The great hunt - By Robert Jordan Page 0,174

light flickered oddly, and made her stomach flutter with it if she looked too long. Where arch touched ring, an Aes Sedai sat cross-legged on the bare stone of the floor, staring at the silvery construction. Another stood nearby, beside a plain table on which sat three large silver chalices. Each, Nynaeve knew—or at least, she had been told—was filled with clear water. All four Aes Sedai wore their shawls, as Sheriam did; blue-fringed for Sheriam, red for the swarthy woman by the table, green, white, and gray for the three around the arches. Nynaeve still wore one of the dresses she had been given in Fal Dara, pale green embroidered with small white flowers.

“First you leave me to stare at my thumbs from morning to night,” Nynaeve muttered, “and now it’s all in a rush.”

“The hour waits on no woman,” Sheriam replied. “The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, and when it wills. Patience is a virtue that must be learned, but we must all be ready for the change of an instant.”

Nynaeve tried not to glare. The most irritating thing she had yet discovered about the flame-haired Aes Sedai was that she sometimes sounded as if she were quoting sayings even when she was not. “What is that thing?”

“A ter’angreal.”

“Well, that tells me nothing. What does it do?”

“Ter’angreal do many things, child. Like angreal and sa’angreal, they are remnants of the Age of Legends that use the One Power, though they are not quite so rare as the other two. While some ter’angreal must be made to work by Aes Sedai, as this one must, others will do what they do simply with the presence of any woman who can channel. There are even supposed to be some that will function for anyone at all. Unlike angreal and sa’angreal, they were made to do specific things. One other we have in the Tower makes oaths binding. When you are raised to full sisterhood, you will take your final vows holding that ter’angreal. To speak no word that is not true. To make no weapon for one man to kill another. Never to use the One Power as a weapon except against Darkfriends or Shadowspawn, or in the last extreme of defending your own life, that of your Warder, or that of another sister.”

Nynaeve shook her head. It sounded either like too much to swear or too little, and she said so.

“Once, Aes Sedai were not required to swear oaths. It was known what Aes Sedai were and what they stood for, and there was no need for more. Many of us wish it were so still. But the Wheel turns, and the times change. That we swear these oaths, that we are known to be bound, allows the nations to deal with us without fearing that we will throw up our own power, the One Power, against them. Between the Trolloc Wars and the War of the Hundred Years we made these choices, and because of them the White Tower still stands, and we can still do what we can against the Shadow.” Sheriam drew a deep breath. “Light, child, I am trying to teach you what any other woman standing where you are would have learned over the course of years. It cannot be done. Ter’angreal are what must concern you, now. We don’t know why they were made. We dare use only a handful of them, and the ways in which we do dare to use them may be nothing like the purposes the makers intended. Most, we have learned to our cost to avoid. Over the years, no few Aes Sedai have been killed or had their Talent burned out of them, learning that.”

Nynaeve shivered. “And you want me to walk into this one?” The light inside the arches flickered less, now, but she could see what lay in it no better.

“We know what this one does. It will bring you face-to-face with your greatest fears.” Sheriam smiled pleasantly. “No one will ask you what you have faced; you need tell no more than you wish. Every woman’s fears are her own property.”

Vaguely, Nynaeve thought about her nervousness concerning spiders, especially in the dark, but she did not think that was what Sheriam meant. “I just walk through one arch and out another? Three times through, and it’s done?”

The Aes Sedai adjusted her shawl with an irritated hitch of her shoulder. “If you wish to boil it down that far, yes,” she said dryly. “I