“Do not look so shaken,” Bair chuckled. “Amys is not angry at all wetlanders, certainly not at you, who have become like a daughter of our tents. It is your sister Aes Sedai. The one called Carlinya suggested we may be holding you against your will.”

“Suggested?” Amys’ pale eyebrows climbed nearly to her hairline. “The woman said as much!”

“And learned to guard her tongue better.” Bair laughed, rocking on her scarlet cushion. “I will wager she did. When we left them, she was still yelping and trying to get those scarlet puffers out of her dress. A scarlet puffer,” she confided to Egwene, “looks much like a red adder if your eye is dull like a wetlander’s, but it is not poisonous. It does wriggle when confined, though.”

Amys sniffed. “They would have been gone if she thought of them gone. The woman learns nothing. The Aes Sedai we served in the Age of Legends could not have been such fools.” But she sounded mollified.

Melaine was chortling quite openly, and Egwene found herself giggling too. Some Aiel humor was beyond explaining, but not this. She had only met Carlinya three times, but the image of that stiff, icily supercilious woman dancing about trying to haul snakes out of her dress—it was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud.

“At least your humor is in good fettle,” Melaine said. “The head pains have not come back?”

“My head feels fine,” Egwene lied, and Bair nodded.

“Good. We were worried when they persisted. So long as you refrain from entering the dream for a while longer, they should stay away. Do not fear you suffer any ill effect from them; the body uses pain to tell us to rest.”

That nearly made Egwene laugh again, though not in humor. Aiel ignored gaping wounds and broken bones because they could not be bothered right then. “How much longer do I have to stay out?” she asked. She hated lying to them, but she hated doing nothing even worse. The first ten days after Lanfear hit her with whatever that had been were bad enough; then she could not even think without her head splitting. Once she could, what her mother called “the itchy hands of idleness” had driven her into Tel’aran’rhiod behind the Wise Ones’ backs. You learned nothing resting. “The next meeting, you said?”

“Perhaps,” Melaine replied with a shrug. “We will see. But you must eat. If your desire for food is gone, something is wrong that we do not know.”

“Oh, I can eat.” The porridge cooking outside did smell good. “I was just being lazy, I suppose.” Getting up without wincing was a chore; her head did not like being moved yet. “I thought of some more questions last night.”

Melaine rolled her eyes in amusement. “Since, you were hurt you ask five questions for every one you asked before.”