was… Unthinkable? Phaw! “I’m sure whatever you decide will be correct.”

With one last glance at Nynaeve, she left the taller woman stroking the enameled pin with her thumb and frowning down into the courtyard. Lan had just defeated Jahar once more, but the young man was squaring up again, demanding yet another match. Whatever Merise decided, she had already learned one thing she did not like. The boundaries between Aes Sedai and Warders had always been as clear as the connections; Aes Sedai commanded, and Warders obeyed. But if Merise, of all people, was dithering over a collar pin — Merise, who managed her Warders with a firm hand — then new boundaries would have to be worked out, at least with Warders who could channel. It seemed unlikely that bonding them would stop now; Beldeine was evidence for that. People never really changed, yet the world did, with disturbing regularity. You just had to live with it, or at least live through it. Now and then, with luck, you could affect the direction of the changes, but even if you stopped one, you only set another in motion.

As expected, she did not find the door to the al’Thor boy’s rooms unguarded. Alivia was there, of course, seated on a bench to one side of the door with her hands folded patiently in her lap. The pale-haired Seanchan