She opened herself to saidar — and her stomach sank. Saidar was there — she could feel its warmth and light — but between her and the True Source stood something, nothing, an absence that shut her away from the Source like a stone wall. She felt hollow inside, until panic welled up to fill her. A man was channeling, and she was caught in it. He was Rand, of course, but dangling there like a basket, helpless, all she could think of was a man channeling, and the taint on saidin. She tried to shout at him, but all that came out was a croak.
“You want me to do something?” Rand growled. A pair of small tables flexed their legs awkwardly, the wood creaking, and began to stumble about in a stiff parody of dance, gilt flaking off and falling. “Do you like this?” Fire flared up in the fireplace, filling the hearth from side to side, burning on stone bare of ashes. “Or this?” The tall stag and wolves above the fireplace began to soften and slump. Thin streams of gold and silver flowed out from the mass, fining down to shining threads, snaking, weaving themselves into a narrow sheet of metallic cloth; the length of glittering fabric hung in the air as it grew, its far end still linked to the slowly melting statuette on the stone mantel. “Do something,” Rand said. “Do something! Do you have any idea what it is like to touch saidin, to hold it? Do you? I can feel the madness waiting. Seeping into me!”
Abruptly the capering tables burst into flame like torches, dancing still; books spun into the air, pages fluttering; the mattress on the bed erupted, showering feathers across the room like snow. Feathers falling onto the burning tables filled the room with their sharp, sooty stink.
For a moment Rand stared wildly at the blazing tables. Then whatever was holding Egwene and Elayne vanished, along with the shield; their heels thumped onto the carpet in the same instant the flames went out as if sucked into the wood they had been consuming. The blaze in the fireplace winked out, as well, and the books fell to the floor in a worse jumble than before. The length of goldandsilver cloth dropped, too, along with strands of roughmelted metal, no longer liquid or even hot. Only three largish lumps, two silver and one gold, remained on the mantel, cold and unrecognizable.
Egwene had staggered into Elayne as they landed. They clutched each other for support, but Egwene felt the other woman doing exactly what she was doing, embracing saidar as quickly as she could. In moments she had a shield ready to throw around Rand if he even appeared to be channeling, but he stood stunned, staring at the charred tables with feathers still drifting down around him, flecking his coat.
He did not seem to be a danger, now, but the room was certainly a mess. She wove tiny flows of Air to pull all the floating feathers together, and those already on the carpet, as well. As an afterthought, she added those on his coat. The rest of it he could have the majhere straighten, or see to himself.
Rand flinched as the feathers floated past him to alight on the tattered ruins of the mattress. It did nothing for the smell, burned feathers and burned wood, but at least the room was neater, and the open windows and faint breezes were already lessening the stench.
“The majhere may not want to give me another,” he said with a strained laugh. “A mattress a day is probably more than she is willing to....” He avoided looking at her or Elayne. “I'm sorry. I did not mean to....Sometimes it runs wild. Sometimes there's nothing there when I reach for it, and sometimes it does things I don't.... I'm sorry. Perhaps you had better go. I seem to say that a lot.” He blushed again and cleared his throat. “I am not touching the Source, but maybe you had best go.”
“We are not done yet,” Egwene said gently. More gently than she felt — she wanted to box his ears; the idea of picking her up like that, shielding her — and Elayne — but he was on the ragged edge. Of what, she did not know, and she did not want to find out, not now, not here. With so many exclaiming over their strength — everyone said she and Elayne would be among the strongest Aes Sedai, if not the strongest, in a thousand years or more — she had assumed they were as strong as he. Near to it, at least. She had just been rudely disabused. Perhaps Nynaeve could come close, if she was angry enough, but Egwene knew she herself could never have done what he just had, split her flows that many ways, worked that many things at once. Working two flows at once was far more than twice as hard as working one of the same magnitude, and working three much more than twice again working two. He had to have been weaving a dozen. He did not even look tired, yet exertion with the Power took energy. She very much feared he could handle her and Elayne both like kittens. Kittens he might decide to drown, if he went mad.
But she would not, could not, just walk away. That would be the same as quitting, and she was not made that way. She meant to do what she had come there for — all of it — and he was not going to chase her off short of it. Not him or anything else.
Elayne's blue eyes were filled with determination, and the moment Egwene fell silent she added in a much firmer voice, “And we will not go until we are. You said you would try. You must try.”
“I did say that, didn't I?” he murmured after a time. “At least we can sit down.”
