“Don’t you understand?” Elayne broke in, haughtiness all gone in excitement and fervor. She leaned forward to put a hand on Nynaeve’s knee, and her eyes shone, she was so delighted with herself. “It is a ter’angreal, Nynaeve. And I think I can make one.” She said each word slowly and deliberately, then laughed and rushed on. “If I can make this one, I can make others. Maybe I can even make angreal and sa’angreal. No one in the Tower has been able to do that in thousands of years!” Straightening, she shivered, and laid fingers across her mouth. “I never really thought of making anything myself before. Not anything useful. I remember seeing a craftsman once, a man who had made some chairs for the palace. They were not gilded, or elaborately carved—they were meant for the servants’ hall—but I could see the pride in his eyes. Pride in what he had made, a thing well crafted. I would love to feel that, I think. Oh, if we only knew a fraction of what the Forsaken do. The knowledge of the Age of Legends inside their heads, and they use it to serve the Shadow. Think what we could do with it. Think what we could make.” She took a deep breath, dropping her hands in her lap, her enthusiasm barely diminished. “Well, be that as it may, I’ll wager I could puzzle out how Whitebridge was made, too. Buildings like spun glass, but stronger than steel. And cuendillar, and—”

“Slow down,” Nynaeve said. “Whitebridge is five or six hundred miles from here at least, and if you think you’re going to go channeling at the seal, you can think again. Who knows what could happen? It stays in its pouch, in the stove, until we find somewhere safe for it.”

Elayne’s eagerness was very odd. Nynaeve would not have minded a little of the Forsaken’s knowledge herself—far from it—but if she wanted a chair, she paid a carpenter. She had never wanted to make anything, aside from poultices and salves. When she was twelve, her mother had stopped going through the motions of teaching her to sew, after it became apparent that she did not care whether she sewed a straight seam and could not be made to care. As for cooking . . . She thought she was a good cook, actually, but the point was that she knew what was significant. Healing was important. Any man could build a bridge, and leave him to it was what she said.

“With you and your a’dam,” she went on, “I nearly forgot to tell you. Juilin saw Galad on the other side of the river.”

“Blood and bloody ashes,” Elayne muttered, and when Nynaeve raised her eyebrows, she added very firmly, “I will not listen to a lecture on my language, Nynaeve. What are we going to do?”