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The sun blazes brightly, blindingly so. Under any other circumstance, Moiraine might have taken the time to close her eyes and bask in it, this warmth so different from the dry, dusty heat of the Waste that burned her lungs day and night with each inhale. It’s been weeks now since she’s felt air this fresh on her face, and here, each breath is sweet and clean, the sounds of bird songs weaving through the rustling leaves.
And here, before her, stands a small bamboo hut.
The rickety door is open, just a fishing net hung beside the entryway and swaying in the soft breeze. It’s dark inside, but Moiraine can still barely make out a figure seated on the bed, slightly hunched, making her look much smaller than she remembers.
A few paces away, Moiraine stops. There is still time to turn back, to find Egwene, and ask her to return them to the Waste. To ask her to relay the message to Siuan instead. Her pulse pounds hard in her shaking fingers, black spots creeping into the edges of her vision.
Without conscious decision, she’s half turned her body, ready to flee, when the shaded figure raises her head, her breath catching. Moiraine’s own halts in her throat, her heart beating even more wildly than before.
She can still leave; she can still walk away. She knows she won’t.
It’s surreal entering the hut from this vantage. The entire space looks foreign—wrong—as though viewing their life through a warped mirror. There are other differences, too, and Moiraine catalogs the changes one by one. The bed is pushed up against the wall, arranged for only one person to climb in and out of it. Everything is tidier: the pillows usually strewn about the floor now sitting flat with disuse on the couch. Motes of dust picked up by the breeze rise from the table, set for one. It looks wholly unlived in, but for the woman still seated on the bed, eyes intently tracking every step Moiraine takes closer.
When Siuan tries to rise, Moiraine holds out a hand, valiantly ignoring the small way it trembles.
“Siuan, please,” she says, eyes closing. She can still turn to leave, it isn’t too late. (It will always be too late.) She waits until she hears the quiet shifting of Siuan settling back on the bed before she opens her eyes once more.
“I don’t have long. Egwene is… I don’t have long.” But Moiraine knows this shouldn’t be news to Siuan, their stolen moments together perpetually truncated.
I thought we’d have more time. Siuan’s voice rings through her head, her words spoken only months past though it feels like years since they were last here.
Moiraine, in turn, had cupped her face, the way her fingers itch to in the present despite the hurt and betrayal that still squirm sickly in her stomach. We always think that. Don’t we?
One day we will. In this life or the next.
In the next, Moiraine thinks now. This one is too far gone.
She clears her throat, willing that night from her mind, and continues: “Rand has just declared himself Car’a’carn among the Aiel. Their prophecies are different but similar enough, and the sept we are with has backed him.” The words are stiff and perfunctory, her voice flat and hollow even to her own ears.
“He’s building momentum, even if it’s not how—”
“Why are you here, Moiraine?” Siuan cuts her off. It is Moiraine’s own veiled accusation thrown back at her, but the ire that she knows had sparked in her eyes during their tense meeting in Cairhien is absent from Siuan’s. There is only deep exhaustion dulling them, her sharp gaze gone flat. “Egwene already told me as much when arranging this… meeting.”
“This is still our mission, Siuan, even if you sought to remove me from it,” she snaps back, harsher than she means to. But a frantic energy courses through her, breaking the calm she so desperately clings to. If Moiraine were anyone else, she wouldn’t have been able to catch Siuan’s small flinch. But Siuan is the woman she has loved for decades and through the arduous years of their mission, and Moiraine long ago learned to read her better than she could even read herself.
“There are some things only I can tell you, some things I don’t trust anyone else to.”
Siuan doesn’t speak, doesn’t give any indication or acknowledgment besides the way her eyes burn into Moiraine’s own, a bit of that fire coming back. Waiting for my spikes to retract, Moiraine thinks and almost laughs despite herself.
“Rand and I both went to Rhuidean,” she starts, willing that calm back into her voice.
As she speaks, the words grow more and more breathless, recounting her time in the rings. The futures she saw. How in order for Rand to live, for the past twenty years to not be for naught, she must die—though, truthfully, this does not come as a surprise to either of them. Moiraine was always living on borrowed time.
She tells Siuan everything, all of it pouring out as she paces the room. The one thing she can’t bring herself to voice is the futures in which they were happy—and that, despite that happiness, no amount of love could save them. Her words stutter as she unwillingly recalls the vision of herself seated on the bamboo floor and leaning against the very bed before her, tattoos spiraling up her arms and fingers calloused from the coarse fishing net in her hands. It had felt like the most natural thing in the world to look up at the sound of soft footsteps and see Siuan framed in the doorway, light pouring in around her and crowning her in gold like the regalia she had never worn in that life.
But of course, just like all the other visions, it had ended in destruction. Theirs, or the world’s, or—most often—both, it didn’t matter.
“Moiraine, the Tower, it…” Siuan starts, seizing the momentary lapse in Moiraine’s recounting. “Elaida has returned. She wants to cage him. I’ve delayed the vote but I’m not sure how much longer I can hold her off.” The admission grinds out of Siuan’s throat, tinged with shame Moiraine is not used to.
“If the White Tower does not bend the knee to Rand al’Thor, he will lose the last battle. You know this.” There is no broker in her tone. “We… I failed once before. We both did. We cannot fail again.”
Siuan has been tracking her erratic movements, eyes never leaving Moiraine, but at that she looks down at her hands, clenching and unclenching them.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Siuan finally speaks. “In Cairhien, I shouldn’t have—”
“What’s done is done,” Moiraine interjects before Siuan can continue with words poised to break her heart.
