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Consciousness crawled back slowly. The first thing Rand became aware of was the blinding pain in his side. It felt like the never-healing wounds in his side had gotten worse, which was a bad sign. He took a careful breath, his jaw clenched tight against the pain.
A hand touched his shoulder and he flinched. “Rand?” Min asked, her voice quiet.
He dragged his eyes open. Min was sitting over him wrapped in a blanket. Another blanket was draped over him. It had gotten dark and cooled off considerably. With the blanket, he wasn’t exactly cold though.
“How long have I been asleep?” he asked.
“You’ve been unconscious,” Min said in a tone of voice that said that she was not going to put up him trying to soften it. “For hours.”
Rand did not know what to say to that. He felt like he’d been unconscious for hours but he wasn’t going to tell Min that. It would just make her more worried than she obviously already was. “I’m awake now,” he said instead.
“I’ve noticed,” she raised her eyebrows and for a minute her face was alight with levity despite the obvious worry hanging around her eyes. Then she sobered again. “Is it clean?” she asked. “Saidin, I mean. Is the Taint gone?”
“The Asha’man didn’t check?” he couldn’t believe it.
“I want to hear it from you.”
“She doubts us,” Lews Therin said in the back of Rand’s head. “She should not doubt us.”
But he supposed it was reasonable that Min would want to ask him. He did want to check himself as well. He was fairly sure he had succeeded but his memories of the experience were hazy enough that he wasn’t quite sure.
He closed his eyes and reached for saidin. The Source came with the same twisting rush of nausea which was as bad a sign as how painful his side wounds were. However, once he pushed by the sickness and immersed himself in saidin the rage of the Source that surrounded him felt different. It wasn’t any less raging and dangerous than it had always been, but the oil-slick feeling of the Taint floating along its surface was gone. Rand wasn’t sure he’d describe saidin as pure—that didn’t seem like a word that would ever apply to saidin—but it didn’t feel as corrupted as it had the entire time Rand had been Channeling.
He allowed himself a small twitch of the lips. Not a real smile, but close to one. He opened his eyes and released the Source. “It’s clean,” he told Min.
Min let out a very un-Min-like squeak and threw her arms around him. She squeezed him tightly and gave him a lingering kiss. He tried to enjoy it, but that seemed to be a bit beyond his capacity at the moment. He had a headache and he felt like he’d been stretched just a bit too far and hadn’t had the chance to snap back into shape yet. Also, Min was being careful to avoid touching his side just like she always did, but the pain was so terrible right now that he couldn’t stop bracing himself.
“That’s wonderful news, Rand,” she whispered when she came up for air. “That’s amazing. You did something amazing, Rand.”
He supposed it was amazing, when looked at objectively. However, he didn’t feel like he’d done anything amazing, just like he’d done what needed to be done. It wasn’t over yet and knowing that made it hard to understand why Min was celebrating. Tarmon Gai’don was still to come, after all.
“I take it the boy is awake?” a cool and very unwelcome voice said.
Min gasped and pushed herself off Rand. She jarred him in a way that his side did not appreciate and he gritted his teeth. Sitting up was probably a bad idea with how badly his wounds were already smarting but he did it anyway. He did not want to face this person lying down.
The change in position made the pounding in his head increase. He heard Lews Therin muttering in the back of his brain, but couldn’t make out the words. The night was chilly, and the cold that he felt when the blanket fell away from his upper body startled him. He’d lost the concentration necessary to ignore heat and cold at some point during the Cleansing and it embarrassed him to realize it.
“What do you want, Cadsuane?” he snapped at the woman who had interrupted him and Min.
The Aes Sedai looked surprisingly disheveled, her green dress ripped along the skirt and splattered with mud and her hair and the numerous angreal and ter'angreal were just a little askew. Her face was the same cool composure as always though. It set his teeth on edge.
She looked down at him with her fathomless expression. Lews Therin’s whisperings grew louder in Rand’s head, sometimes cresting to a volume that he could understand them. Rand tried and failed not to think of the Red Ajah and the box. His heartrate sped up. He would not be bound in Aes Sedai chains. He refused.
“Is it clean?” Cadsuane demanded.
“Yes,” he got out through his teeth.
“You’re sure?”
“You doubt me?” he demanded.
“I doubt anything that I cannot confirm myself,” Cadsuane said chillily.
Rand couldn’t take looking up at her any longer. He pushed himself to his feet and instantly regretted it when he vision grayed out and he nearly fell. Thankfully the spell passed quickly and he was left swaying and blinking with both women looking at him.
“Rand?” Min ventured. She was reaching for him as if to catch him if he fell.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You should sit back down,” Cadsuane said. Like Min she was closer to him than she had been before.
“I’m fine,” he repeated and stepped away from both of them. Cadsuane had been reaching to catch him if he fell too. He tried not to be notice that.
Someone had started a fire and now that Rand was on his feet he could see that most of the others who had come with them were sitting around trying to look like they weren’t watching the interaction between him and Cadsuane. He ground his teeth.
Lan was sitting on the other side of the fire with Nynaeve’s head in his lap. “How is she?” Rand asked.
Lan lifted his head and looked at Rand with an unreadable expression for a moment. Rand was annoyed by the obvious attempt to hide the fact that he had been listening. He knew Lan had been listening. It was insulting that Lan thought Rand didn’t know that.
“She’s recovering,” Lan said. “It was a lot of power that you were wielding and she took it harder than you did.”
Was his tone accusing? Rand couldn’t decide but Lews Therin thought it was. He cursed Lan for being so hard to read. Nynaeve had had to use the other access key. There was no other Aes Sedai who he could trust not to have used the experience to manipulate him. He wasn’t exactly sure what could have happened, but he was sure something would have. However, if something awful had happened to Nynaeve he would have yet another thing on his conscience.
