“Eventually,” Moiraine replied quietly. “Eventually I will—have to leave you, after all. What will be, must be.” Rand thought she shivered, but it was so quick it could have been his imagination, and the next instant she was all composure and self-control once more. “You must be ready.” The reminder of his doubts came unpleasantly. “We should discuss your plans. You cannot sit here much longer. Even if the Forsaken are not planning to come after you, they are out there, spreading their power. Gathering the Aiel will do no good if you find that everything beyond the Spine of the World is in their hands.”

Chuckling, Rand leaned back against the table. So this was just another ploy; if he was anxious about her leaving, perhaps he would be more willing to listen, more amenable to being guided. She could not lie, of course, not right out. One of the vaunted Three Oaths took care of that: to speak no word that was not true. He had learned that it left a barn-width of wriggle room. She would leave him alone eventually. After he was dead, no doubt.

“You want to discuss my plans,” he said dryly. Pulling a short-stemmed pipe and a leather tabac pouch from his coat pocket, he thumbed the bowl full and briefly touched saidin to channel a flame dancing above the tabac. “Why? They are my plans.” Puffing slowly, he waited, ignoring Egwene’s glower.

The Aes Sedai’s face never changed, but her large, dark eyes seemed to blaze. “What have you done when you refused to be guided by me?” Her voice was as cool as her features, yet the words still seemed to come like whip-cracks. “Wherever you have gone, you have left death, destruction and war behind you.”

“Not in Tear,” he said, too quickly. And too defensively. He must not let her put him off balance. Determinedly, he took spaced, deliberate puffs at his pipe.

“No,” she agreed, “not in Tear. For once you had a nation behind you, a people, and what did you do with it? Bringing justice to Tear was commendable. Establishing order in Cairhien, feeding the hungry, is laudable. Another time I would praise you for it.” She herself was Cairhienin. “But it does not help you toward the day you face Tarmon Gai’don.” A single-minded woman, and cold when it came to anything else, even her own land. But should he not be just as single-minded?

“What would you have me do? Hunt down the Forsaken one by one?” Again he forced himself to draw more slowly on the pipe; it was an effort. “Do you even know where they are? Oh, Sammael is in Illian—you know that—but the rest? What if I go after Sammael as you wish, and find two or three or four of them? Or all nine?”