Work Text:
***
Nynaeve doesn’t die at Fal Dara. She comes close, giving Egwene her strength and her words before letting the One Power take her, take her back to the Pattern, back to the Two Rivers, back to her parents, back before time and after it.
It isn’t the death she imagined for herself: an old Wisdom tended by a young one. It isn’t the death she wants; she barely believes in this cause, doesn’t like this city, hates that channeling means she cannot hear the wind–but Egwene insisted, and Nynaeve followed.
Egwene brings her back.
**
Lan brings Moiraine back, both haggard and worn. Nynaeve looks behind them, waiting for Rand to follow with his loping gait and half-smile–if he was the Dragon Reborn, as he must have thought, as Moiraine must have thought, then he would have survived. But if he wasn’t–or if Moiraine was wrong and this wasn’t the Last Battle–or if Moiraine was wrong about everything–.
“Where’s Rand?” Nynaeve asks, and Moiraine shakes her head. “That’s not an answer,” Nynaeve says, and the stress of the last day boils over. “He’s dead and you can’t even tell us yourself,” she spits.
Behind her, Egwene makes a gasping, haunted noise. Nynaeve wants to turn, to comfort her friend, to stroke her hair, to breathe in the smell of the girl–the woman–who saved her, who may yet save them all. But her anger is too great, and it bubbles under her barely-healed skin, scratching and clawing at her, demanding release. “Are you going to lie about this, too? Are you so caught up in your damn prophecy that you can’t see that people are hurt? That people suffer? It wasn’t enough to lose Mat, now you have to take Rand, too?”
Moiraine doesn’t flinch, and on a different day, Nynaeve might credit her for that. Instead Nynaeve continues, voice low and strong, “I don’t care about the Dark One. I only care about my friends, and now you’ve taken two of them. Are the rest of us next?”
It is Lan who intervenes. “Enough,” he says, his voice heavy with fatigue. He steps between Nynaeve and Moiraine, shielding the older woman with his body. “That’s enough.”
Nynaeve wants to spit at him, too. Wants to tell him that he is blinded by unearned loyalty and unreturned affection, that she doesn’t understand, will never understand how he could give his life to the Aes Sedai. To this Aes Sedai. But he might call her a liar, and she couldn’t bear for him to be right.
**
Nynaeve climbs into bed with Egwene and Perrin, the three of them unwilling to be parted even in sleep. Their bodies are warm, even if their souls are chilled by what they have seen, and neither Perrin nor Egwene stays awake long. Nynaeve lies between them and tries not to think of Lan.
His hands had been far warmer on her skin than she had expected. She had known he would be gentle, almost to a fault, had known he would be quiet, entirely as she preferred, but she had thought his skin would be cool beneath her hands. She hadn’t said that, had merely let him touch her, let his affection wash over her and inside her, let him convince her to stay.
A Wisdom never weds, she thinks. She had told him that if she went to the White Tower, perhaps she would no longer be a Wisdom. But if she goes to the White Tower, as Egwene says they must, as Moiraine says they must, as the whole world seems to insist is the only path–she does not know what will become of her.
She knows she must learn to control the power that nearly killed her today. The death she avoided, Amalisa’s death, was painful and loud, a burning, twisting end. Nynaeve touched it, and it reached back, too big for her, too big for any of them. And if she is to learn, she must go to the Tower, prostrate herself before Siuan Sanche, swear fealty to the Amyrlin Seat, take oaths and become Moiraine Sedai’s bloody sister.
Do Aes Sedai ever wed? She knows they take men to their beds, sometimes. Sometimes their warders, if it suits. She assumes some of them take women, either by preference or convenience. But if an Aes Sedai’s bond to her warder is deeper than a husband’s to a wife’s, where does that leave a warder bonded to one Aes Sedai but in love with another?
Love. Hah. Lan does not love Nynaeve. He cares for her, she knows that much. But his love for Moiraine leaches out of his every pore, a thing that lives so deep within his heart a Trolloc army could not unseat it. “She doesn’t own me,” he’d said. No more than the kids who sleep curled beside her own Nynaeve.