“I regret what I did,” Siuan forges on anyway. “I know you heard me talking with the girls, but I had to say it to you directly.”
“I don’t.” Please, Moiraine begs silently. Please stop talking. Please don’t make this harder than it has to be. She takes a deep, steadying breath. “I don’t regret a moment. But I am not sure I can forgive you. Even now.”
Siuan forcibly flinches this time, her whole body spasming as though Moiraine has landed a physical blow. Her mouth opens, a small noise escaping before she closes it and gives a short, jerky nod.
Desperately fighting the tears welling in her eyes and begging them not to fall, Moiraine turns from Siuan, crossing her arms over her stomach to clutch protectively at her sides. She is too preoccupied with how her chest constricts, a sob trying to claw its way out, to notice that Siuan has left the bed and now stands before her.
A gentle hand falls on each of Moiraine’s wrists, pulling lightly until she unfolds her arms. Siuan may as well be flaying her open, exposing her heart that beats hard and near painfully at how close they are. She slowly, almost regretfully, uncurls her fingers from one of Moiraine’s wrists. But before she can release the other, Moiraine flips her hand and grips hard at Siuan’s own.
She should let go. Egwene is waiting. There are more important matters than…
But Siuan’s eyes are wide and dark, life finally creeping back into them, and when she glances down at Moiraine’s lips, Moiraine knows she never stood a chance.
Moiraine steps forward, pulled by some force—not the One Power, not any kind of weave. She is pulled in simply by Siuan and her need to be as close as possible, razing the barricades and distance she has so adamantly forced between them. Moiraine places her free hand on Siuan’s cheek and brings their lips together.
She can feel Siuan’s hesitancy matching her own, and no matter how brief, it tears at something in her like a snagged thread, perilously close to unraveling her. But a moment later, Siuan’s hand comes to her waist, squeezing tightly and stepping closer. The kiss turns needy and desperate, small moans and panted breaths pressed against each other’s lips. Moiraine drops her hand from Siuan’s cheek to her shoulder, feeling the strength of the rounded joint beneath her palm and the way the muscles flex and relax as they move together.
When it becomes too much, Moiraine pulls away, and Light how she had forgotten what Siuan could do to her with just a kiss. She parts her lips, a question she can’t remember the words to growing stagnant as Siuan leans back in, sealing their mouths together. Urgently deepening the kiss, Siuan presses her tongue between Moiraine’s lips, and she feels herself fall apart.
Siuan’s hand slides to the small of Moiraine’s back, urging her closer until their bodies are pressed tightly together, hips unconsciously rocking in time with each other. Alarm bells sound in Moiraine’s head. They can’t be doing this; there isn’t time. And worst of all, Siuan’s hands on her still ache like a fresh bruise.
Surely feeling the rigidity returning to Moiraine’s body, Siuan leaves one more lingering kiss on the corner of her mouth before stepping backward to take a seat on the bench behind them. She gives the hand still gripping Moiraine’s a slight tug, prompting her to sit beside her, but Moiraine falls to her knees before Siuan instead. It doesn’t escape her that the last time she sat before Siuan like this, an ardent supplicant, it had ended in their ruin.
She places both hands in Siuan’s lap, moving her fingers in soft circles on her thighs. With the hand not holding Moiraine’s, Siuan reaches up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind Moiraine’s ear and trails her fingers downward until she can cup her jaw. Despite herself, she leans into the touch, turning her head just slightly to graze her lips against Siuan’s palm as they both let out shaky sighs.
“I have to go,” she whispers against Siuan’s warm skin. “I’ve stayed too long already.”
“Just a few more minutes,” Siuan nearly pleads, and it sends another spike of pain through Moiraine. Siuan does not beg, and it might kill Moiraine if she starts now. She cannot offer Siuan forgiveness, but she can make sure she keeps her dignity.
Moiraine shakes her head, standing. “You were right, Egwene could have been the one to—” She steels herself, willing a chill into her voice. “I’m not sure I should have come here at all.”
But as though moved like a puppet of the Pattern, threads lifting her limbs without her permission, Moiraine brings her hand to Siuan’s cheek and brushes her thumb against one of the dark circles that hollow out her eyes. It would be so easy to lean in and kiss her once more, to settle herself onto Siuan’s lap and let their bodies attempt to remedy what their words cannot.
It would be so easy. But neither of them have ever taken what was easy and neither of them will start now.
“Goodbye, Siuan.”
Moiraine sees the momentary shock on Siuan’s face as she moves to leave. In all these years, she has never said those words, even when departing for the Eye. They both ache with the finality of it.
“In the rings—in your visions, was I with you?” Siuan’s voice stops her, the question small and tentative, as if even while asking it she’s not sure she truly wants to know the answer.
Moiraine stands stock-still, hand traitorously coming to rest against the doorframe to keep herself from swaying.
“Sometimes,” she admits.
“Were we happy? In any of those futures, were we happy?” It stings to know that Siuan agrees their time for happiness in this turn of the Wheel has run out. At the same time, it is a relief.
Moiraine has never hated the Oaths more as she looks over her shoulder, eyes blurred to the point that Siuan is no more than something from a dream, and whispers a soft, “yes,” before turning and walking out the door.
The sun blazes brightly, blindingly so. And behind her, fading away with each step, stands a small bamboo hut.