“Like what?” she asked, turning her mare to join the throng. Rand and his escort were already out of the city.

“Worried,” he said bluntly, no readable expression on that stone-carved face now. “Afraid. I’ve never seen you afraid, not when we had Trollocs and Myrddraal swarming over us, not even when you learned the Forsaken were loose and Sammael was sitting almost on top of us. Is the end coming?”

She gave a start, and immediately wished she had not. He was looking straight ahead over his stallion’s ears, but the man never missed anything. Sometimes she thought he could see a leaf fall behind his back. “Do you mean Tarmon Gai’don? A redbird in Seleisin knows as well as I. The Light send, not so long as any of the seals remain unbroken.” The pair she had were on one of Kadere’s wagons, too, each packed by itself in a cask stuffed with wool. A different wagon than the redstone doorframe; she had made sure of that.

“What else could I mean?” he asked slowly, still not looking at her, and making her wish she had bitten her tongue. “You have become—impatient. I can remember when you could wait weeks for one tiny scrap of information, one word, without twitching a finger, but now—” He did look at her then, a blue-eyed gaze that would have intimidated most women. And most men as well. “The oath you gave to the boy, Moiraine. Whatever under the Light possessed you?”

“He has been drawing further and further away from me, Lan, and I must be close to him. He needs whatever guidance I can give, and I will do everything short of sharing his bed to see that he gets it.” The rings had told her that that would be disaster. Not that she had ever considered it—the very idea still shocked her!—but in the rings it was something she would or could have considered in the future. It was a measure of her growing desperation, no doubt, and in the rings she had seen that it would bring ruination on everything. She wished she could remember how—there were keys to Rand al’Thor in anything she could learn about him—but only the simple fact of calamity remained in her mind.

“Perhaps it will help your humility grow, if he tells you to fetch his slippers and light his pipe.”

She stared at him. Could that be a joke? If so, it was not amusing. She had never found that humility served very well in any situation. Siuan claimed that growing up in the Sun Palace in Cairhien had put arrogance deeply into Moiraine’s bones, where she could not even see it—something she firmly denied—but for all that Siuan was a Tairen fisherman’s daughter, she could match any queen stare for stare, and to her arrogance meant opposition to her own plans.