But it is not the same. She cannot feel Egwene’s thoughts, does not know Perrin’s moods when he is out of sight. If Rand is dead, she does not feel it in her soul–but if Moiraine died, Lan might as well have his heart torn from his body and fed to a Fade, the pain would be so great. If Stepin could not survive Kerene’s loss, could Lan survive Moiraine’s?
Nynaeve huffs. What a foolish thing, after the day she’s had, to be lying here, thinking not of Rand or the Dark One or the One Power, but of Lan’s fingers on her skin, of all the things that will never happen between them. She’s not a romantic girl, swayed by affection and sex. He’d left her, after all, taken her advice and her heart and ran off in search of Moiraine.
He’d left her, as everyone has always left her.
As she drifts to sleep, lulled by Perrin’s heavy breaths, Nynaeve tries to remember that and not his voice breaking as he left her: you are as beautiful as the sunrise.
**
They are to leave at once for the Tower. Their safety is paramount, and it cannot be guaranteed at Fal Dara. And with the waygate boarded up, the ride will be long–two months, perhaps–and Nynaeve thinks of the old Wisdom, who walked and walked only to be turned away. She knows that will not be her fate–no, the sisters will be desperate to get their hands on her–but the idea still stings.
Moiraine is not beside them as they saddle the horses. “She’s abandoning us, is that it?” Nynaeve asks, and the crease between Lan’s eyes deepens.
“No,” he says, tightening his mount’s bridle firmly. “She has other business and I will join her when it is complete.”
“What other business?” Nynaeve asks, though she thinks she should be glad to be rid of the Aes Sedai. Lan, at least, does not twist his words when he speaks. Lan will look after them better than Moiraine ever could.
But that does not mean he will tell her the whole story, he is too well trained for that. “Not your concern,” he says, with a glance backward to the walled city. Nynaeve watches him, tries to read his face as he hefts his pack onto the horse, settling it easily behind the saddle. He looks resolute, she thinks, and incredibly sad. She wonders what happened to rend them–yesterday, as they returned from the Blight, they had clung to each other, Moiraine’s fingers digging tightly into Lan’s arm. And now he bows under her absence.
Nynaeve relents, just a bit. “I’m sorry you have to leave her,” she says.
Lan raises an eyebrow at that. “No, you’re not,” he says, and she has no reply.
**
They ride quietly, each lost in what they have seen and lived. They make small talk as the weather changes, haggle lightly over who gets the largest portion of dinner, but between the four of them there is little conversation. Lan keeps watch over them all, careful and cautious but at more of a remove than when she shared jokes over the Warders’ fire, and so much more than when she curled beside him in his bed.
He left her, she thinks, and did not return.
They reach a small town with an inn, a small building with a hot fire. The food is fresh, as are the linens. Nynaeve falls back into the bed like a child, letting her skirts billow around her as her booted feet bounce on the quilt.
Egwene comes in and sits beside her, staring down with a wry frown. “You can’t avoid him forever,” she says.
Nynaeve blinks. “I am not,” she says. “I don’t even know how that’s possible, we have spent every minute together for the last ten days.”
Egwene raises an eyebrow. “Yes. And you have commented that the sun is bright and the clouds are puffy and the one day it rained, you said nothing to anyone.” Egwene lies down beside Nynaeve, her face close, sisterly in its intimacy. “You should be fighting about going to the White Tower, or interrogating him about the Aes Sedai we’re going to meet.” Egwene props her head on her fist, pretending to conspiracy. “Ask him about all the hidden passages!” Nynaeve rolls her eyes. “I don’t even care if you decide to moon all over him,” Egwene says. “But I can’t put up with another day of this, let alone six weeks.”
“It’s complicated,” Nynaeve says.
Egwene nods, then falls back to lie beside Nynaeve. “Rand is dead,” she says. “And Mat is lost, maybe forever. And all I can think about is everything I didn’t get to tell them.” Out of the corner of her eye, Nynaeve sees Egwene bite her lip. “And I know it isn’t the same,” Egwene says. “We’ve known Rand and Mat our whole lives, and maybe whatever you have with Lan is nothing at all.” She shakes her head, loosening strands from her braid. “But even if it is, you should talk to him. Remember why you like him. Remember that he likes you.” Egwene’s voice breaks, just a little. “Before it’s too late.”
