Perrin sighed again. Today he had decided to stay every moment at Faile’s side. She would have to speak to him sooner or later, and besides, Berelain would surely leave him alone if he was with his wife. Well, at least Berelain had indeed left him alone, but as soon as Faile realized he was not going hunting again, she had collared Loial before he could run off to the Library, and they had been playing endless games of stones ever since. In silence, for all practical purposes. Perrin wished he were wherever Rand was.

Lying on his back on the bed, Rand stared up at the thick basement rafters, not really seeing them. The bed was not large, but it had two feather mattresses and goose-down pillows and good linen sheets. There was a sturdy chair, and a small table, plain yet well made. His muscles still ached from being transported here inside one of the chests. The Power had doubled him up easily, with his head between his knees; simple cords had sufficed to make a package of him.

Metal grating on metal made him turn his head. Galina had used a large iron key to unlock a flap in the iron cage that surrounded bed and table and chair. A graying woman with a wrinkled face thrust her arms inside the cage long enough to set a cloth-covered tray on the table, then all but leaped back.

“I intend to deliver you to the Tower in reasonable health,” Galina said coldly as she relocked the flap. “Eat, or you will be fed.”

Rand turned his eyes back to the rafters. Six Aes Sedai sat in chairs around the cage, sustaining the shield on him. He maintained the Void, in case they should slip, but he did not lunge at the barrier. When they first pushed him stumbling into the cage, he had; some of them had laughed, those who took any notice. Now he reached gingerly instead toward the fury of saidin, a storm of fire and ice still just out of sight beyond the corner of his eye. He reached, and felt at the invisible wall cutting him off from the Source, slid along it as though trying to find an edge. What he found was a place where the wall seemed to become six points; they stopped him as effectively, but they were six, not one, and definitely points.