Leaning on his elbow, Mat examined the game of Snakes and Foxes laid out on the tent floor. Occasionally a drop of sweat fell from his chin, just missing the board. It was not a board at all, really, just a piece of red cloth with the web of lines drawn in black ink, and arrows showing which lines allowed movement only one way and which both. Ten pale wooden discs each with an inked triangle were the foxes, ten with a wavy line the snakes. Two lamps set to either side gave more than enough light.

“We will win this time, Mat,” Olver said excitedly. “I know we will.”

“Maybe,” Mat said. Their two black-stained discs were nearly back to the circle in the middle of the board, but the next roll of the dice would be for the snakes and foxes. Most of the time you did not make it as far as the outer edge. “Roll the dice.” He never touched the dice cup himself, not since the day he had given it to the boy; if they were going to play the game, it might as well be without his luck taking a hand.

With a grin, Olver rattled the leather cup and spilled out the wooden dice his father had made. He groaned as he counted the pips; this time three dice showed faces marked with a triangle, the other three wavy lines. On their turn you had to move the snakes and foxes toward your own pieces by the shortest path, and if one landed on the point you occupied. . . . A snake touched Olver, a fox Mat, and Mat could see if the rest of the pips had been played, two more snakes would have reached him.

Only a child’s game, and one you would not win so long as you followed the rules. Soon Olver would be old enough to realize that, and like other children, stop playing. Only a child’s game, but Mat did not like the fox getting him, and even less the snakes. It brought back bad memories, even if one had nothing to do with the other.

“Well,” Olver muttered, “we almost won. Another game, Mat?” Not waiting for an answer, he made the sign that opened the game, a triangle and then a wavy line through it, then chanted the words. “ ‘Courage to strengthen, fire to blind, music to dazzle, iron to bind.’ Mat, why do we say that? There is no fire, no music and no iron.”

“I don’t know.” The line tickled something in the back of his head, but he could not bring it up. The old memories from the ter’angreal might as well have been chosen at random—they probably had been—and there were all those gaps in his own, all those fuzzy places. The boy was always asking questions he did not know the answer to, usually beginning with “why.”