What did you spend so much time talking about with Ila? If you weren’t dancing with that long-legged fellow, you were talking to her like it was some kind of secret.”“Ila was giving me advice on being a woman,” Egwene replied absently. He began laughing, and she gave him a hooded, dangerous look that he failed to see.“Advice! Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are.”“That,” Egwene said, “is probably why you make such a bad job of it.
Couldn’t we camp down by the lakes?” Nynaeve asked, patting her face with her kerchief. “It must be cooler down by the water.”“Light,” Mat said, “I’d just like to stick my head in one of them. I might never take it out.”Just then something roiled the waters of the nearest lake, the dark water phosphorescing as a huge body rolled beneath the surface. Length on man-thick length sent ripples spreading, rolling on and on until at last a tail rose, waving a point like a wasp’s stinger for an instant in the twilight, at least five spans into the air. All along that length fat tentacles writhed like monstrous worms, as many as a centipede’s legs. It slid slowly beneath the surface and was gone, only the fading ripples to say it had ever been.Rand closed his mouth and exchanged a look with Perrin. Perrin’s yellow eyes were as disbelieving as he knew his own must be. Nothing that big could live in a lake that size. Those couldn’t have been hands on those tentacles. They couldn’t have been.“On second thought,” Mat said faintly, “I like it right here just fine.