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Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
— from "Love at First Sight"
Wislawa Szymborska, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak.
Elena Sedai really didn't have anyone to blame but herself.
She had simply slept through the Last Battle.
Not exactly slept, but she had travelled to the northern confines of the Borderlands about five years ago in order to study the language of a valley where a people still spoke what she suspected was a proto form of the Old Tongue with some words still in use in most of the Westlands.
And while Elena was meticulously writing down the stories and words of these secluded people, immersing herself in the ways of a nomadic culture between cliffs and sea, the Last Battle had happened.
Without her.
Of course, she was a Brown, but that hardly excused missing only the most important battle in four Ages.
A lost gleeman informed her of the end of this Age. By the time she reached the Tower, six months after Tarmon Gai'don, she found it so changed that victory over the forces of evil didn't mean much.
After all, Elena was only on her fourteenth Amyrlin and she could only remember the current one because they had a falling out lifetimes ago.
Each time she'd returned to the Tower in the past hundred years, it was to learn that this old friend or that respected teacher had passed. So she had avoided coming back as much as possible, until she stopped entirely about twenty years ago.
There wasn't much home to find in a place filled with ghosts, although she was happy to meet so many novices again.
Which is why she resented Cadsuane. Even more. She’d badgered Elena into attending the commemoration of the third anniversary of the Last Battle in Andor with the current leaders of the Westlands. Truly, she understood Cadsuane's impatience with these infants, but it was no reason to drag Elena out of her retirement.
Cadsuane had vanished before the evening, professing an emergency meeting with the Green Ajah, but Elena was no dupe.
What were the Greens even supposed to do once the Last Battle was won?
Elena didn't know anyone at the celebration. All the Aes Sedai she tried to talk to would inevitably end up mentioning a Sister who had died at the Last Battle or in the years leading up to it. Elena was only reminded of how disconnected she was from this world.
Death must surely be a mercy for someone as old as she was.
The Queen of Andor had a vague resemblance to Queen Mordrellen, but given the young woman's age it didn't seem plausible. Perhaps Morgase herself, but Elena could not quite recall how old Morgase had been the last time she had seen her, so it could have been her granddaughter.
Morgase had been such a distracted student when Elena was teaching the Old Tongue, ever mooning over the most haughty novices.
Not far, some Shienaran kings and queens were huddling together, barely acknowledging the crowd of leaders that Elena was failing to tell apart by their modern attire.
Here a Mayener Queen, there an Andoran Lord, and an individual of such careless appearance he looked like he belonged at a table getting drunk and playing dice rather than surrounded by monarchs.
He must have been inebriated with how free he was in his attempt at sweet talking the Cairhienin.
At some point, one of the Borderlanders — she was fairly sure the cord around his head was a hadori — tried to strike up a conversation, only for them to stare at each other awkwardly after she failed three times to explain where exactly she had spent her research.
Cities and villages; their names changed so quickly.
He didn't even attempt to find an excuse to take his leave as he mumbled something about sheepherders and wisdom.
As Elena was lamenting again how few people she could recognise, drowning in a Cairhienin wine that tasted like grape juice, her eyes fell on two women standing in a corner, keeping to themselves.
They looked like any of the ladies in the room, though perhaps less ostentatious in appearance. Both were in their middle years, wearing simply cut dresses in deep purple, almost blue, lined with furs as if they were used to warmer climates.
The one closest to Elena had short, curly hair interwoven with elegant silver strands. The open collar revealing her tattoos and her darker complexion marked her as Tairen without a shadow of a doubt. She spoke animatedly to her companion, hands moving gracefully like water itself. Her gaze did not leave the woman in front of her.
The other woman wore deep furrows at the corner of her eyes and long brown hair twisted in an artful way over loose waves. The look of profound admiration she had for the Tairen woman, unmistakable in her large clear eyes, sparked a sense of familiarity so vivid Elena had to draw close.
She moved in circles, watching them like a Blue, to get a better look at the Tairen woman's face.
By the blue gems on their rings, she could tell they were Aes Sedai, but not one Sister had approached them since Elena had started her survey. By all appearances, Elena would characterize the glances they would direct at the oblivious duo as "cautious," sometimes even "awed."
Not friendly, more disbelieving.
After five years with the Iceni, Elena hadn't exactly gotten more proficient at reading lips in the Modern Tongue and could only now catch sparse and nonsensical strings of words.
The animated Aes Sedai appeared to be talking more about fish than reason would allow in a Tairen. Her quieter companion kept mentioning water birds.
It wasn't a very conclusive study.