At that, Nynaeve turns and gathers Egwene into her arms and embraces her. Egwene doesn’t cry, just holds tightly, comfort deferred for too long. They didn’t have time to mourn Rand, and their slow, quiet walk has only left space for grief to creep in beside them. And so when Nynaeve says, “I’m sorry,” she means for Rand, for Mat, for every moment she failed to keep them safe–and, she supposes, for sulking.
When Egwene releases her, Nynaeve does not let her go too far. “Is it really that bad?” she asks, and Egwene nods, face breaking into a wry smile.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” Egwene says, “when you were so torn up over a man.”
It’s complicated, Nynaeve thinks, because she knows that this is not a schoolgirl crush. It is instead the prospect of loving a man with ties to another, bonded to a woman and a cause and a world she does not care for. It would require–what? An entire reevaluation of everything she believes. She bites her tongue to keep from saying, “I’m not.”
Instead, she tries to give Egwene what she wants: an answer, a distraction, a promise to do better. “I mean,” Nynaeve says, forcing her voice into a deliberate mockery of the silliest women she knows, “have you seen him?”
It works, and Egwene laughs. Nynaeve smiles with her.
**
She finds him at a table in the inn, nursing an ale. Nynaeve slides across the table from him and folds her hands in front of her. She doesn’t equivocate. “How would it work?” she asks. “You, bonded to Moiraine. Me, with a warder you hate.”
If Lan is surprised, he doesn’t show it. He turns his cup in his hands. “Would you believe me if I said that Moiraine has a lover?” he asks, sipping at his drink, watching Nynaeve closely.
“No,” Nynaeve says, trying to imagine the kind of person who might love Moiraine Sedai, or the kind of person she might love in return. She conjures a hedgehog. “No.”
Lan smiles then, and gentle amusement reaches his eyes. “Moiraine has loved the same person for longer than I have known her. And that love has never been diminished by our bond, and our bond is not any less strong because of it,” he says. The depth of his voice tells Nynaeve he is not lying, no matter the impossibility of his words.
“Sounds awkward,” Nynaeve says, still trying to catch up, and Lan shrugs.
“Sometimes,” he says. “But we’ve learned to manage.”
Nynaeve isn’t ready to ask how. But she nods a little, the barest tilt of her chin, and acknowledges that she has heard him and believes him before escaping again to her room.
**
They ride again, early mornings giving way to long, unbroken roads. Nynaeve tries not to glare at Egwene, who grins at her every time their eyes meet. She tries not to notice that she has given in, and that she rides beside Lan more often than not.
At first, they ride in silence, but it is more comfortable than before. Lan is not one for idle conversation, and neither is Nynaeve, and she appreciates that they can travel together, side by side, saying little. She wonders if he misses Moiraine.
Instead, she asks, “What will happen when we get to the Tower?”
“You’ll become novices, you and Egwene.” His penchant for saying too little–Nynaeve sighs.
“Which means what? In terms a backcountry Wisdom can understand.”
Lan laughs at that, a jerk of his shoulder. “You’re far more than that,” he says, but shrugs a bit. “It’s rigorous training,” he says. “Through testing in every kind of weave under every kind of stress. Incredible discipline.” He quirks up a lip in a half smile. “At least, that’s what I am told. Novices and Accepted don’t have warders, so we hear about it all later.”
“And what about women who don’t want to go through rigorous training and testing and discipline?” she asks. “What if we just want to go home?”
Of course, Lan doesn’t answer the question. Instead, he says, “What did the Aes Sedai do to you to make you distrust them as you do?”
The anger and frustration of the old Wisdom rise up within her, a burden shared and later adopted as her own. “They are a cabal,” Nynaeve says. “They make decisions for the world that no one else understands, that no one else can influence. They decide who lives and who dies. How is that fair?”
Lan nods. “Maybe,” he says. “But that’s not what I asked you. Not what stories you have heard, but what happened to you?”