Everyone was watching him. He could feel Cadsuane’s sharp eyes cutting through him and Min’s concern burning into his back. Neither was something he was capable of dealing with right now. “I’m glad she’s recovering,” he told Lan and then turned on his heal and stalked away from the camp before anyone else could try to draw him into conversation.
Walking was probably not something he was actually up for. It made his headache and the pain in his side worse, but it was worth it to be away from the others. He kept going despite everything until he reached the top of the hill where he and Nynaeve had sat and saw the valley where Shadar Logoth had once been stretched out beneath him. The city was entirely gone. In its place was nothing but a clean hole. It was so vast that it was easy to see even in the darkness. Rand was not entirely sure what he had expected to happen to Shadar Logoth once he was finished, but he was fairly sure it vanishing entirely was not what he had thought would happen. It was a little disconcerting that it had.
Someone pushed through the forest behind him and down the hill, he tensed but then he heard Damer Flinn calling out to him. “My Lord Dragon.”
“What do you want?” Rand asked. He kept staring off into the darkness at the place where Shadar Logoth had once been as the Asha’man reached the top of the hill and came to stand beside him.
“While you were unconscious we all agreed not to go wandering around alone for a while,” Flinn said. “We haven’t seen any Forsaken or Darkfriends since the battle ended, but we can’t be entirely sure they’re gone. It’s a basic safety measure.”
It was also probably Cadsuane’s idea. Rand resented that is was a good idea and resented that he was going to have to follow it.
Flinn sighed. “I also wanted to talk to you about something privately.”
That didn’t sound good. Rand looked over at him. “What do you want to talk about?”
Flinn was silent for a few minutes, obviously considering what to say. “I hear things sometimes,” he finally said. “Horrid, terrifying things. Things that can’t be real or are easily proven not to be real. It’s the way the madness of saidin manifests in me.”
“What are you trying to say?” Rand asked. He wasn’t sure how this would matter anymore, and he wasn’t entirely comfortable hearing the details of another man’s madness.
“I’m saying that it hasn’t stopped,” Flinn’s voice dropped to a bare whisper. “Even with everything you and Nynaeve Sedai did today, I’m still hearing things.”
It took a minute for the implications to sit in. Rage boiled through Rand in a hot wave. “You’re doubting that I successfully cleansed saidin too?” he didn’t bother hiding his incredulity. Lews Therin’s mutterings sounded like something about how no one was trustworthy.
“No, never,” Flinn said. “I can tell it’s clean. But I did ask Jahar to confirm and it doesn’t seem like whatever you and Nynaeve Sedai did cured anyone’s saidin madness. Any of us who have been using the Source for any period of time are still potentially insane.”
Flinn’s words sunk into Rand like a stone that he’d swallowed. The whole point of cleansing saidin had been to remove the madness from the list of chips the Dark One had to play. The Asha’man would be needed at the Last Battle and Rand couldn’t risk losing however many of them would have lost their minds to the Taint before then. But now Flinn was saying…
“You don’t seem insane to me,” he said, uncertain whether he was comforting the other man or reassuring himself. Lewis Therin’s ravings were getting louder and more difficult to ignore. It made him feel off-balance. Shut up. He thought in the madman’s direction.
“You don’t either, Lord Dragon,” Flinn said. “But what about some of the others?”
“Do the Aes Sedai know?” Rand asked. It was important to focus on the most dangerous threats and the threat of Aes Sedai control was always the greatest. The mere thought of what Cadsuane would do if she knew about this made his heart rate increase. It didn’t matter that she’d rescued him at Far Madding, it didn’t matter that she’d moved to catch him if he collapsed just now, she was out to use and control him. He could not trust her.
“I haven’t mentioned anything about my symptoms to Corele, and don’t intend to mention this either,” Flinn said. “Though it’s possible she will work out at least some of it on her own. The Warder bond is…interesting. Should I make sure Jahar knows not to mention it as well?”
Rand took what he hoped wasn’t an obviously deep breath, trying to control his panic before Flinn noticed it. Lews Therin’s ravings weren’t helping at all. “Do that,” he said. “We can’t let the Aes Sedai figure out about this. They will use it to leash us. We cannot trust them.”
His words had sped up as he spoke and even he could hear the deranged edge they were taking on. Light, he sounded a little like Lews Therin. Flinn eyed him with open concern for a moment then collected himself and the worry vanished. “For what it’s worth,” the Asha’man said. “I trust Corele.”
“Well I don’t,” Rand spat.
“I’ve noticed,” Flinn said. There was a long pause in which Rand tried to catch his breath and Flinn studied him with an unreadable expression that put Rand on edge. He was as bad as an Aes Sedai. “Lord Dragon…” Flinn finally began, but branches snapped behind them cutting him off.
They both whirled around, embracing the Source. Dizziness and nausea nearly knocked Rand off his feet, but he managed to catch himself on the trunk of a tree. He could feel Flinn watching him. Lews Therin thought that maybe they should kill the Asha’man so he couldn’t spread tales of their weakness. SHUT UP! Rand thought more forcefully at him.
Thankfully, the source of the breaking branches turned out to just be Min. “Did I interrupt something?” she asked. “I thought you’d want to know that Nynaeve just woke up briefly. She’s very weak but Corele thinks she’s going to be alright.”
“You didn’t interrupt anything,” Rand said. It was a lie, but he was glad she had come. He had a feeling he didn’t want to know whatever Flinn had been working up to saying. He felt steady enough now that he could step away from the tree and go to Min. “And it’s good that Nynaeve was awake. Thank you for coming to tell me."