Chapter 13: Choices

The party rides north toward Baerlon for nearly a week. Lan scouts ahead and behind, finds no sign of pursuit, and drills the boys each evening with the weapons they carry. Teaching Rand the sword, he describes the empty mind a fighter needs, and Rand recognizes it as the flame and the void Tam taught him.

Egwene stops braiding her hair because Aes Sedai do not, and Rand loses his temper over it. A few nights later Mat talks of slipping off to Illian instead of going to Tar Valon. Moiraine hears him and tells the three flatly that before she lets the Dark One have them, she will destroy them herself.

Later Rand creeps out to listen to Moiraine and Egwene talk. He learns the men who broke the world were mad rather than wicked, and that another girl in the Two Rivers could also be trained as Aes Sedai. Moiraine seems to feel him there.

At Baerlon's gates, Moiraine and Lan take the names Alys and Andra. The gatekeeper says Children of the Light have come north, and that Aes Sedai went to fight a man calling himself the Dragon in Ghealdan; some may be dead. The false Dragon is marching on Tear with followers he calls the People of the Dragon. Thom tells Rand the name is from the Karaethon Cycle: the Stone of Tear will fall only when the Dragon Reborn wields a sword no man may touch. They take rooms at Master Fitch's inn.