On one of those walkways, with fat green columns, two sisters were standing together watching the activity in the courtyard below. At least, they were watching together when Cadsuane opened the door to the colonnade. Beldeine saw her step out, and stiffened, twitching at the green-fringed shawl she had worn fewer than five years. Pretty, with her high cheekbones and a slight tilt to her brown eyes, she had not yet achieved agelessness, and looked younger than Min, particularly when she shot Cadsuane a frosty stare and hurried from the colonnade in the other direction.

Merise, her companion, smiled after her in amusement, shifting her own green-fringed shawl slightly. Tall and usually quite serious, with her hair drawn back tightly from her pale face, Merise was not a woman who smiled often. “Beldeine, she is becoming concerned that she has no Warder yet,” she said in the accents of Tarabon as Cadsuane stopped beside her, though her blue eyes returned to the courtyard. “She seems to be considering an Asha’man, if she can find one. I told her to talk to Daigian. If it does not help her, it will help Daigian.”

All of the Warders they had with them were gathered in the stone-paved yard, in their shirtsleeves despite the cold, most seated on painted wooden benches watching two of their number work with wooden practice swords. Jahar, one of Merise’s three, was a pretty, sun-dark young man. The silver bells fastened to the ends of his two long braids chimed with the fury of his attack. He moved like a striking blacklance. Not a breath of breeze stirred, but the eight-pointed star, like a golden compass rose, seemed to shift against Cadsuane’s hair. Had it been held in her hand, she could have felt it vibrating clearly. But then, she already knew that Jahar was an Asha’man, and the star would not have pointed him out, merely told her that a man who could channel was nearby. The more men who could channel, the harder the star quivered, she had learned. Jahar’s opponent, a very tall, broad-shouldered fellow with a stone face and a braided leather cord around his graying temples to hold back shoulder-length hair, was not the second Asha’man down there, but he was as deadly in his own way. Lan did not really seem to move that fast, but he … flowed. His blade of bundled laths was always there to deflect Jahar’s, always moving the younger man just a touch more out of his line.