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Nynaeve was a curiosity.
The murmurs around the camp following Nynaeve’s foolish display in the cave made any attempt to rest futile. The weight of a dozen gazes burdened her at all times. They rode too slowly, encumbered by the carts and the Aes Sedai’s insistence on stopping early to rest.
Nynaeve would not urge them to ride harder and risk drawing those women’s attention to her friends. It was hard enough to avoid their questions. Her trips to the forest to replenish her herbs regularly turned into hide-and-seek games with Sisters who tried to stumble on Nynaeve.
The Red Sister had cornered her twice already and only the arrival of patrolling Warders had sent her slithering away. She did not like men, that one.
Nynaeve slept alone outside the encampment, only coming in to eat and chat with the Warders in the evening. Back in their tent, they would no doubt repeat each word to their Aes Sedai, but she was careful with what she revealed.
Well, she had mentioned Mat in passing, but the way she talked about him, he could be anything from a horse to a distant uncle.
Let them watch!
She was watching and judging just as keenly.
By the tenth day, the wheels of the cart carrying Logain were damaged on the road.
The attack had left them without certain supplies, spare wheels among them, and the closest hamlet was a day’s ride ahead. For all their might, Nynaeve doubted the Aes Sedai knew how to repair wheel and axletree with the One Power. Watching the expressionless women scurry around to account for the now unavoidable delay in their journey lightened her mood considerably.
The Warders would have to reorganize the supplies from the broken cart between vehicles and pack mules.
Despite the slumbering pace of their journey, Nynaeve could use the respite to soothe her aching muscles in the nearby river.
As she tied her horse with the others, she discreetly checked on Stepin, engrossed in the care of Kerene's Nai1. His fingers disentangled the mare's grey mane with care, but the animal was shuffling nervously. Stepin was staring through the horse, as he had every single day before.
The bond was barbaric; tying oneself to anyone to such an extent was self-destructive. No one should own another person like this. Stepin was proof of that. If only Nynaeve could heal him of the bond…
Nai pressed her large head against Stepin’s chest and he smiled, more present this time, but just so.
Nynaeve sniffed and picked up her pack.
Once she was assured the Aes Sedai would not depart before the morrow, Nynaeve sneaked out of the camp and walked a safe distance downriver. These women would not bathe in a river when they had servants to wash their hair.
She selected a secluded spot, with overhanging trees for a discreet retreat, and stripped to her underclothes. The air was colder inland than it was back to the Two Rivers, but the stream was a tributary of the Manetherendrelle and her limbs loosened the moment she entered the water.
Eyes closed, she could pretend she was back home.
Leaning against a rock, she cleared her mind and listened to the wind. It was muffled today, difficult. Between her friends’ uncertain location and Logain’s assault, her failed attempt didn’t worry her.
Yet.
It was the wind that warned her of Lan’s presence.
Nynaeve cursed silently and crouched behind the nearest trunk, soaking her undergarment, as the Warder stepped into the clearing with a small parcel and his sword.
The wind behaved differently around the Aes Sedai and her Warder, although Nynaeve doubted anyone but a trained Wisdom would notice. The other Aes Sedai didn’t warp the local weather like this.
Odd.
Lan had removed his upper garments, placed them neatly beside the parcel on a rock, and started splashing water across his chest and back, an expression of smooth content across his features.
Out of respect, Nynaeve could slip out unnoticed, albeit not with dignity considering how wet she was, but something about the way he carried himself held her back.
Lan's body had the secure strength Nynaeve expected from a soldier, honed on battlegrounds and roads. Old scars ran along his back, sometimes dark, sometimes pale. Burns, cuts, here the marring from a jagged blade, there the dented flower of a puncture wound from an arrow she dared not imagine. Even a cool, clinical examination like hers could not ignore the harmonious proportions and elastic strength in his muscles.
That morning in the glade, disrupting his prayer, she had learned he thought of her after all. The kindness in his eyes had not suggested he deemed her disruptive at all.
Now, his face was turned toward the canopy, studying the wind in the foliage, listening to its whispers. He stretched his neck, rotated his shoulder —
She skinned the bark under her fingers when she noticed what she was looking for.
The strength could well come from the bond. All the warders she studied shared this rested efficiency, a power she knew could not come only from enough sleep and food.
In Lan, that tautness was bent.
The water whispered differently around his calves and Nynaeve had the sense to retreat further into the water to avoid Moiraine's sweeping gaze. The air did not enter her lungs for a minute before Nynaeve reasoned that surrounded by Aes Sedai as they were, Moiraine surely could not pick Nynaeve out. If Moiraine could even pick her out.
