Carefully she formed a well-remembered image in her mind, and she was back in Tel’aran’rhiod, inside the small, windowless room in the Tower where she had lived as a novice. A narrow bed was built against one white-painted wall. A washstand and a three-legged stool stood opposite the door, and the current occupant’s dresses and shifts of white wool hung with a white cloak on pegs. There could as easily have been none; the Tower had not been able to fill the novices’ quarters in many years. The floor was almost as pale as walls and clothes. Every day the novice who lived there would scrub that floor on hands and knees; Egwene had done so herself, and Elayne, in the next room. If a queen came to train in the Tower, she would start in a room like this, scrubbing the floor.

The garments were arranged differently when she glanced at them again, but she ignored that. Ready to embrace saidar in a heartbeat, she opened the door just enough to stick her head out. And drew a relieved breath when she found Elayne’s head coming just as slowly out of the next doorway. Egwene hoped she did not appear as wide-eyed and uncertain. She motioned hurriedly, and Elayne scurried across in novice white that became a pale gray silk riding dress as she darted inside. Egwene hated gray dresses; that was what damane wore.

For an instant more she stayed there, scanning the railed galleries of the novices’ quarters. Layer on layer they rose, and fell as many levels to the Novices’ Court below. Not that she really expected Liandrin or worse to be out there, but it never hurt to be careful.

“I thought this was what you meant,” Elayne said as she shut the door. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to remember what I can say in front of whom? Sometimes I wish we could just tell the Wise Ones everything. Let them know we are only Accepted, and be done with it.”

“You would be done with it,” Egwene said firmly. “I happen to be sleeping not twenty paces from them.”

Elayne shivered. “That Bair. She reminds me of Lini when I’d broken something I was not supposed to touch.”

“You wait until I introduce you to Sorilea.” Elayne gave her a doubtful look, but then, Egwene was not sure that she would have believed Sorilea herself until she met her. There was no way to do this easily. She shifted her shawl. “Tell me about meeting Birgitte. It was Birgitte, wasn’t it?”

Elayne staggered as if hit in the stomach. Her blue eyes closed for a moment, and she took a breath that must have filled her to the toes. “I cannot talk to you about that.”

“What do you mean you can’t talk? You have a tongue. Was it Birgitte?”