New Spring recap

During the Aiel War, the Accepted Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche are present when a dying Aes Sedai speaks a Foretelling: the Dragon has been Reborn, a boy child born that very day near the great battle. The Amyrlin swears the two friends to secrecy and quietly sets searchers to find the child, but soon the Amyrlin is dead and her searchers are being murdered, and Moiraine and Siuan realize that the Black Ajah, servants of the Shadow hidden among the Aes Sedai, are hunting anyone who knows. Newly raised to the shawl, Moiraine slips away from the Tower's dangerous politics to search for the child herself. In the Borderland city of Chachin she crosses paths with Lan Mandragoran, the uncrowned king of fallen Malkier and a deadly swordsman. Together they uncover and defeat a hidden servant of the Shadow sent to kill her. Recognizing they are stronger together, Moiraine asks Lan to become her Warder; he accepts, and the two set out in secret to find and protect the Dragon Reborn.

Set about twenty years before the main series, this book follows two young women of the White Tower, Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche, as they near the end of their training to become Aes Sedai. The Aiel have come out of the Waste and are besieging the great island city of Tar Valon in the war that will be remembered as the Aiel War, and the Tower is crowded with the wounded and the anxious. Amid the chaos, the two friends, close as sisters despite Moiraine's noble birth and Siuan's humble one, are set to menial duties and chafe under the Tower's endless rules, unaware that the war's turning point is about to place them at the center of the most important secret of the age.

New Spring ends with the partnership that will drive the whole series into motion. Moiraine Damodred, now a full Aes Sedai, has survived an assassination attempt by a hidden servant of the Shadow and has committed herself to a lonely, secret quest: to find the infant boy prophesied to be the Dragon Reborn before the Shadow's agents can kill him, and one day to guide him toward the Last Battle. Lan Mandragoran, the last king of a nation devoured by the Blight, agrees to bond to her as her Warder, trading his expected death in the Blight for her cause. Her friend Siuan Sanche remains in the White Tower to hunt the Shadow's hidden agents from within and to rise in the Tower's ranks. As the book closes, Moiraine and Lan ride out together, beginning the long search that, years later, will bring them to a remote village and the young man born on that fateful day.