“Ah, yes,” Verin said. She was seated behind a table as cluttered as everything else in the room, a torn page held carefully in her hands. “It is you. Yes.” She noticed Egwene’s sideways glance at the owl, and said absently, “He keeps down mice. They chew paper.” Her gesture took in the entire room, and reminded her of the page she held. “Fascinating, this. Rosel of Essam claimed more than a hundred pages survived the Breaking, and she should have known, since she wrote barely two hundred years afterwards, but only this one piece still exists, so far as I know. Perhaps only this very copy. Rosel wrote that it held secrets the world could not face, and she would not speak of them plainly. I have read this page a thousand times, trying to decipher what she meant.”

The tiny owl blinked at Egwene again. She tried not to look at it. “What does it say, Verin Sedai?”

Verin blinked, very much as the owl had. “What does it say? It is a direct translation, mind, and reads almost like a bard reciting in High Chant. Listen. ‘Heart of the Dark. Ba’alzamon. Name hidden within name shrouded by name. Secret buried within secret cloaked by secret. Betrayer of Hope. Ishamael betrays all hope. Truth burns and sears. Hope fails before truth. A lie is our shield. Who can stand against the Heart of the Dark? Who can face the Betrayer of Hope? Soul of shadow, Soul of the Shadow, he is—’ ” She stopped with a sigh. “It ends there. What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” Egwene said. “I do not like it.”

“Well, why should you, child? Like it, or understand it? I have studied it nearly forty years, and I do neither.” Verin carefully placed the page inside a silk-lined folder of stiff leather, then casually stuffed the folder into a stack of papers. “But you did not come for that.” She rummaged across the table, muttering to herself, several times barely catching a pile of books or manuscripts before it toppled. Finally she came up with a handful of pages covered in a thin, spidery hand and tied with nubby string. “Here, child. Everything that is known about Liandrin and the women who went with her. Names, ages, Ajahs, where they were born. Everything I could find in the records. Even how they performed in their studies. What we know of the ter’angreal they took, too, which isn’t much. Only descriptions, for the most part. I do not know whether any of this will help. I saw nothing of any use in this.”