The Aes Sedai had seemed surprised by the incident in the cave and Nynaeve had been avoiding her ever since.
An attempt had been made the day after Kerene’s burial to question her under the guise of concern about channeling sickness. Nynaeve’s answers had been as curt as Lan’s eyes had been bemused. Moiraine did not need to know about how she healed Egwene as a teen. It galled her that Moiraine seemed to know anyway, merely acknowledging her rebuttals with a raised eyebrow.
Moiraine was similarly bare to the waist, breeches tied up at the knees, a thin cloth wrapped around her chest for modesty, but revealing enough of her upper body to confound Nynaeve.
Stark marks on her strong body. Slender muscles, drawn sharply by years of travel. In appearance, her attire and masks removed, Moiraine bore more similarities to the horse traders Nynaeve occasionally treated than the noble ladies crossing White Bridge in their palanquins.
Both of them look dry.
Like bark or stone. Not like flesh.
Nynaeve had seen many bodies in her years as a Wisdom, old and young; the embarrassment she felt had to be discarded on the floor of her dispensary, among the grime dragged inside by the farmers carrying old Buie’s broken body.
Yet she had never witnessed bodies afflicted with such a condition as the bond.
Her eyes narrowed, inspecting further.
Could the bond affect the flesh as well as the mind?
Lan had not seemed physically diminished during Moiraine’s sickness, yet he felt her pain, and pain had a way of shaping the body. Old wounds warped movement like stones on a river bed, impressing new points of tension across muscles and pivotal points along limbs.
As Moiraine wasted away on the forest ground, her blood rotting, the wound had caved her body from the chest. Nynaeve knew, even when she could not recall with precision Moiraine’s looming stance from the Two Rivers, that the Aes Sedai's bearing had shifted after healing, used at it was to the pain in her left shoulder.
Stepin bent on his horse the same way, although the weave that struck Kerene never touched his body. He bore the scar of a phantom wound that no healing could soothe.
On the battlefield, she had seen his body stagger from afar. The chaos was too reminiscent of that night back home when an obstacle in the dark had been the corpse of a neighbor, but his stillness had been deafening.
He had stopped, the world around him a fury of motion, a dead man still standing.
Moiraine was close to death not a fortnight before, close to dragging Lan with her.
Now chin-deep in the water, Nynaeve stopped herself from grabbing her braid for fear of alerting them. She wasn’t a girl and Lan wasn’t one of the youths back home. He was what he was, and inextricable from her.
Moiraine was alive, here, massaging her shoulder, a faint smile on her lips. The scar from the healed wound drew a healthy pink oblong tear on her chest.
Shy pride suffused the anger at that. Nynaeve had held her life in her hands, powerful as Moiraine might be, and she kept that flicker alive. The Aes Sedai had barely thanked her on the morning before the attack, and Lan, shadowing his Aes Sedai, had remained silent.
The relief was evident now, his face expressionless but no more pained as it had been when she found them in the woods.
Healed, whole.
Nynaeve may have saved his life, all of their lives, but Moiraine safe and sound seemed a greater victory for him than cheating death.
Lan and Moiraine did not exchange words, merely waded in the water in unison, chasing whirlpools in the current as they freshened up. They appeared so different from what they were, beings of legends. Nynaeve had heard Aes Sedai lived hundreds of years, changing Warders like pieces of clothing.
The belief was hard to reconcile with the picture before her.
Gracefully, Moiraine bent and ducked her head in the water, and from his parcel, Lan retrieved a jar for her, the content to be applied on her hair.
Moiraine scratched the back of her head, shaking the wet mass of hair to wash away the soot, lingering at the nape. Lan shivered, content. His hand joined Moiraine’s in her hair and rubbed gently.
No bond closer than an Aes Sedai and her Warder.
Lan moved in front of Moiraine for better access and continued massaging. From this angle, they appeared a fantastical four-armed creature, Moiraine tending to the top of her head, Lan to the ends. Their faces were not visible, but everything about their postures and movements told of trust. The scars on Moiraine’s back extended into the ones at Lan’s sides, only interrupted by the gap between their bodies.
Nynaeve's cheeks burned. Her diagnosis felt an intrusion now.
They moved like one body, bent in the shape of love.
From his pack, Lan pulled out a small bowl that he filled with water and poured on Moiraine’s hair while the Aes Sedai was carding the strands to remove the last of the mixture. With delicate weaves, begrudgingly visible to Nynaeve, the Aes Sedai dried Lan and herself with almost a flourish to her movement.
A smirk distinctly stretched Lan’s lips.
Nynaeve was still cooling her shame in the water when Moiraine called out to her, “Mistress al’Meara, you may come out now, if you wish.”