With that, she finally put the stocking down atop her mending basket and rose to take Egwene’s cloak. And to exclaim that Egwene was cold as ice. That was another cause of headaches, in her book. Aes Sedai went around ignoring freezing cold or steaming heat, but your body knew whether you did or not. Best to bundle up warm. And wear red shifts. Everyone knew red was warmest. Eating helped, too. An empty belly always led to shivering. You never saw her shivering, now did you?

“Thank you, Mother,” Egwene said lightly, which earned a soft snort of laughter. And a shocked look. For all her liberties, Chesa was a stickler for the proprieties to make Aledrin seem lax. The spirit, anyway, if often not the letter. “I don’t have a headache to­night, thanks to that tea of yours.” Maybe it had been the tea. Vile as that tasted, as a cure, it was no worse than sitting through a ses­sion of the Hall lasting more than half a day. “And I’m not very hungry, really. A roll will be enough.”

Of course, it was not quite so simple as that. The relationship between mistress and servant was never simple. You lived in one another’s sleeve, and she saw you at your worst, knew all your faults and foibles. There was no such thing as privacy from your maid. Chesa muttered and grumbled under her breath the whole time she was helping Egwene undress, and in the end, wrapped in a robe – red silk, to be sure, edged with frothy Murandian lace and embroi­dered with summery flowers; a gift from Anaiya – Egwene let her remove the linen cloth covering the tray on the little round table.

The lentil stew was a congealed mass in the bowl, but a little channeling fixed that, and with the first spoonful, Egwene discov­ered she did have some appetite. She ate every scrap, and the piece of blue-veined white cheese, and the somewhat shriveled olives, and the two crusty brown rolls, though she had to pick weevils out of both. Since she did not want to fall asleep too quickly, she drank only one cup of the spiced wine, which needed reheating, too, and had a slight bitterness for it, but Chesa beamed with approval as if she had cleaned the tray. Peering at the dishes, empty except for the olive pits and a few crumbs, she realized she had, at that.

Once she was in her narrow cot, two soft woolen blankets and a goose-down comforter pulled to her chin, Chesa took up the dinner tray, but she paused at the tent’s entrance. “Do you want me to come back, Mother? If you get one of your heads… Well, that woman’s found company, or she’d be here by now.” There was open scorn in “that woman.” “I could brew another pot of tea. I got it from a peddler who said it was sovereign for aching heads. And joints, and belly upsets, too.”

“Do you really think she’s a lightskirt, Chesa?” Egwene mur­mured. Already warm under her covers, she felt drowsy. She wanted sleep, but not just yet. Heads and joints and bellies? Nynaeve would laugh herself sick to hear that. Perhaps it had been all those chattering Sitters who chased her headache away after all. “Halima does flirt, I suppose, but I don’t think it’s ever gone beyond flirting.”

For a moment Chesa was silent, pursing her lips. “She makes me… uneasy, Mother,” she said finally. “There’s something just not right about that Halima. I feel it every time she’s around. It’s like feeling somebody sneaking up behind me, or realizing there’s a man watching me bathe, or…” She laughed, but it was an uncomfortable sound. “I don’t know how to describe it. Just, not right.”

Egwene sighed and snuggled deeper under the covers. “Good night, Chesa.” Channeling briefly, she extinguished the lamp, plunging the tent into pitch blackness. “You go sleep in your own bed tonight.” Halima might be upset to come and find someone else on her cot. Had the woman really broken a man’s arm? The man must have provoked her somehow.

She wanted dreams tonight, untroubled dreams – at least, dreams she could recall; few of her dreams were what anyone would call untroubled – but she had another sort of dream to enter first, and for that, it had been some time since she needed to be asleep. Nor did she need one of the ter’angreal the Hall guarded so closely. Slipping into a light trance was no harder than deciding to do so, especially as tired as she was, and…

… bodiless, she floated in an endless blackness, surrounded by an endless sea of lights, an immense swirl of tiny pinpoints glit­tering more sharply than stars on the clearest night, more numer­ous than the stars. Those were the dreams of all the people in the world, of people in all the worlds that were or could be, worlds so strange she could not begin to comprehend them, all visible here in the tiny gap between Tel’aran’rbiod and waking, the infinite space between reality and dreams. Some of those dreams, she rec­ognized at a glance. They all looked the same, yet she knew them as surely as she did the faces of her sisters. Some, she avoided.

Rand’s dreams were always shielded, and she feared he might know when she tried to peek in. The shield would keep her from seeing anything, anyway. A pity she could not tell where someone was from their dreams; two points of light could be side-by-side here, and the dreamers a thousand miles apart. Gawyn’s dreams tugged at her, and she fled. His dreams held their own dangers, not least because part of her wanted very much to sink into them. Nynaeve’s dreams gave her pause, and the desire to put the fear of the Light into the fool woman, but Nynaeve had managed to ignore her so far, and Egwene would not sink to pulling her into Tel’aran’rbiod against her will. That was the sort of thing the Forsaken did. It was a temptation, though.

Moving without moving, she searched for one particular dreamer. One of two, at least; either would do. The lights seemed to spin around her, to sweep past so fast that they blurred into streaks while she floated motionless in that starry sea. She hoped that at least one of those she hunted was asleep already. The Light knew, it was late enough for anyone. Vaguely aware of her body in the wak­ing world, she felt herself yawn and curl her legs up beneath her covers.

Then she saw the point of light she sought, and it swelled in her sight as it rushed toward her, from a star in the sky to a full moon to a shimmering wall that filled her vision, pulsing like a breathing thing. She did not touch it, of course; that could lead to all sorts of complications even with this dreamer. Besides, it would be embarrassing to slide into someone’s dream accidentally. Reach­ing out with her will across the hair-fine space that remained between her and the dream, she spoke cautiously, so she would not be heard in a shout. She had no body, no mouth, but she spoke.

elayne, it’s egwene. meet me at the usual place. She did not think anyone could eavesdrop, not without her knowing, yet there was no point in taking unneeded chances.

The pinprick winked out. Elayne had wakened. But she would remember, and know the voice had not been just part of a dream.

Egwene moved… sideways. Or perhaps it was more like com­pleting a step that she had paused halfway through. It felt like both. She moved, and. . . .

… she was standing in a small room, empty save for a scarred wooden table and three straight-back chairs. The two windows showed deep night outside, yet there was light of an odd sort, dif­ferent from moonlight or lamplight or sunlight. It did not seem to come from anywhere; it just was. But it was more than enough to see that sad, sorry little room clearly. The dusty wall-panels were riddled by beetles, and broken panes in the windows had allowed snow to drift in atop a litter of twigs and dead leaves. At least, there was snow on the floor sometimes, and twigs and leaves some­times. The table and chairs remained where they stood, but when­ever she glanced away, the snow might be gone when she looked back, the twigs and brown leaves in different places as if scattered by a wind. They even shifted while she was looking, simply here then there. That no longer seemed any odder to her than the feel of unseen eyes watching. Neither was truly real, just the way things were in Tel’aran’rhiod. A reflection of reality and a dream, all jum­bled together.