Not looking at the blackened tables or the band of metallic cloth lying crumpled on the carpet, he led them, limping slightly, to highbacked chairs near the windows. They had to move books from the red silk cushions in order to sit; Egwene's chair held Volume Twelve of The Treasures of the Stone of Tear, a dusty, woodbound book entitled Travels in the Aiel Waste, with Various Observations on the Savage Inhabitants, and a thick, tattered leather volume called Dealings with the Territory of Mayene, 500 to 750 of the New Era. Elayne had a bigger stack to move, but Rand hurriedly took them from her along with those from his chair and put them all on the floor, where the pile promptly fell over. Egwene laid hers neatly beside them.
“What do you want me to do now?” He sat on the edge of his seat, hands on his knees. “I promise I won't do anything but what you ask this time.”
Egwene bit her tongue to keep from telling him that promise came a bit late. Perhaps she had been a little vague in what she had asked for, but that was no excuse. Still, that was something to be dealt with another time. She realized she was thinking of him as just Rand again, but he looked as if he had just splashed mud on her best dress and was worried she would not believe it an accident. Yet she had not let go of saidar, and neither had Elayne. There was no need to be foolish. “This time,” she said, “we just want you to talk. How do you embrace the Source? Just tell us. Take it step by step, slowly.”
“More like wrestling than embracing.” He grunted. “Step by step? Well, first I imagine a flame, and then I push everything into it. Hate, fear, nervousness. Everything. When they're all consumed, there's an emptiness, a void, inside my head. I am in the middle of it, but I'm a part of whatever I am concentrating on, too.”
“That sounds familiar,” Egwene said. “I've heard your father talk about a trick of concentration he uses to win the archery competitions. What he calls the Flame and the Void.”
Rand nodded; sadly, it seemed. She thought he must be missing home, and his father. “Tam taught it to me first. And Lan uses it, too, with the sword. Selene — someone I met once — called it the Oneness. A good many people seem to know about it, whatever they call it. But I found out for myself that when I was inside the void, I could feel saidin, like a light just beyond the corner of my eye in the emptiness. There's nothing but me and that light. Emotion, even thought, is outside. I used to have to take it bit by bit, but it all comes at once, now. Most of it does, anyway. Most of the time.”
“Emptiness,” Elayne said with a shiver. “No emotion. That doesn't sound very much like what we do.”
“Yes, it does,” Egwene insisted eagerly. “Rand, we just do it a little differently, that's all. I imagine myself to be a flower, a rosebud, imagine it until I am the rosebud. That is like your void, in a way. The rosebud's petals open out to the light of saidar, and I let it fill me, all light and warmth and life and wonder. I surrender to it, and by surrendering, I control it. That was the hardest part, to learn, really; how to master saidar by submitting, but it seems so natural now that I do not even think about it. That is the key to it, Rand. I am sure. You must learn to surrender —” He was shaking his head vigorously.
“That's nothing like what I do,” he protested. “Let it fill me? I have to reach out and take hold of saidin. Sometimes there's still nothing there when I do, nothing I can touch, but if I didn't reach for it, I could stand there forever and nothing would happen. It fills me all right, once I take hold, but surrender to it?” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Egwene, if I surrendered — even for a minute — saidin would consume me. It's like a river of molten metal, an ocean of fire, all the light of the sun gathered in one spot. I must fight it to make it do what I want, fight it to keep from being eaten up.”
He sighed. “I know what you mean about life filling you, though, even with the taint turning my stomach. Colors are sharper, smells clearer. Everything is more real, somehow. I don't want to let go, once I have it, even while it's trying to swallow me. But the rest.... Face the facts, Egwene. The Tower is right about this. Accept it for the truth, because it is.”
She shook her head. “I will accept it when it is proved to me.” She did not sound as sure as she wanted to, not as sure she had been. What he told sounded like some twisted halfreflection of what she did, similarities only emphasizing differences. Yet there were similarities. She would not give up. “Can you tell the flows apart? Air, Water, Spirit, Earth, Fire?”
“Sometimes,” he said slowly. “Not usually. I just take what I need to do what I want. Fumble for it, mostly. It's very strange. Sometimes I need to do a thing, and I do it, but only afterward do I know what it was I did, or how. It's almost like remembering something I've forgotten. But I can remember how to do it again. Most of the time.”
“Yet you do remember how,” she insisted. “How did you set fire to those tables?” She wanted to ask him how he had made them dance — she thought she saw a way, with Air and Water — but she wanted to start with something simple; lighting a candle and putting it out were things a novice could do.
Rand's face took on a pained expression. “I don't know.” He sounded embarrassed. “When I want fire, for a lamp or a fireplace, I just make it, but I do not know how. I don't really need to think to do things with fire.”
That almost stood to reason. Of the Five Powers, Fire and Earth had been strongest in men in the Age of Legends, and Air and Water in women; Spirit had been shared equally. Egwene hardly had to think to use Air or Water, once she had learned to do a thing in the first place. But the thought did not further their purpose.
This time it was Elayne who pressed him. “Do you know how you extinguished them? You seemed to think be