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She wondered if the woht Liandrin fit that part better Or perhaps Alanna; she had been interested in Rand, too

She could not bring herself to tell Anaiya Formally, she said, "Anaiya Sedai, I know it sounds foolish, but he is in danger Great danger I know it I could feel it I still can"

Anaiya wore a thoughtful look "Well, now," she said softly, "that’s a possibility I’ll wager no one has considered You may be a Dreamer It is a small chance, child, butWe haven’t had one of those in -- oh -- four or five hundred years And Drea If you really can Dream, it er in the Reds’ eye Of course, it could be just an ordinary nightht, and cold food, and us traveling so hard since we left Fal Dara And youman Much more likely Yes, yes, child, I know You are worried about hiwene shook her head "He just vanished, and I felt danger And evil I felt it even before he vanished" She shivered and rubbed her hands together "I can still feel it"

"Well, ill talk about it more on the River Queen If you are a Drea Moiraine should be here toYou there!" the Aes Sedai barked suddenly, and Egwene jumped A tall man, who had just sat down on a cask of wine, jumped, too Several others quickened their step "That’s for loading aboard, not resting on! We will talk on the boat, child No, you fool! You can’t carry it by yourself! Do you want to hurt yourself?" Anaiya went striding off down the dock, giving the unfortunate villagers a rougher side of her tongue than Egould have suspected she had

Egwene peered into the dark, toward the south He was out there, soht She was sure of it Hold on, you woolheaded idiot If you get yourself killed before I can get you out of this, I will skin you alive It did not occur to her to ask how she was going to get hi her cloak around her, she set out to find a boat to the River Queen

Chapter 13

(Portal Stone)

Fro sun woke Rand, and he wondered if he were dreaed, or al The sun and the sky were as he expected to see, if pallid and all but cloudless Loial and Hurin still lay on either side of him, wrapped in their cloaks asleep, and their horses still stood hobbled a pace away, but everyone else was gone

Soldiers, horses, his friends, everyone and everything gone

The hollow itself had changed, too, and they were in the e At Rand’s head rose a gray stone cylinder, every bit of three spans high and a full pace thick, covered with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deeply incised diagranize White stone paved the bottom of the hollow, as level as a floor, polished so sh steps rose to the ris of different colored stone And about the rim, the trees stood blackened and twisted as if a firestor seemed paler than it should be, just like the sun, h mist Only there was no mist Just the three of them and the horses appeared truly solid But when he touched the stone under hih

He reached out and shook Loial and Hurin "Wake up! Wake up and tellalready?" Loial began, sitting up, then his reider and wider

Hurin ith a start, then leaped to his feet, ju like a flea on a hot rock to look this way, then that "Where are we? What’s happened? Where is everybody? Where are we, Lord Rand?" He sank to his knees, wringing his hands, but his eyes still darted "What’s happened?"

"I don’t know," Rand said slowly "I was hoping it was a dream, butMaybe it is a dream" He had had experience of dreams that were not dreams, experience he wanted neither to repeat nor to re stayed as it was

"I do not think so," Loial said He was studying the colued across his cheeks, and his tufted ears seemed to have wilted "I think this is the saht I think I knohat it is, now" For once, he soundedthe same stone was no more crazy than what he could see around hi changed I thought I’d escaped, but it’s started again, and there’s no such thing as crazy anymore Unless I a as if he were ht his eye, the different colors, seven rising from blue to red "One for each Ajah," he said

"No, Lord Rand," Hurin moaned "No Aes Sedai would not do this to us They wouldn’t! I walk in the Light"

"We all do, Hurin," Rand said "The Aes Sedai won’t hurt you" Unless you get in the way Could this be Moiraine’s doing somehow? "Loial, you said you knohat the stone is What is it?"

"I said I think I know, Rand There was a piece of an old book, just a few pages, but one of the of this stone, this Stone" -- there was a distinct difference in the way he said it that marked importance -- "or one very like it And underneath, it said, ’From Stone to Stone run the lines of "if," between the worlds that ht be"’

"What does that ier shook his es Part of it said Aes Sedai in the Age of Legends, some of those who could Travel, the most powerful of them, could use these Stones It did not say how, but I think, from what I could puzzle out, that perhaps those Aes Sedai used the Stones solanced up at the seared trees and pulled his eyes down again quickly, as he did not want to think about what lay beyond the rim "Yet even if Aes Sedai can use them, or could, we had no Aes Sedai with us to channel the Power, so I don’t