“There was nothing I could do, Cadsuane,” Samitsu said bit­terly. “Half the people I gave an order had begun checking with Sashalle to see if it was right, and the other half told me to my face she’d already said different. Lord Bashere talked her into turning the Warders loose – I have no idea how he found out about them in the first place – and she talked Sorilea into it, and there wasn’t the least thing I could do to stop it. Sorilea was behaving as if I had just abdicated! She doesn’t understand, and she made it plain she thinks I’m a fool. There’s no point at all in me going back, unless you expect me to carry Sashalle’s gloves for her.”

“I expect you to watch her, Samitsu. No more than that. I want to know what one of these Dragonsworn sisters does when neither I nor the Wise Ones are looking over their shoulders and holding a switch. You’ve always been very observant.” Patience was not always her strongest trait, but sometimes it was required with Samitsu. The Yellow was observant, and intelligent, and strong-willed most of the time, not to mention the best alive at Heal­ing – at least until the appearance of Darner Flinn – but she could suffer the most astonishing collapses in her confidence. The stick never worked with Samitsu, but pats on the back did, and it was ridiculous not to use what worked. As Cadsuane reminded her how intelligent she was, how skilled at Healing – that was always nec­essary, with Samitsu; she could go into a depression over failing to Heal a dead man – how clever, the Arafellin sister began to draw up her composure. And her self-assurance. “You can be assured Sashalle won’t change her stockings with­out I know it,” she said crisply. In truth, Cadsuane expected no less.

“But if you don’t mind me asking,” with her confidence restored, Samitsu’s tone made that the merest courtesy; she was no shrinking flower except when her self-assurance weakened, “why are you here, at the back end of Tear? What’s young al’Thor going to do? Or should I say, what are you going to have him do?”

“He intends something very dangerous,” Cadsuane replied. Lightning flashed outside the windows, sharp silver forks in a sky near as dark as night. She knew exactly what he intended. She just did not know whether to stop it.

“It has to end!” Rand thundered, echoed by the crashes in the sky. He had doffed his coat before this interview, and rolled up his shirtsleeves to bare the Dragons twined around his forearms in scarlet and gold, the golden-maned heads resting on the backs of his hands. He wanted the man in front of him reminded with every look that he was facing the Dragon Reborn. But his hands were fists, to keep him from giving in to Lews Therin’s urgings and throttling bloody Logain Ablar. “I don’t need a war with the White Tower, and you bloody Asha’man bloody well won’t give me a war with the White Tower! Do I make myself understood?”

Logain, hands resting easily atop the long hilt of his sword, did not flinch. He was a big man, if smaller than Rand, with a steady gaze that gave no sign that he had been dressed down or called to account. The silver sword and red-and-gold Dragon glittered brightly in the lamplight on the high collar of his black coat, and that itself looked freshly ironed. “Are you saying release them?” he asked calmly. “Will the Aes Sedai release those of ours they’ve taken?”

“No!” Rand said curtly. And sourly. “What’s done can’t be undone.” Merise had been so shocked when he suggested she release Narishma, you would have thought he was asking her to abandon a puppy by the side of the road. And he suspected Flinn would fight as hard to hang on to Corele as she to him; he was fairly certain there was more between those two than the bond, now. Well, if an Aes Sedai could bond a man who channeled, what was to say a pretty woman could not fix on a girnpy old man? “You realize the mess you’ve created, though, don’t you? As it is, the only man who can channel that Elaida wants alive is me, and that only till the Last Battle is done. Once she learns of this, she’ll be twice as hot to see you all dead any way she can manage it. I don’t know how the other lot will react, but Egwene was always a sharp bargainer. I may have to tell off Asha’man for Aes Sedai to bond until they have as many of you as you do of them. That’s if they don’t just decide you all have to die as soon as they can arrange it, too. What’s done is done, but there cannot be any more!”

Logain stiffened a little more with every word, but his gaze held on Rand’s. It was plain as horns on a ram that he was ignoring the others in the sitting room. Min had wanted no part of this meeting and taken herself off to read; Rand could not make up from down in Herid Pel’s books, but she found them fascinating. He had insisted Loial remain, though, and the Ogier was pretend­ing to study the flames in the fireplace. Except when he glanced at the door, tufted ears twitching, as if wondering whether he could slip out unnoticed under cover of the storm. Davram Bashere appeared even shorter than he really was alongside the Ogier, a graying man with dark tilted eyes, a beak of a nose, and thick mus­taches curving down around his mouth. He had worn his sword, too, a shorter blade than Logain’s, and serpentine. Bashere spent more time peering into his winecup than looking at anything else, but whenever his eyes touched Logain, he unconsciously ran a thumb along his sword hilt. Rand thought it was unconscious.

“Taim gave the order,” Logain said, coldly uncomfortable explaining himself in front of an audience. Sudden lightning close to the house cast his face in lurid shadows for an instant, a bleak mask of darkness. “I assumed it came from you.” His eyes moved slightly in Bashere’s direction, and his mouth tightened. “Taim does a great many things people think are at your direction,” he went on reluctantly, “but he has his own plans. Flinn and Narishma and Manfor are on the deserters’ list, like every Asha’man you kept with you. And he has a coterie of twenty or thirty he keeps close and trains privately. Every man who wears the Dragon is one of that group except me, and he’d have kept the Dragon from me, if he dared. No matter what you’ve done, it is time to turn your eyes to the Black Tower before Taim splits it worse than the White Tower is. If he does, you’ll find the larger part is loyal to him, not you. They know him. Most have never even seen you.”

Irritably, Rand pushed his sleeves down and dropped into a chair. What he had done made no matter to Logain. The man knew saidin was clean, but he could not believe Rand or any man had actually done the cleansing. Did he think the Creator had decided to stretch out a merciful hand after three thousand years of suffer­ing? The Creator had made the world and then left humankind to make of it what they would, a heaven or the Pit of Doom by their choosing. The Creator had made many worlds, watched each flower or die, and gone on to make endless worlds beyond. A gardener did not weep for each blossom that fell.

For an instant, he thought those must have been Lews Therin’s reflections. He had never gone on that way about the Creator or anything else that he recalled. But he could feel Lews Therin nod­ding in approval, a man listening to someone else. Still, it was not the kind of thing he would have considered before Lews Therin. How much space remained between them?

“Taim will have to wait,” he said wearily. How long could Taim wait? He was surprised not to hear Lews Therin raging for him to kill the man. He wished that made him feel easier. “Did you just come to see that Logain reached me safely, Bashere, or to tell me somebody stabbed Dobraine? Or do you have an urgent task for me, too?”

Bashere raised an eyebrow at Rand’s tone, and his jaw tightened as he glanced at Logain, but after a moment, he snorted so hard his thick mustaches should have shaken. “Two men ransacked my tent,” he said, setting his winecup down on a carved blue table against the wall, “one carrying a note I could swear I wrote myself if I didn’t know better. An order to carry away ‘certain items.’ Loial tells me the fellows who knifed Dobraine had the same sort of note, apparently in Dobraine’s hand. A blind man could see what they were after, with a little thought. Dobraine and I are the most likely candidates to be guarding the seals for you. You have three, and you say three are broken. Maybe the Shadow knows where the last is.”