She had learned a few things alone like this, added to what the Wise Ones had taught her, even ventured where they would have barred the way. And yet. . . . She had no doubt she would know more, much more, if she had had a dreamwalker looking over her shoulder. Telling her that this was too dangerous yet and that forbidden altogether, true, yet suggesting what to try as well. Long past the simple things, easily puzzled out—well, not exactly easily; never that—she had reached a point where she could reason the next step on her own, but they were steps the Wise One dreamwalkers had taken long ago. What took her a month to master for herself, they could teach in a night, in an hour. When they decided she was ready. Never until then. It galled so, when all she wanted was to learn. To learn everything. Right now.

Each light looked identical to every other, yet she had learned to recognize a handful. How exactly, she did not know, a thing that irked her no end. Even the Wise Ones did not know that. Still, once she identified which dream belonged to which person, she could find that person’s dreams again like an arrow to the target, no matter if they went to the other side of the world. That light was Berelain, the First of Mayene, the woman Rand had put in charge in Cairhien. Looking into Berelain’s dreams made Egwene uncomfortable. Usually they were no different from any other woman’s—any woman interested equally in power, politics and the latest fashion in dresses—but sometimes Berelain dreamed of men, even men Egwene knew, in a way that made Egwene blush to remember.

And that slightly muted glow over there was Rand, his dreams guarded behind a ward woven of saidin. She almost stopped—it piqued her that something she could not see or feel could shut her out like a stone wall—but instead let it pass. Another night of futility held no attraction.

This place skewed distance the way Tel’aran’rhiod did time. Rand was sleeping in Caemlyn, unless he had jaunted to Tear, a thing she very much wanted to know how he did, but only a little way from his dream, Egwene picked out another light she recognized. Bair, in Cairhien, hundreds of leagues from Rand; wherever Rand was, she knew for a fact it was not Cairhien this night. How did he do it?