“I'll go easy when she answers me. Well, Moiraine?”

“He is what he is,” she said sharply.

“You said the Pattern would force him to the right path eventually. Is that what this is, or is he just trying to get away from you?” For a moment he thought he had gone too far — her dark eyes sparkled with anger — but he refused to back down. “Well?”

Moiraine took a deep breath. “This may well be what the Pattern has chosen, yet I did not mean for him to go off alone. For all his power, he is as defenseless as a babe in many ways, and as ignorant of the world. He channels, but he has no control over whether or not the One Power comes when he reaches for it and almost as little over what he does with it if it does come. The Power itself will kill him before he has a chance to go mad if he does not learn that control. There is so much he must learn, yet. He wants to run before he has learned to walk.”

“You split hairs and lay false trails, Moiraine.” Perrin snorted. “If he is what you say he is, did it never occur to you that he might know what he has to do better than you?”

“He is what he is,” she repeated firmly, “but I must keep him alive if he is to do anything. He will fulfill no prophecies dead, and even if he manages to avoid Darkfriends and Shadowspawn, there are a thousand other hands ready to slay him. All it will take is a hint of the hundredth part of what he is. Yet if that were all he might face, I would not worry half so much as I do. There are the Forsaken to be accounted for.”

Perrin gave a start; from the corner, Loial moaned.“ 'The Dark One and all the Forsaken are bound in Shayol Ghul,' ” Perrin began by rote, but she gave him no time to finish.

“The seals are weakening, Perrin. Some are broken, though the world does not know that. Must not know that. The Father of Lies is not free. Yet. But as the seals weaken, more and more, which of the Forsaken may be loosed already? Lanfear? Sammael? Asmodean, or Be'lal, or Ravhin? Ishamael himself, the Betrayer of Hope? They were thirteen altogether, Perrin, and bound in the sealing, not in the prison that holds the Dark One. Thirteen of the most powerful Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends, the weakest of them stronger than the ten strongest Aes Sedai living today, the most ignorant with all the knowledge of the Age of Legends. And every man and woman of them gave up the Light and dedicated their souls to the Shadow. What if they are free, and out there waiting for him? I will not let them have him.”

Perrin shivered, partly from the icy iron in her last words, and partly from thought of the Forsaken. He did not want to think of even one of the Forsaken loose in the world. His mother had frightened him with those names when he was little. Ishamael comes for boys who do not tell their mothers the truth. Lanfear waits in the night for boys who do not go to bed when they are supposed to. Being older did not help, not when he knew now they were all real. Not when Moiraine said they might be free.

“Bound in Shayol Ghul,” he whispered, and wished he still believed it. Troubled, he studied Rand's letter again. “Dreams. He was talking about dreams yesterday, too.”

Moiraine stepped closer, and peered up into his face. “Dreams?” Lan and Uno came in, but she waved them to silence. The small room was more than crowded now, with five people in it besides the Ogier. “What dreams have you had the last few days, Perrin?” She ignored his protest that there was nothing wrong with his dreams. “Tell me,” she insisted. “What dream have you had that was not ordinary? Tell me.” Her gaze seized him like smithy tongs, willing him to speak.

He looked at the others — they were all watching him fixedly, even Min — then hesitantly told of the one dream that seemed unusual to him, the dream that came every night. The dream of the sword he could not touch. He did not mention the wolf that had appeared in the last.

“Callandor,” Lan breathed when he was done. Rockhard face or no, he looked stunned.

“Yes,” Moiraine said, “but we must be absolutely certain. Speak to the others.” As Lan hurried out, she turned to Uno. “And what of your dreams? Did you dream of a sword, too?”

The Shienaran shifted his feet. The red eye painted on his patch stared straight at Moiraine, but his real eye blinked and wavered. “I dream about flam — uh, about swords all the time, Moiraine Sedai,” he said stiffly. “I suppose I've dreamed about a sword the last few nights. I don't remember my dreams the way Lord Perrin here does.”

Moiraine said, “Loial?”

“My dreams are always the same, Moiraine Sedai. The groves, and the Great Trees, and the stedding. We Ogier always dream of the stedding when we are away from them.”

The Aes Sedai turned back to Perrin.

“It was just a dream,” he said. “Nothing but a dream.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “You describe the hall called the Heart of the Stone, in the fortress called the Stone of Tear, as if you had stood in it. And the shining sword is Callandor, the Sword That Is Not a Sword, the Sword That Cannot Be Touched.”

Loial sat up straight, bumping his head on the roof. He did not seem to notice. “The Prophecies of the Dragon say the Stone of Tear will never fall till Callandor is wielded by the Dragon's hand. The fall of the Stone of Tear will be one of the greatest signs of the Dragon's Rebirth. If Rand holds Callandor, the whole world must acknowledge him as the Dragon.”

“Perhaps.” The word floated from the Aes Sedai's lips like a shard of ice on still water.

“Perhaps?” Perrin said. “Perhaps? I thought that was the final sign, the last thing to fulfill your Prophecies.”

“Neither the first nor the last,” Moiraine said. “Callandor will be but one fulfillment of The Karaethon Cycle, as his birth on the slopes of Dragonmount was the first. He has yet to break the nations, or shatter the world. Even scholars who have studied the Prophecies for their entire lives do not know how to interpret them all. What does it mean that he 'shall slay his people with the sword of peace, and destroy them with the leaf'? What does it meant that he 'shall bind the nine moons to serve him'? Yet these are given equal weight with Callandor in the Cycle. There are others. What 'wounds of madness and cutting of hope' has he healed? What chains has he broken, and who put into chains? And some are so obscure that he may already have fulfilled them, although I am not aware of it. But, no. Callandor is far