“Oh, do give over, Talene.” Yukiri’s voice was always an even bigger surprise than Talene’s. The woman looked a miniature queen, in dark silver silk with ivory lace, but she sounded a comfortable country woman. She claimed the contrast helped in negotiations. She smiled at Seaine and Pevara, a monarch perhaps unsure how gracious she should be. “I saw the pair of you sniffing about like ferrets at the hencoop,” she said, “but I held my tongue — you might be pillow friends, for all I know, and whose business is that but yours? — I held my tongue till Talene here started yelping about who’s been huddling in corners. I’ve seen a bit of huddling in corners myself, and I suspect some of those women might head their Ajahs as well, so... Sometimes six and six make a dozen, and sometimes they make a mess. Tell us if you can, now. The Hall does have a right.”

“We are not leaving until you do tell,” Talene put in even more heatedly than before.

Pevara snorted and folded her arms. “If the head of my Ajah spoke two words to me, I’d see no reason to tell you what they were. As it happens, what Seaine and I were discussing has nothing to do with the Red or the White. Snoop elsewhere.” But she did not release saidar. Neither did Seaine.

“Bloody useless and I bloody knew it,” Doesine muttered from her place by the door. “Why I ever flaming let you talk me into this... Just as bloody well nobody else knows, or we’d have sheepswallop all over faces for the whole bloody Tower to see.” At times she had a tongue like a boy, too, a boy who needed his mouth washed out.

Seaine would have stood to leave if she had not feared her knees would betray her. Pevara did stand, and raised an impatient eyebrow at the women between her and the door.

Saerin fingered her knife hilt and eyed them quizzically, not shifting a step. “A puzzle,” she murmured. Suddenly she glided forward, her free hand dipping into Seaine’s lap so quickly that Seaine gasped. She tried to keep the Oath Road hidden, but the only result was that she ended with Saerin holding the Rod waist high with one hand while she held the other end and a fistful of her skirts. “I enjoy puzzles,” Saerin said.

Seaine let go and adjusted her dress; there seemed nothing else to do.

The appearance of the Rod produced a momentary babble as nearly everyone spoke at once.

“Blood and fire,” Doesine growled. “Are you down here raising new bloody sisters?”

“Oh, leave it with them, Saerin,” Yukiri laughed right on top of her. “Whatever they’re up to, it’s their own business.”

Atop both, Talene barked, “Why else are they sneaking about — together! — if it isn’t to do with the Ajah heads?”

Saerin waved a hand, and after a moment gained quiet. All present were Sitters, but she had the right to speak first in the Hall, and her forty years counted for something, too. “This is the key to the puzzle, I think,” she said, stroking the Rod with her thumb. “Why this, after all?” Abruptly the glow of saidar surrounded her, too, and she channeled Spirit to the Rod. “Under the Light, I will speak no word that is not true. I am not a Darkfriend.”

In the silence that followed, a mouse sneezing would have sounded loud.

“Am I right?” Saerin said, releasing the Power. She held the Rod out toward Seaine.

For the third time, Seaine retook the Oath against lying, and for the second time repeated that she was not of the Black. Pevara did the same with frozen dignity. And eyes sharp as an eagle’s.

“This is ridiculous,” Talene said. “There is no Black Ajah.”

Yukiri took the Rod from Pevara and channeled. “Under the Light, I will speak no word that is not true. I am not Black Ajah.” The light of saidar around her winked out, and she handed the Rod to Doesine.

Talene frowned in disgust. “Stand aside, Doesine. I for one will not put up with this filthy suggestion.”

“Under the Light, I will speak no word that is not true,” Doesine said almost reverently, the glow around her like a halo. “I am not of the Black Ajah.” When matters were serious, her tongue was as clean as any Mistress of Novices could have wished. She extended the Rod to Talene.

The goldenhaired woman started back as from a poisonous snake. “Even to ask this is a slander. Worse than slander!” Something feral moved in her eyes. An irrational thought, perhaps, but that was what Seaine saw. “Now move out of my way,” Talene demanded with all the authority of a Sitter in her voice. “I am leaving!”

“I think not,” Pevara said quietly, and Yukiri nodded slowly in agreement. Saerin did not stroke her knife hilt; she gripped it till her knuckles went white.

Riding through the deep snows of Andor, floundering through them, Toveine Gazal cursed the day she was born. Short and slightly plump, with smooth copper skin and long glossy dark hair, she had seemed pretty to many over the years, but none had ever called her beautiful. Certainly none would now. The dark eyes that had once been direct now bored into whatever she looked at. That was when she was not angry. She was angry today. When Toveine was angry, serpents fled.

Four other Reds rode — floundered — at her back, and behind them twenty of the Tower Guard in dark coats and cloaks. None of the men liked it that their armor was stowed away on the packhorses, and they watched the forest lining both sides of the road as though expecting attack any moment. How they thought to cross three hundred miles of Andor unnoticed, wearing coats and cloaks with the Flame of Tar Valon shining bright on them, Toveine could not imagine. The journey was almost done, though. In another day, perhaps two with roads kneedeep in snow on the horses, she would join with nine other parties exactly like hers. Not all of the sisters in them were Red, unfortunately, but that did not trouble her overmuch. Toveine Gazal, once a Sitter for the Red, would go into the histories as the woman who destroyed this Black Tower.

She was sure Elaida thought her grateful for the chance, called back from exile and disgrace, given the opportunity for redemption. She sneered, and if a wolf had been looking into the deep hood of her cloak, it might have quailed. What had been done twenty years ago was necessary, and the Light burn all those who muttered that the Black Ajah must have been involved. It had been necessary and right, but Toveine Gazal had been driven from her chair in the Hall, and forced to howl for mercy under the birch, with the assembled sisters watching, and even novices and Accepted witnessing that Sitters, too, lay beneath the law, though they were not told what law. And then she had been sent to work these last twenty years on the isolated Black Hills farm of Mistress Jara Doweel, a woman who considered an Aes Sedai serving penance in exile no different from any other hand laboring in sun and snow. Toveine’s hands shifted on her reins; she could feel the calluses. Mistress Doweel — even now, she could not think of the woman without the honorific she had demanded — Mistress Doweel believed in hard work. And discipline as tight as any novice faced! She had no mercy on anyone who tried to shirk the backbreaking labor that she herself shared, and less than none for a woman who sneaked away to comfort herself with a pretty boy. That had been Toveine’s life these past twenty years. And Elaida had slipped through the cracks uncaught, danced her way to the Amyrlin Seat that Toveine had once dreamed of for herself. No, she was not grateful. But she had l