“I do not miss where I aim,” Birgitte said dryly, “and where I aim will not be at you.” She began taking things from one of the cabinets and laying them on the small table. Half-finished arrows, scraped shafts, steel arrow points, stone glue pot, fine cord, gray goose feathers for fletchings. She had said she would make her own bow, too, as soon as she could. Luca’s she called “a knot-riddled branch broken from a cross-grained tree by a blind idiot in the middle of the night.”

“I liked you, Nynaeve,” she said as she laid everything out. “Thorns, warts and all. I no longer do, as you are now . . .”

“You have no reason to like me, now,” Nynaeve said miserably, but the other woman spoke right over her without looking up.

“. . . and I will not allow you to make me less, to make my decisions less, by claiming responsibility for them. I have had few women friends, but most have had tempers like snowghosts.”

“I wish you could be my friend once more.” What under the Light was a snowghost? Something from another Age, no doubt. “I would never try to make you less, Birgitte. I only—”

Birgitte paid her no mind, except to raise her voice. Her attention seemed all on her arrow shafts. “I would like to like you again, whether you return the liking or not, but I cannot until you are yourself again. I could live with you a milk-tongued sniveling wretch if that was what you were. I take people as they are, not as I would like them to be, or else I leave them. But that is not what you are, and I will not accept your reasons for playing at it. So. Clarine told me of your encounter with Cerandin. Now I know what to do the next time you claim my decisions as your own.” She swished a length of ashwood vigorously. “I am sure Latelle will be happy to provide the switch.”

Nynaeve forced her jaws to unclench, forced her tone as smooth as she could make it. “You have a perfect right to do whatever you wish to me.” Her fists in her skirts quivered more than her voice.