She looked around and saw Nynaeve wrapped in the glow of saidar and holding a prybar so close in color to the blue-white of the light that it was nearly invisible. Nynaeve frowned at the chain, muttered something about leverage, and the prybar was suddenly twice as long.

“Move, Egwene.”

Egwene moved.

Thrusting the end of the prybar through the chain, Nynaeve braced it, then heaved with all her strength. The chain snapped like thread, Nynaeve gasped and stumbled halfway across the hall in surprise, and the prybar clattered to the floor. Straightening, Nynaeve stared from the bar to the chain in amazement. The prybar vanished.

“I think I did something to the chain,” Egwene said. And I wish I knew what.

“You could have said something,” Nynaeve muttered. She pulled the rest of the chain from the staples and threw open the door. “Well? Are you going to stand there all day?”

The dusty room inside was perhaps ten paces square, but it held only a heap of large bags made of heavy brown cloth, each stuffed full, tagged, and sealed with the Flame of Tar Valon. Egwene did not have to count them to know there were thirteen.

She moved her ball of light to the wall and fastened it there; she was not certain how she did it, but when she took her hand away, the light remained. I keep learning how to do things without knowing what they are, she thought nervously.

Elayne frowned at her as if considering, then hung her light on the wall, too. Watching, Egwene thought she saw what it was she had done. She learned it from me, but I just learned it from her. She shivered.

Nynaeve went straight to tumbling the bags apart and reading the tags. “Rianna. Joiya Byir. These are what we are after.” She examined the seal on one bag, then broke the wax and unwound the binding cords. “At least we know no one’s been here before us.”

Egwene chose a bag and broke the seal without reading the name on the tag. She did not really want to know whose possessions she was searching. When she upended them onto the dusty floor, they proved to be mainly old clothes and shoes, with a few ripped and crumpled papers of the sort that might hide under the wardrobe of a woman who was not too assiduous in seeing her rooms cleaned. “I don’t see anything useful here. A cloak that would not do for rags. A torn half of a map of some city. Tear, it says in the corner. Three stockings that need darning.” She stuck her finger through the hole in a velvet slipper that had no mate and waggled it at the others. “This one left no clues behind.”