“Moiraine told me herself that every Aes Sedai has an agenda,” Nynaeve retorts. “To be watchful and careful because I can’t trust anyone.”
Lan nods. “And you will trust her on that but nothing else?” he asks. Nynaeve thinks she was better off ignoring him. The answer to his question–the first one, what happened to her–is nothing. Nothing before Moiraine stole her friends, before Lan lost them, before she found herself trapped on this journey to a place that will teach discipline and rigor. To a place that promises to remake her in ways she does not want.
Before that, there were only stories: the Wisdom, turned away. Words twisted until they had no meaning. Women who could change the world with a touch of a finger, and then everyone else, powerless to stop them.
“If you’re going to survive the Tower,” Lan says, “you will need to put all your preconceptions out of your head. Whatever Moiraine said, whatever Liandrin said, whatever you’ve heard before. All of it matters, and some of it is true. But some of it isn’t.”
“Aes Sedai never lie,” Nynaeve says, and she cannot keep the mockery out of her voice. “Isn’t that right?”
Lan laughs. “To speak no word that is not true,” he quotes. “That is right. They are bound through the One Power and cannot break that oath.”
Nynaeve conjures Moiraine, frustrated: You forget, girl, that I cannot lie. “But twisting their words to twist the truth with it,” she says. “That they excel at.”
“Some of them,” Lan says on a shrug. “But they are people. Women from all towns and villages across the world with different cultures and lives and hopes and dreams.”
“Like me,” Nynaeve replies, voice flat. It isn’t that she doesn’t understand what he is saying: she does, she isn’t foolish. But she doesn’t want to, has not been given a single reason to consider some of the Aes Sedai trustworthy. Except Lan’s devotion. Except Stepin’s.
She wonders if that should be enough.
Lan interrupts her thoughts. “Oh, Wisdom,” he says, “there is no one else like you.”
**
They rest by the fire. Perrin and Egwene are long asleep, but Nynaeve stares into the flames as they crackle and jump. Lan sits beside her, not touching but close enough that she can hear him breathe.
“What did it feel like when you were dying?” Nynaeve asks, and she hears that her tone is abrupt. She tries to soften it with a smile, but she suspects her face contorts into a grimace. She is terrible at this.
But Lan never seems to mind, and she could come to appreciate that about him. “It was so fast,” he says. “A sharp, blinding pain. A bright light. Nothing more.” He glances at her. “The thing I remember was that you brought me back. Do you know what that feels like?”
Nynaeve nods. “At Fal Dara,” she says. “Egwene–she–yes. I do know.”
It was warm, the way the One Power filled her body, directed through Egwene’s untrained hands. It was unexpected: her flesh, somehow, was already preparing for death, the beat of her heart slowing with her breath. Death was cold, and revival was like awakening on a winter morning in a bed of blankets beside a blazing fire.
“I have never felt anything like it,” Lan says. “I can feel when Moiraine channels, and she has healed scrapes and cuts more often than I can count. But what you did there–nothing has ever been so overwhelming as what you did.”
A different woman might tease him–nothing?--but Nynaeve has never had time to flirt. “Could you feel Moiraine dying?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. “And I could feel you bring her back, too.” He turns and faces her, earnest and serious. “I know you don’t want this,” he says. “I know you want to go home. I haven’t had a home since I was a tiny child, and I still wake sometimes, wishing I could have just one more piece of my mother’s bread.” He offers himself to her in these small words. “But even if you forget the Dark One for just a minute–don’t you want to be able to help more people?”
She sighs, staring into the fire. “The only thing I ever wanted was to be a Wisdom,” Nynaeve says. “It’s a good life, a useful life.”
“I think that’s what we all want,” Lan says. “To be useful to someone.”
Nynaeve shrugs. “Could you have found a different purpose,” she asks, “if not for Moiraine?”
Lan smiles, the sort of look that speaks to decades of history in a second. “I don’t know,” he says. “As you said, I was a king without a kingdom. I had no home. You may not believe that the Aes Sedai are a usually force for good, but I do. I am grateful to have found them.”
“You had a choice,” Nynaeve says. “I don’t seem to.”
