Zoya’s lips pursed in sour disapproval as the gleeman sang on, winding through the dire and ancient verses. The serving maid returned and set down two plates of mutton, long slender shanks served in a heavily herbed gravy. Rough brown bread baked into fist sized loaves accompanied it, along with stringy  looking potatoes and vegetables. Zoya was absolutely certain that Maddy’s table would have been better provisioned and safer besides but that battle had already been lost.

“It is the Ley of Lanfear,” Zoya told him quietly as she tore her bread in half and began sopping up gravy and popping it into her mouth. Some Aes Sedai became picky eaters after they got out of their long novitiates but Zoya had never lost the urchin's instinct to eat while and what one could.  

“The Forsaken?” Davian asked in some alarm. Zoya wished she could say something witty, like ‘no, the chambermaid,’ but her oaths prevented her from such petty rhetorical satisfaction. Instead she contented herself with nodding.
“Rumor has it the original verse was composed by Asmodean himself, though to be honest I dont find Shelli’s analysis of the timber to be altogether…” she trailed off, pushing aside the pleasant nostalgia of the Brown Ajah’s endless debates on ancient texts.

“You sometimes hear it though usually it is the purview of… more elevated individuals. Dissolute nobles or those who consider themselves philosophers,” she told him. There was an attraction to that way of thinking, who wouldn’t want to know what the ancients had said and what they had said of themselves. Little writing survived that was attributed to the Foresaken themselves. In her darker moments Zoya wondered about that. There was so little material pertaining to those Ancient Aes Sedai, and yet they must have been the most talked about figures of their age. Could they or their agents be deliberately purging knowledge of themselves? There was no way to know.

“I cannot imagine it is a very wise choice of song,” she said at last. “Not with Whitecloaks on the prowl.”