Egwene climbed to her feet with a hand from Leane. The room fell still, lamp flickering, all of them staring at the cell. The melting had stopped, the bars split, the top halves frozen with drips of steel on their tips, the lower halves bent inward. Many had been flattened to the stones by Leane's escape. The floor inside the room had bowed inward, like a funnel, the rocks stretching. Those stones bore gashes where Leane's scrambling had scored them.

Leane stood, her heart beating, realizing that only seconds had passed. What should they do? Scuttle away in fear? Was the rest of the hallway going to melt, too?

Egwene stepped forward, tapping her toe against one of the bars. It resisted. Leane took a step forward, and her dress crunched, bits of stone— like mortar—falling free. She reached down and brushed at her skirt, and felt rough rock coating it instead of wax.

"These sorts of events are more frequent," Egwene said calmly, glancing at the two Yellows. "The Dark One is getting stronger. The Last Battle approaches. What is your Amyrlin doing about it?"

Musarin glanced at her; the tall, aging Aes Sedai looked deeply disturbed. Leane took Egwene's lead, forcing herself to be calm as she stepped up beside the Amyrlin, chips of stone falling from her dress.

"Yes, well," Musarin said. "You shall return to your rooms, novice. And you . . ." She glanced at Leane, then at the remains of the cell. "We will . . . have to relocate you."

"And get me a new dress as well, I assume," Leane said, folding her arms.

Musarin's eyes flickered at Egwene. "Go. This is no longer your business, child. We will care for the prisoner."

Egwene gritted her teeth, but then she turned to Leane. "Stay strong," she said, and hurried away, heading down the hallway.

Exhausted, disturbed by the stone-warping bubble of evil, Egwene walked with swishing skirts toward the Tower wing that contained the novices' quarters. What would it take to convince the foolish women that there wasn't time to spare for squabbling!

The hour was late, and few women walked the corridors, none of them novices. Egwene passed several servants bustling at late-night duties, their slippered feet falling softly on the floor tiles. These sectors of the Tower were populated enough that lamps burned on the walls, trimmed low, giving an orange light. A hundred different polished tiles reflected the flickering flames, looking like eyes that watched Egwene as she walked.

It was hard to comprehend that this quiet evening had turned into a trap that nearly killed Leane. If even the ground itself could not be trusted, then what could? Egwene shook her head, too tired, too sore, to think of solutions at the moment. She barely noticed when the floor tiles turned from gray to a deep brown. She just continued on, into the Tower wing, counting the doors she passed. Hers was the seventh . . .

She froze, frowning at a pair of Brown sisters: Maenadrin—a Saldaean—and Negaine. The two had been speaking in hushed whispers, and they frowned at Egwene as she passed them. Why would they be in the novices' quarters?

But wait. The novices' quarters didn't have brown floor tiles. This section should have had nondescript gray tiles. And the doors in the hallway were spaced far too widely. This didn't look at all like the novices' quarters! Had she been so tired that she'd walked in completely the wrong direction?

She retraced her steps, passing the two Brown sisters again. She found a window and looked out. The rectangular white expanse of the Tower wing extended around her, just as it should. She wasn't lost.

Perplexed, she looked back down the hallway. Maenadrin had folded her arms, regarding Egwene with a set of dark eyes. Negaine, tall and spindly, stalked up to Egwene. "What business have you here this time of night, child?" she demanded. "Did a sister send for you? You should be back in your room for sleep."

Wordlessly, Egwene pointed out the window. Negaine glanced out, frowning. She froze, gasping softly. She looked back in at the hallway, then back out, as if unable to believe where she was.

In minutes, the entire Tower was in a frenzy. Egwene, forgotten, stood at the side of a hallway with a cluster of bleary-eyed novices as sisters argued with one another in tense voices, trying to determine what to do. It appeared that two sections of the Tower had been swapped, and the slumbering Brown sisters had been moved from their sections on the upper levels down into the wing. The novices' rooms—intact—had been placed where the section of Brown sisters had been. Nobody remembered any motion or vibration when the swap happened, and the transfer appeared seamless. A line of floor tiles had been split right down the middle, then melded with tiles from the section that had shifted.

It's getting worse and worse, Egwene thought as the Brown sisters decided—for now—that they would have to accept the switch. They couldn't very well move sisters into rooms the size that novices used.

That would leave the Browns divided, half in the wing, half in their old location—with a clump of novices in the middle of them. A division aptly representative of the less-visible divisions the Ajahs were suffering. Eventually, exhausted, Egwene and the others were sent off to sleep— though now she had to trudge up many flights of stairs before reaching her bed.

CHAPTER 7

The Plan for Arad Doman

A storm is coming," Nynaeve said, looking out the window of the manor. "Yes," replied Daigian from her chair by the hearth without bothering to glance at the window. "I think you might be right, dear. I swear, it seems as if it has been overcast for weeks!"

"It has been a single week," Nynaeve said, holding her long, dark braid in one hand. She glanced at the other woman. "I haven't seen a patch of clear sky in over ten days."

Daigian frowned. Of the White Ajah, she was plump and curvaceous. She wore a small stone on her forehead as Moiraine had so long ago, though Daigian's was an appropriately white moonstone. The tradition apparently had something to do with being a Cairhien noblewoman, as did the four colored slashes the woman wore on her dress.

"Ten days, you say?" Daigian said. "Are you certain?"

Nynaeve was. She paid attention to the weather; that was one of the duties of a village Wisdom. She was Aes Sedai now, but that didn't mean she stopped being who she was. The weather was always there, in the back of her mind. She could sense the rain, sun, or snow in the wind's whispers.

Lately, however, the sensations hadn't been like whispers at all. More like distant shouts, growing louder. Or like waves crashing against one another, still far to the north, yet harder and harder to ignore.

"Well," Daigian said, "I'm certain this isn't the only time in history that it has been cloudy for ten days!"

Nynaeve shook her head, tugging on her braid. "It's not normal," she said. "And those overcast skies aren't the storm I'm talking about. It's still distant, but it's coming. And it is going to be terrible. Worse than any I've ever seen. Far worse."

"Well, then," Daigian said, sounding slightly uncomfortable, "we will deal with it when it arrives. Are you going to sit down so that we can continue?"

Nynaeve glanced at the plump Aes Sedai. Daigian was extremely weak in the Power. The White might just be the weakest Aes Sedai that Nynaeve had ever met. By traditional—yet unspoken—rules, that meant that Nynaeve should be allowed to take the lead.

Unfortunately, Nynaeve's position was still questionable. Egwene had raised her to the shawl by decree, just as she'd raised Elayne: there had been no testing, nor had Nynaeve sworn on the Oath Rod. To most—even those who accepted Egwene's place as the true Amyrlin— those omissions made Nynaeve something less than Aes Sedai. Not an Accepted, but hardly equal to a sister.