“You could kill me in my sleep,” Lan says, speaking into the fire. “You and Egwene and Perrin could overpower me. Steal the horses. Poison my tea just long enough to slip away.” He says that last with a quiet sigh, and she remembers how Stepin drugged him so he could escape to die. “You haven’t. You’re still here, walking to the Tower.”
“You wouldn’t chase me down?” she retorts, but she knows Lan is right. After those first odd hours with Lan and Moiraine, she has fought only with her words, but never with her fists. She tells herself it is for Egwene and Perrin, who need her with them on this journey.
“Could I catch you?” Lan replies, lightly but with a challenge in his tone.
“No,” Nynaeve says, but she smiles. If he caught her, he could subdue her. But he could not catch her, not in unfamiliar lands–she knows how to hide her trail and erase her footsteps, and Lan is no magician. Just a man, teasing her over a fire. Asking her why she hasn’t run.
She hasn’t stayed for him. In a different life, she could fall in love with him, the erstwhile heir to the throne of Malkier. In a different life–not the one she was raised in or the one she has been thrust into, but some impossible third thing where they meet as travelers in a tavern, in a world where Malkier was not turned to the Blight, a world where Two Rivers still lived its idyll. No Trollocs or Fades, no Aes Sedai–it is a turn of the Wheel so distant as to be unimaginable. Nynaeve does not stay on the road for dreams.
“You believe it,” Nynaeve says. “The Dark One is rising, the Dragon has been reborn.”
Lan nods. “Yes,” he says. “I do.”
Nynaeve watched as the Trolloc army pushed on Fal Dara in numbers she couldn’t understand. Walls of them as if conjured from the deep by magic. She is not so foolish as to disbelieve her own eyes.
“And you believe that one of these kids is the Dragon Reborn? That Rand is or was the Dragon.”
“Yes,” Lan says.”
That, she thinks, is why she hasn’t fled. Because even if the Aes Sedai lie, even if Moiraine has lied–Lan has not. That he believes these things does not make them true, but his belief means they could be. And if they are true–if Rand was the Dragon, or Egwene is, or if Nynaeve really is the most powerful channeller in a thousand years–bollocks on that–shouldn’t she go to the place that will train her how to be useful?
Shouldn’t she want it?
She shakes her head, pushing the thought away. She doesn’t. She wants Lan, perhaps, but wants him in her bed in the Two Rivers, laughing over a story from the town children. She wants to find out if a Wisdom could wed–
She never will, and she hates that more than anything. She hasn’t left Lan on the road, but somehow that is no more a choice than following him.
Nynaeve takes a sharp breath, and Lan looks at her with concern. Nynaeve shakes her head. “It’s something the Amyrlin Seat said. About not getting to lead the life you expected or the one you wanted. About wanting to simply stay home and care for the people you love.”
Lan starts at that, the barest jerk of his shoulders. “She said that?” he asks.
“She did,” Nynaeve confirms, and Lan’s face softens. If Nynaeve didn’t know better, she would say the look on his face was one of affection and warmth, but that doesn’t make sense–everyone in the Tower said that the Amylrin hated Moiraine. And Nynaeve had heard Moiraine confirm to Lan that the Amylrin had banished her from the Tower, to swear an oath never to return. That would seem unsurmountable. But Nynaeve knows Lan now, and there is fondness at the edge of his eyes.
“Then you will have one person in the Tower who understands how you feel.” As if she wants Siuan Sanche’s understanding, as if having the Amyrlin Seat as an ally is even possible, given Nynaeve’s unfortunate affiliation with Moiraine. Though Lan seems to think it would be.
“Why would you trust her? Why should I?”
“I thought you would appreciate anyone who disliked Moiraine,” Lan says.
“I might,” Nynaeve says. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
He nods. “No,” he says. “I didn’t.” Now he turns to face her fully, voice firm. “What I think doesn’t matter. Go to the Tower and watch and learn and build your own opinions. Not mine, not Moiraine’s. Not whatever you heard from Liandrin or anyone else.”
“You have given me that advice twice now,” Nynaeve says.
“It’s good advice.”
