Thom won anyway, and while he was stripping the saddle from Skulker, Nynaeve put her head under the wagon seat and levered up a floorboard with her belt knife. Besides two small gilded coffers containing Amathera’s presents of jewelry, several leather purses bulging with coin lay in the recess. The panarch had been more than generous in her desire to see their backs. The other things looked trifling by comparison; a small dark wooden box, polished but plain and uncarved, and a washleather purse lying flat and showing the impression of a disc inside. The box held the two ter’angreal they had recovered from the Black Ajah, both linked to dreams, and the purse . . . That was their prize from Tanchico. One of the seals on the Dark One’s prison.

As much as she wanted to find out where Siuan Sanche wanted them to chase the Black Ajah next, the seal was the source of her haste to reach Tar Valon. Digging coins from one of the fat purses, she avoided touching the flat purse; the longer it remained in her possession, the more she wanted to hand it to the Amyrlin and be done with it. Sometimes she thought she could feel the Dark One, trying to break through, when she was near the thing.

She saw Thom off with a pocketful of silver and a strong admonition to search out some fruit and green vegetables; either man was likely as not to buy nothing but meat and beans, left to himself. Thom’s limp as he led the horse off toward the road made her grimace; an old injury, and nothing to be done for it now, so Moiraine said. That rankled as much as the limp itself. Nothing to be done.

When she had left the Two Rivers, it had been to protect young people from her village, snatched away in the night by an Aes Sedai. She had gone to the Tower still with the hope that she could somehow shelter them, and the added ambition of bringing down Moiraine for what she had done. The world had changed since then. Or maybe she only saw the world differently. No, it is not me that’s changed. I’m the same; it is everything else that’s different.

Now it was all she could do to protect herself. Rand was what he was, and no turning back, and Egwene eagerly went her own way, not letting anyone or anything hold her back even if her way led over a cliff, and Mat had learned to think of nothing but women, carousing and gambling. She even found herself sympathizing with Moiraine sometimes, to her disgust. At least Perrin had gone back home, or so she had heard through Egwene, secondhand from Rand; perhaps Perrin was safe.