Elayne shook her towel-wrapped head in confusion. “Right about what? What are you talking about?”

“This,” Aviendha said, holding up the dagger. “I think that if you have this in your possession, the Shadow cannot see you. Not the Eyeless or the Shadowtwisted, maybe not even Leafblighter. Except that I must be wrong if you did not see it.”

Sephanie gasped, her hands going still until Essande murmured a soft admonition. Essande had lived too long to be shaken by mere mention of the Shadow. Or much else, for that matter.

Elayne stared. She had tried teaching Aviendha to make ter’angreal, but her sister possessed not a scrap of facility there. Yet perhaps she had a different skill, maybe even one that could be called a Talent. “Come with me,” she said, and taking Aviendha’s arm, she almost pulled her out of the dressing room. Essande followed with a torrent of protest, and Sephanie, attempting to continue buttoning up Aviendha’s dress on the fly.

In the larger of the apartment’s two sitting rooms, goodly fires blazed in both of the fireplaces, and if the air was not so warm as in the dressing room, it was still comfortable. The scroll-edged table bordered with low-backed chairs in the middle of the white-tiled floor was where she and Aviendha took most of their meals. Several leather-bound books from the palace library sat in a stack on one end of the table, histories of Andor and books of tales. The mirrored stand-lamps gave a good light, and they often read here of an evening.

More important, a long side table against one dark-paneled wall was covered with ter’angreal from the cache the Kin had kept hidden in Ebou Dar, cups and bowls, statuettes and figurines, jewelry, all manner of things. Most looked commonplace, aside from perhaps a strangeness of design, yet even the most fragile-seeming could not be broken, and some were much lighter or heavier than they appeared. She could no longer safely study them in any meaningful way-she had Min’s assurance her babes could not be harmed, but with her control of the Power so slippery, damaging herself was more a possibility than ever-yet she changed what was on the table every day, picking out pieces at random from the panniers kept in the apartment’s boxroom, just so she could look at them and speculate on what she had learned before getting with child. Not that she had learned very much-well, nothing, really- but she could think on them. There was no worry of anything being stolen. Reene had rooted out most, if not all. of the dishonest among the servants, and the constant guard at the entrance saw to the rest.

Mouth tight with disapproval-dressing was done in the dressing room, decently, not out where anyone at all might walk in-Essande resumed her task with Elayne’s buttons. Sephanie, likely as agitated by the older woman’s displeasure as anything else, breathed hard as she worked on Aviendha’s.

“Pick out something and tell me what you think it does.” Elayne said. Looking and speculating had done no good, and she had not expected it to. Yet if Aviendha could somehow tell what a tev’angreal did just by holding it… Jealousy surged up in her, hot and bitter, but she knocked it down, then for good measure jumped up and down on it until it vanished. She would not be jealous of Aviendha!

“I am not sure that I can, Elayne. I only think this knife makes a kind of warding. And I must be wrong or you would know it. You know more of these things than anyone.”

Elayne’s cheeks heated with embarrassment. “I don’t know nearly as much as you seem to think. Try, Aviendha. I’ve never heard of anyone being able to… to read’ tev’angreal, but if you can, even a little, don’t you see how wonderful that would be?”

Aviendha nodded, but her face held doubt. Hesitantly, she touched a slim black rod, a pace long and so flexible it could be bent into a circle and spring back, lying in the middle of the table. Touched it and jerked her hand back swiftly, wiping her fingers unconsciously on her skirt. “This causes pain.”

“Nynaeve told us that,” Elayne said impatiently, and Aviendha gave her a level look.

“Nynaeve al’Meara did not say you can change how much pain each blow gives.” Uncertainty overcame her again at once, though, and her voice became tentative. “At least, I think that can be done. I think one blow can feel like one, or a hundred. But I am only guessing, Elayne. It is only what I think.”

“Keep going,” Elayne told her encouragingly. “Maybe we’ll find something that makes it certain. What about this?” She picked up an oddly shaped metal cap. Covered with strange, angular patterns of what seemed to be the most minute engraving, it was much too thin to be of use as a helmet, though it was twice as heavy as it appeared. The metal felt slick, too, not simply smooth, as if it were oiled.

Aviendha put down the dagger reluctantly and turned the cap over once in her hands before setting it back on the table and taking up the dagger again. “I think that allows you to direct a… a device of some sort. A machine.” She shook her towel-wrapped head. “But I do not know how, or what kind of machine. You see? I am only guessing again.”

Elayne would not let her stop, though. Ter’angreal after ter’angreal Aviendha touched or sometimes held for a moment, and every time she had an answer. Delivered hesitantly and with cautions that it was only a surmise, but always an answer. She thought a small hinged box, apparently ivory and covered with rippling red and green stripes, held music, hundreds of tunes, perhaps thousands. With a ter’angreal, that might be possible. After all, a fine music box might have cylinders for as many as a hundred tunes and some could play quite long pieces on one cylinder after another without changing them. A flatfish white bowl almost a pace across was for looking at things that were far away. she thought, and a tall vase worked with vines in green and blue- blue vines!-would gather water out of the air. That sounded useless. but Aviendha almost caressed it, and after consideration, Elayne realized it would be very useful indeed in the Waste. If it worked as Aviendha believed. And someone figured out how to make it work. A black-and-white figurine of a bird with long wings spread in flight was for talking to people a long way off, she said. So was a blue figure of a woman, small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, in an oddly cut skirt and coat. And five earrings, six finger-rings and three bracelets.

Elayne began to think that Aviendha was giving up, offering the same answer every time in hopes that she would stop asking, but then she realized that her sister’s voice was becoming more confident rather than less, that the protests that she was only guessing had dwindled. And her “guesses” were growing in detail. A bent, featureless rod of dull black, as wide as her wrist-it seemed metal, yet one end accommodated itself to any hand that gripped it-made her think of cutting, either metal or stone if they were not too thick. Nothing that could catch fire, though. The apparently glass figure of a man, a foot tall, with his hand raised as if to signal stop, would chase away vermin, which would certainly have been useful, given Caemlyn’s plague of rats and flies. A stone carving the size of her hand, all deep blue curves-it felt like stone, at least, though somehow it did not really look carved- was for growing something. Not plants. It made her think of holes, only they were not exactly holes. And she did not believe anyone had to channel to make it work. Only sing the right song! Some ter’angreal did not require channeling, but really! Singing?

Done with Aviendha’s dress, Sephanie had grown enthralled with the recitation, her eyes getting wider and wider. Essande listened with interest too, her head tilted to one side, murmuring small exclamations at each new revelation, but she was not bouncing on her toes the way Sephanie was. “What about that one, my Lady?” the younger woman blurted when Aviendha paused. She pointed to the statuette of a stout, bearded man with a merry smile, holding a book. Two feet tall, it appeared to be age-darkened bronze and was certainly heavy enough to be. “Looking at him always makes me want to smile, too, my Lady.”