Mave felt a weight lift unexpectedly from her chest at Ali’s words. Compulsion was a forbidden weave, punishable by the most severe sanctions. Officially the art had been lost but unofficially… well it wasn’t uncommon for a wilder’s first weave to be some form of it. Make a boy like you, make a parent buy you a dress or a pet. Mave’s first weave had been a weak form of compulsion and she had talked with other novices and Accepteds, gathering pieces of information on how it might be done. Even so it was nothing like what Ali and others believed.

“Well if your...if your…” Ali stumbled over the words, obviously reluctant to say something outloud and make it true, even though the facts, as he knew them, were infront of him.

“If your an Aes Sedai, can’t you, I don’t know, hurl fire at it and kill it?” he asked. Mave nodded her head. 

“I could,” she agreed, “but as I said if it is killed here others will come.” At first Mave had believed the thing to be following her but the more she thought about it the less sense that made. It could have been asking about Ali to find her, having seen them on the road, but if it knew who she was then there as no way it would have come alone. A fade was a deadly threat to even the most experienced swordsman, but only the feeblest Aes Sedai would fail to blast the thing to ragged bones.

“So what do we do?” Ali asked, moving his staff from hand to hand in obvious agitation.

“I can drive it off,” Mave said after a moment, she took her eyes of the fade and looked full at Ali, her dark eyes boring into him like augers.

“But you will need to leave the Two Rivers,” she said with implacable resolve.

“Once we are away from here we can dispatch it, but for the sake of your family and your village we need to leave this place tonight.”