Spencer held his horse steady as the embassy crested a low hill, and Thread Sight caught Rand's golden thread one last time before distance swallowed it completely.
The ta'veren signature blazed south-southeast, heading toward the Darkfriend trail that led to Fain and the Horn. Mat's healed silver rode beside it, Perrin's green-gold wolf-touched thread completing the trio. Three boys from a village that had forgotten Spencer's borrowed face, riding toward a destiny that had been written three thousand years before any of them were born.
They'll be fine. Canon demands it.
And if canon breaks because of something I changed—
Spencer cut the thought off and turned his attention forward. The road to Tar Valon stretched west, white-paved and ancient, and the embassy moved along it like a procession of queens. Fourteen Aes Sedai, their Warders, servants, guards — a mobile court carrying the weight of the White Tower's authority.
And one carpenter with too many secrets, riding three horses behind a woman who wanted him dead.
---
Liandrin Guirale sat her horse like she was presiding over a tribunal.
Spencer studied her through Thread Sight while maintaining the appearance of a bored traveler watching the countryside. Up close, the Red sister's corruption was a masterwork of concealment. Her silver Aes Sedai thread gleamed with apparent purity — aggressive, certainly, touched by the characteristic harshness of Red Ajah temperament, but nothing that would stand out to casual observation.
The black threads were buried deep.
They surfaced only in moments: when Liandrin snapped at a servant for bringing water too slowly, when she dismissed a younger sister's comment with contempt, when her pale eyes swept the road ahead with the calculating attention of a predator assessing territory. In those instants, the corruption flickered to the surface like oil rising through water.
[Skill Archive: Recording. Category: Black Ajah Corruption Pattern — Concealed. Entry: Liandrin Guirale (Red Ajah). Note: Deep-buried corruption, surfaces during expressions of cruelty or contempt. Template for identifying sophisticated hidden Black Ajah.]
That's what decades of practice look like. She's been serving the Shadow since before I was born — either lifetime.
And she knows someone in Fal Dara could sense Darkfriends. She just doesn't know it was me.
Spencer let his horse drift slightly further back in the formation, putting more bodies between himself and Liandrin's periodic backward glances. The Red sister was still hunting for the "detector" that had been reported to her network. Every few hours, her corruption-threads extended feelers toward the group, testing, probing, looking for anything that felt wrong.
She can't sense the Codex. But she knows someone here isn't what they seem.
Three weeks on this road. Three weeks to avoid her attention while building an alliance with Verin.
This is going to be complicated.
---
That evening, the embassy made camp in a clearing that had clearly been used for this purpose before — fire pits already dug, tent positions marked by worn earth. Spencer helped with the mundane work of setting up, falling into the rhythms that had become familiar during the long weeks since Winternight.
Winternight. Sixteen dead. Eldrin Cauthon among them.
The memory surfaced unbidden, and Spencer let it sit in his chest without pushing it away. Eldrin's thread snapping. The Codex's clinical notification. The knowledge that his first intervention had killed a child.
He'd carried that weight through Baerlon, through Shadar Logoth, through the Ways and the Blight and the Eye of the World. It hadn't gotten lighter. But it had become familiar — a scar on his consciousness that reminded him what the stakes were.
I am not the author. I am the editor.
And editors make cuts. Sometimes the cuts bleed.
---
After dinner, Spencer found a quiet spot at the camp's edge and attempted something he'd been planning since they left Fal Dara.
Thread Tracing activated. He focused on Rand's ta'veren signature — that impossible golden blaze that was visible even at the edges of his perception — and pushed.
The trace extended south. Through forests and hills, across rivers he couldn't see, reaching toward a thread that burned like a bonfire in the Pattern's weave. Spencer's perception stretched thinner and thinner, the connection fraying at the edges—
And held.
[Thread Tracing: Extreme range achieved. Target: Rand al'Thor (ta'veren). Distance: ~150 miles. Connection quality: Degraded (position/direction only). Duration: 12 seconds. Stamina cost: 14.]
Spencer released the trace and let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. His head throbbed with the familiar ache of overextension, but he was grinning.
Ta'veren threads are strong enough to track at continental range. I can monitor Rand from Tar Valon.
Which means I can know if something goes catastrophically wrong with the Hunt. If the timeline breaks, I'll feel it.
The thought was reassuring and terrifying in equal measure. He couldn't help the Hunt party directly — but he could watch from a distance, counting the beats of a story he'd read a dozen times and hoping the melody stayed true.
---
Verin found him still sitting at the camp's edge, staring south into darkness.
"A contemplative evening," she said, settling onto a fallen log nearby. Her thread pulsed with the layered calculation that Spencer had come to recognize as her default state. "You looked very far away for a moment."
"Thinking about the people heading south."
"The Hunt party? An understandable concern. The Horn of Valere is no small prize to pursue." Verin's voice was mild, academic, perfectly casual. "I understand you were close with some of them. The young men from the Two Rivers."
She's probing. Testing whether I have connections that might complicate her plans.
"We traveled together. Survived together." Spencer chose his words carefully. "That creates bonds, even when the circumstances are... unusual."
"Indeed it does." Verin was quiet for a moment, her round face thoughtful in the firelight. "I've been considering our earlier conversation. About the historical references to certain Talents."
"And?"
"I believe the journey will provide excellent opportunity for discussion. The road is long, and I have research materials I'd like your opinion on." Her smile was warm and utterly opaque. "Perhaps tomorrow afternoon? The ride should be smooth enough for reading."
"I'd like that."
Verin rose, brushing dirt from her skirts. "Rest well, Aldan. The Tower awaits, and she is not a patient mistress."
She walked away, and Spencer watched her thread disappear into the camp's silver constellation of channeler signatures. Two liars with good intentions, circling each other on a road that led to the most dangerous place in the world.
The White Tower rises in twelve days. And I'm riding toward it with a dead child's memory, a flask of liquid light, and a list of traitors no one else can see.
Spencer opened his journal and wrote one line by firelight:
I am not the author. I am the editor. And the manuscript is fighting back.
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