The morning light fell gray and cold across Emond's Field.
Spencer had slept three hours. His body screamed for more, but the Codex hummed with impatience, and there was work to do before Moiraine made her decision about who traveled with her and who stayed behind.
He found her outside the inn, standing alone near the well. Her blue cloak was freshly brushed despite the chaos of the night before, and her ageless face showed no trace of the exhaustion she must be feeling after Healing half the village. The silver-blue thread of her fate-line glowed steady and bright in Spencer's Thread Sight — controlled power, patient purpose.
Time to perform.
"Lady Moiraine." Spencer approached with the carefully measured hesitation of a young man confessing something shameful. "I need to tell you something. About what I can do."
She turned. Those dark eyes missed nothing — not the circles under his eyes, not the slight tremor in his hands, not the way he kept his gaze lowered like someone expecting to be mocked.
"The carpenter with the impressions." Her voice was calm, neutral. "I wondered when you would come to me properly."
She's been waiting. Good. That means I'm worth waiting for.
"I've had them since childhood," Spencer said. The lie flowed smoothly, rehearsed through three hours of sleepless preparation. "Feelings about people. Whether they're... right, or wrong. Safe, or dangerous. I never told anyone because — well, you know how villages are. They'd have called me touched."
"And what do your impressions tell you now?"
"The peddler. Fain." Spencer let his voice drop, as if the name itself was difficult to speak. "He felt like rot under a floor. Something sick and wrong, wearing a human face. I tried to warn Master al'Thor about him, but I couldn't explain it properly. I just knew — the way you know when a storm is coming, even before the clouds."
Moiraine's expression didn't change, but something shifted in her thread. Interest, sharpening to focus.
"And last night?"
"I felt them coming. The — the Trollocs." Spencer stumbled over the word, the way a village boy would stumble over a name from legends. "From the north, before anyone heard them. I ran door to door, tried to warn people. Some listened. Some didn't."
Sixteen dead. Seventeen, counting mine.
"That is... a remarkably specific impression."
"I don't understand it myself." Spencer spread his hands, the gesture of a man who'd given up trying to explain the unexplainable. "But I thought you should know. In case it matters."
---
Movement behind him. Spencer felt it through Thread Sight — a gray-green thread approaching fast, stopping exactly where a knife could reach his kidney.
Lan Mandragoran stood close enough to kill him in less than a heartbeat. The Warder's face was stone, his eyes chips of winter ice.
"How did you know which direction they were coming from?" The question was flat, stripped of everything except demand.
Spencer didn't flinch. He'd sensed Lan's approach and kept his body language neutral, which was either the right play or exactly the wrong one.
"I don't know how. I just felt it. Like pressure building behind my eyes, and when I turned north, it got worse."
"How many?"
"I couldn't count. More than twenty. Maybe forty."
"What formation?"
"Three groups. Coming from different angles."
Lan's eyes narrowed. Those were specific answers — too specific for vague impressions, too accurate for luck. Spencer watched the calculation happening behind that stone face and knew he was being weighed.
He thinks I'm either Talented or a Darkfriend. There's no middle ground for a man like Lan.
"The peddler," Lan said. "You watched him in the square. Before the attack."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because he felt wrong. Because every time I looked at him, my skin crawled." Spencer met Lan's gaze and let the truth — the real truth, underneath all the careful lies — show through. "Something is wearing that man like a coat. I don't know what. But it's not human anymore."
Silence stretched. Moiraine and Lan exchanged a glance that communicated entire conversations in a single look.
"Wait here," Moiraine said. "I need to examine something."
She walked toward the village center, where Fain's wagon sat abandoned in the morning light. Lan stayed behind, watching Spencer with the focused attention of a predator deciding whether something was prey or competition.
Spencer waited. There was nothing else to do.
---
Fain's wagon was empty.
Not just unoccupied — stripped. Spencer heard the details from villagers who'd noticed: the peddler had fled sometime in the night, before dawn, leaving behind his wagon and most of his wares. He'd taken only what he could carry on his back and vanished into the darkness.
That's wrong. In canon, Fain stayed through Winternight. He fled WITH the Trollocs, not before them.
I changed something. When I watched him in the square — when his corruption reacted to my Thread Sight — he sensed something. Not me specifically, but something. And it spooked him enough to run early.
Butterfly effect. The first real divergence.
Moiraine emerged from Fain's wagon with her face very still. The kind of stillness that meant she'd found something significant and was processing its implications.
"The carpenter was correct," she said to Lan. "The peddler was... touched by the Shadow. The residue is unmistakable."
Spencer sat on the inn's front steps and listened. He should have felt triumph — his intelligence had been validated, his usefulness proven — but all he could think about was Eldrin Cauthon, whose thread had frayed and snapped under his clumsy hands.
I saved lives last night. I warned families. I got Tam to the inn.
And I killed a seven-year-old girl because I thought I could do more than watch.
What kind of person does that make me?
The Codex offered no answers. It just sat in the back of his mind, tracking his stamina recovery, cataloging the morning's observations, waiting for him to use it again.
---
Moiraine found him an hour later.
The morning had warmed slightly — not spring warmth, but the grudging surrender of winter to the turning year. Spencer was still sitting on the inn steps, watching the village begin its slow recovery from nightmare.
"Your impressions were accurate," Moiraine said, settling beside him with the fluid grace of a woman who'd spent decades making every movement deliberate. "The peddler was a servant of the Shadow. Had he remained, he could have guided another attack."
"I'm glad I could help."
"Are you?" Her dark eyes studied him with that unnerving Aes Sedai intensity. "You seem troubled, Aldan Maeren."
Because I killed a child with good intentions. Because I'm lying to you with every breath. Because I know things about your quest that would terrify you if I told them.
"People died last night," Spencer said instead. "People I grew up with. It's hard to feel glad about anything right now."
"A reasonable answer." Moiraine's voice carried the faintest hint of approval. "Grief is appropriate. But you should know — fewer died than might have. Your warnings saved lives. That matters."
Spencer nodded slowly. He didn't trust himself to speak.
"I have questions about your impressions," Moiraine continued. "How long have you had them? How precise are they? Do they come unbidden, or can you focus them?"
The interrogation begins.
"Since childhood. Variable precision — sometimes clear, sometimes vague. And they come when they come. I can't control them."
All lies, calibrated to suggest a weak Talent rather than a cosmic system that let him edit reality. Moiraine absorbed each answer, her expression revealing nothing.
"The White Tower has methods for understanding such gifts," she said finally. "There are sisters who specialize in unusual Talents. If you wished, I could arrange for you to be examined."
A test. She's offering Tar Valon to see how I react.
"I'd like that," Spencer said carefully. "But I don't know if I could leave right now. The village needs rebuilding. My aunt needs help."
"The village will recover. Your aunt has neighbors." Moiraine's tone shifted slightly — from neutral to something that might have been persuasion. "But there are few who possess even weak Talents, and fewer still who demonstrate them so... specifically. It would be a waste to leave such a gift unexamined."
She's hooked. Now don't pull too hard.
"Can I think about it?"
"Of course." Moiraine rose, her cloak settling around her shoulders. "We leave tomorrow evening, with the three young men the Trollocs were hunting. If your impressions tell you anything else before then — about them, about the Shadow's movements, about anything at all — I would hear it."
She walked away, and Spencer watched her thread retreat across the village green.
Tomorrow evening. That gives me one day to make myself indispensable.
He stood up, joints stiff from sitting too long, and went to find Tam al'Thor.
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