A Memory of Light

She allowed herself a smile. The link brought with it a storm of awareness. She could feel Androl’s emotions. He was as fearful as she was. He was also solid. She’d imagined that being linked to him would be terrible, because of his madness, but she sensed none of it.

But saidin . . . that liquid fire that he wrestled with, like a serpent that was trying to consume him. She pulled back. Was it tainted? She wasn’t certain she could tell. Saidin was so different, so alien. Reports from the early days fragmented, spoke of the taint like an oil slick upon a river. Well, she could see a river— more a stream, really. It appeared that Androl had been honest with her, and wasn’t very powerful. She could not sense any taint— but then again, she did not know what to look for.

“I wonder . . Androl said. “I wonder if I can make a gateway with this power.”

“Gateways don’t work in the Black Tower anymore.”

“I know,” he said. “But I keep feeling that they’re just beyond my fingertips.”

Pevara opened her eyes, looking at him. She could feel his honesty within the circle, but creating a gateway required a lot of the One Power, at least for a woman. Androl would have to be orders of magnitude too weak for that weave. Could it require a different level of strength for a man?

He reached out a hand, using her Power somehow, mixed with his own. She could feel him pulling the One Power through her. Pevara tried to maintain her composure, but she did not like him having control. She could do nothing!

“Androl,” she said. “Release me.”

“It’s wonderful . . .” he whispered, eyes unfocused as he stood up. “Is this what it feels like, to be one of the others? Those with strength in the Power?”

He drew more of her power and used it. Objects in the room began to rise into the air.

“Androl!” Panic. It was the panic she’d felt after hearing that her parents were dead. She hadn’t known this sense of horror in over a hundred years, not since taking the test for her shawl.

He had control of her channeling. Absolute control. She began to gasp, trying to reach for him. She could not use saidar without him releasing it back to her—but he could use it against her. Images of him using her own strength to tie her in Air ran through her mind. She could not end the link. Only he could.

He noticed, suddenly, and his eyes widened. The circle vanished like a wink of the eye, and her power was her own again. Without thinking, she lashed out. This would not happen again. She would have the control. The weaves sprang from her before she knew what she was doing.

Androl fel to his knees, hand sweeping across his table as he threw his head back, brushing tools and scraps of leather to the floor. He gasped. “What have you done?”

“Taim said we could pick any of you,” Pevara muttered as she realized what she had done. She’d bonded him. The reverse, after a fashion, of what he’d done to her. She tried to calm her thundering heart. An awareness of him blossomed in the back of her mind, like what they’d known in the circle, but somehow more personal. Intimate.

“Taim is a monster!” Androl growled. “You know that. You take his word on what you can do, and you do it without my permission?”

“I . . . I . . .”

Androl clenched his jaw, and Pevara immediately felt something. Something alien, something strange. It felt like looking at herself. Feeling her emotions circled back on her endlessly.

Her self melded with his for a seeming eternity. She knew what it was like to be him, think his thoughts. She saw his life in the blink of an eye, was absorbed by his memories. She gasped and fell to her knees in front of him.

It faded. Not completely, but it faded. It felt like swimming a hundred leagues through boiling water, and only now emerging, having forgotten what it was like to have normal sensations.

“Light . . she whispered. “What was that?”

He lay on his back. When had he fal en? He blinked, looking up at the ceiling. “I saw one of the others do it. Some of the Asha’man bond their wives.”

“You bonded me?” she said, horrified.

He groaned, rol ing over. “You did it to me first.”

She realized, with horror, that she could still feel his emotions. His self. She could even understand some of what he was thinking. Not the actual thoughts, but some impressions of them.

He was confused, worried and . . . curious. He was curious about the new experience.

Foolish man!

She’d hoped that the two bonds would have somehow canceled one another out. They did not. “We have to stop this,” she said. “I’ll release you. I vow it. Just . . . just release me.”

“I don’t know how,” he said, standing up and breathing in deeply. “I’m sorry.”

He was telling the truth. “That circle was a bad idea,” she said. He offered a hand to help her to her feet. She stood on her own without accepting it.

“I believe it was your bad idea before it was mine.”