Nynaeve nods. In Lan’s words she hears echoes of Egwene’s frustration: If Moiraine wasn’t a part of this–. She hears Moiraine: If Wisdom is the title you seek–. The whole world wants her to look beyond what she has always known and build something new and different. Lan believes she can. Lan will help her if she asks.
But oh, she doesn’t want to and she doesn’t know how to change her mind.
“I will try,” she says, and it’s the only thing she has to give.
**
“Will I see you again?” Nynaeve asks. They are days from the Tower now rather than weeks, and the future presses down on her like the rain.
“If you want to see me again, you will,” Lan says. “Do you want to?”
“Yes,” Nynaeve says.
“Then you will.”
“I thought Novices couldn’t have–.”
“Lovers?” Lan asks, and Nynaeve blushes. “They can’t. But I don’t expect you will be a Novice for long. And I will be on the road. It will be some time before I can return.”
She hasn’t asked him how long it takes for Novices to become Accepted, for Accepted to become Aes Sedai. She knows he would say that it depends–on what?–on you, Wisdom–. She does not know how to carry his trust with the care it deserves.
She hasn’t asked again how it will work. Him, bonded to Moiraine, her with a Warder he hates. One day, she promises she will ask after the specifics, about the awkward moments with Moiraine and her lover, whatever terrible creature that might be. One day, she hopes, they will laugh over it.
“They said it had been years since Moiraine was last in the Tower,” Nynaeve says. “And now she is exiled.”
“Yes,” Lan says. “And yet, I go with you to the Tower.”
She doesn’t own me, he’d said before he left. He has ridden six weeks by her side to a place Moiraine cannot enter. Nynaeve tries to take his advice and believe her own senses, the sight and smell and touch of him, still beside her.
“So you do,” Nynaeve says.
**
The Tower rises high before them, a white beacon of uncontested power. It is beautiful, Nynaeve concedes, built over generations of the most beautiful stone from the purest quarries. She thinks those stones should have made their way into every little village so all the townspeople could see and touch them for themselves.
They ride toward Tar Valon. Slowly the crowds fill in, fields giving way to the market town outside the city’s walls, which in turns becomes a bustling metropolis as they pass through. No one notices them, four dusty travelers making their way to the Tower.
“We will part when we reach the Tower gates,” Lan says to the group. To Nynaeve he says, “Last chance to make a run for it.”
She smiles and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “You could find me too quickly here.” And she is, at this point, committed. With each step they had taken on the road, she had made up her mind–to go. To try. To become an Aes Sedai and take on the greatest powers in the world.
She is resolved not to enjoy it.
“I will always find you,” Lan says. “If you will let me.”
They stop now, and dismount the horses. The reins are handed to waiting attendants, who fade away. Nynaeve notices Egwene yank Perrin aside, a gift Nynaeve will pay for in gossip later.
“I promise not to make it too easy,” Nynaeve says, and steps closer to him. She has not touched him since the night they spent together, has not crawled into his bedroll or held his hand. He has not reached for her, either, giving her the space she needed to bring herself back to him.
“I would hope not,” Lan says, reaching out, finally. He strokes her face with the backs of his fingers, a small caress, and runs his hand over the braid that lies heavy over her shoulder. Some day, she hopes he can untie it, strand by strand, and then watch lazily as she does it up again, hours later. Some day–.
She imagines, just for now, that it could happen.
“Thank you,” Nynaeve says. “For–.”
Lan kisses her then, interrupting her words. It’s just as well, since she was going to say something witless that she might have regretted later. This she knows she will not regret, not even if Lan leaves now on his crusade with Moiraine and never returns. How could she? His mouth is soft and warm against hers, seeking, wanting, the kind of kiss that offers a pledge, if she will accept it.
She leans into the kiss, opening her mouth, breathing him in. He smells like wool and leather, like the open road he will soon return to. He tastes like a future she wants to live to see, a future she will soon learn to fight for. He does not taste like home.
He steps back then, and Nynaeve knows he will not linger. “Until we meet again, Wisdom,” Lan says.
“Until then,” Nynaeve says, then turns to the Tower to meet her fate.
***