“Child,” Anaiya said gently, adjusting the blue-fringed shawl that was suddenly looped over her arms, “you have been doing very good work, but that doesn’t excuse a peevish mouth.”

“You have been given a number of privileges,” Myrelle said, not at all gently, “but you seem to forget that they are privileges.” Her frown should have been enough to make Nynaeve quake. Myrelle had been increasingly hard on Nynaeve the past weeks. She had her shawl on, too. They all did, a bad sign.

Morvrin snorted bluntly. “When I was Accepted, any girl who spoke to an Aes Sedai that way would have spent the next month scrubbing floors, if she was due to be raised Aes Sedai the next day.”

Elayne spoke up hurriedly, hoping she could forestall their own disaster. Nynaeve had put on what she probably thought was a conciliatory face, but she looked sulky and stubborn. “I am sure she didn’t mean anything, Aes Sedai. We have been working very hard. Please forgive us.” Adding herself might help, since she had done nothing. It might also have them both scrubbing floors. At least it made Nynaeve look at her. And think, apparently, since her features smoothed into something that did seem appeasing and she made a curtsy and stared at the ground as though abashed. Maybe she really was. Maybe. Elayne rushed on as if Nynaeve had made a formal apology and had it accepted. “I know you all do want to spend as much time as possible at the Tower, so perhaps we shouldn’t wait any longer? If you will all visualize Elaida’s study, just as you saw it last time?” Elaida was never called the Amyrlin in Salidar, and in the same way the Amyrlin’s study in the White Tower had its name shifted. “Everyone fix it in your minds, so we all arrive together.”

Anaiya was the first to nod, but even Carlinya and Beonin let themselves be diverted.

It was unclear whether the ten of them moved or Tel’aran’rhiod moved around them. It could have been either from the little Elayne really understood; the World of Dreams was almost infinitely malleable. One moment they were standing in the street in Salidar, the next in a large and ornate room. The Aes Sedai gave satisfied nods, still inexperienced enough to be pleased at anything that worked as they thought it should.

As surely as Tel’aran’rhiod reflected the waking world, this room reflected the power of the women who had occupied it over the last three thousand years. The gilded stand-lamps were unlit, but there was light, in the odd way of Tel’aran’rhiod and dreams. The tall fireplace was golden marble from Kandor, the floor polished redstone from the Mountains of Mist. The walls had been paneled a relatively short time ago—a mere thousand years—in pale wood, oddly striped and carved with marvelous beasts and birds that Elayne was sure had come straight out of the carver’s imagination. Gleaming pearly stone framed tall arched windows that let onto the balcony overlooking the Amyrlin’s private garden; that stone had been salvaged from a nameless city submerged in the Sea of Storms during the Breaking of the World, and no one had ever found its like elsewhere.