Elena was ready to accept defeat and seek one of the Grey Sisters — who had been so newly raised she couldn't remember which floor the Hall was in, but was a meticulous and extensive gossip — when she caught a gesture between the subjects of her study.
Although nothing in their demeanour had indicated that the two women were more than friendly Blue Sisters, the quiet woman had looked around — missing Elena, who had wisely placed herself between the statue of a lion and an Aielwoman, entirely — and she had kissed the Tairen's hand.
Interlaced their fingers, lifted her companion's hand to her face and pressed her lips to the knuckles — all performed in record time and with the gall to look around to see if anyone had caught her display.
The look on her face, quite visible from Elena's vantage point through the lion's open mouth, was one of such recognisable childish delight that Elena was propelled twenty or so years into the past.
Students practically falling asleep during her last lesson for the day. The room was so cold the air was filled with mist from the exhale of the Accepted. Most of the girls had given up on pretending they couldn't feel the cold and were wrapped in a coat or a blanket.
Elena was detailing inflections.
At the back of the class, wrapped in the same blanket, a brown-haired girl leaned onto a black-haired girl, fingers interlaced, and blew over their joined knuckles before kissing them gently.
Those two. More than twenty years ago. Still tangled together.
"You!" Elena called out, stepping out from behind the lion and lifting her chin in the women's direction.
The Aiel woman at her side raised an eyebrow of appreciation and Elena wondered briefly if perhaps hiding behind furniture in a room full of leaders might seem a bit suspicious.
But she had the missing link and was not letting it go so easily now.
Both women had frozen, although more in apparent expectation than fear.
"I know you!" Elena proclaimed again, joining the two women without waiting for their answer.
"Many do unfortunately," the Tairen one muttered under her breath.
Well! So much older and still so dismissive of authority.
The other one narrowed her eyes at Elena, clearly expecting her to explain herself. The intensity of her study was quite intimidating. These two were not Accepted anymore.
She did not look at her companion that way.
"You tried sneaking an entire bass into the Tower during my class," Elena pressed, wagging a finger in their faces.
They may well be full Sisters, but Elena could remember the rascals they were. The bass had been the least of their offences.
The soap in the kitchen! The fireworks on the Warder training grounds! The potatoes! Light, the potatoes, how could she forget that one.
"You must be mistaken, this wasn't—" the quiet one started with a clipped accent, definitely Cairhienin. An incriminating blush was spreading on her cheeks and neck.
That blush had given them away so many times.
Her friend had the decency to look guilty — although relief had also relaxed her posture.
"Moiraine, the slipper soup!" Elena erupted, memories flooding her mind. Seaine had nearly thrown them into the Erinin after that stunt. Only Merean's intervention and reassurance that those two would be on dinner duty on the twenty-fifth floor for three months cooled her fury. "Young woman, the slipper soup was perhaps the vilest prank this Tower has ever known, and I have caught Pevara swapping the Mistress of Novices' whips with cakes."
Why, the entire Tower had not dared taste even a spoonful of chowder for a month! The kitchen had been a Daes' Dae'mar pit.
"Chaos, young women." Elena concluded, dismayed. "Utterly dishonourable of you too, Siuan. You were such a bright mind and you used that for fish in the laundry! You two were the most dangerous novices I ever had the displeasure of sharing the Tower with."
While the Cairhienin woman had turned purple with mortification, so stiff she appeared to be barely breathing, the Tairen Sister was swallowing back laughter. Her hand sought the other woman's wrist in an attempt to stop herself from hiding her face, which she had tried to do several times during Elena's outburst.
Flinching, Elena suddenly recalled she was in fact in the middle of the Andoran grand reception hall, surrounded by the generals and monarchs who had fought in the Last Battle. Few had noticed them, tucked as they were in a corner, all the more so because that drunk-looking young man from before had started brawling with an Andoran lady with a wolf sigil.
Three Aes Sedai talking shop wasn't of importance.
Elena suddenly felt very small. The urge to flee the party and go back to the mountains, ignore how the world had moved on without her, pressed on her with the weight of time.
"Elena Sedai, right? I still remember the day you explained the word kjasic."
The old teacher peered back at the Tairen woman — Siuan, if she hadn't made a complete fool of herself. With her full attention directed at Elena, Siuan displayed all the warmth and assurance of someone who had lived a full range of experiences, a far cry from the scrawny fisherman's daughter Elena had laid eyes on all those years ago.
Her smile was wicked, confident, but tinted with a weariness that told of the years that passed since the time she spoke that word.
Hard, painful years.
Moiraine hovered close to Siuan and observed Elena with that same quiet sharpness. The redness of her face had abated and unveiled a deep-rooted grief, something lasting that a woman of her years — a girl, compared to Elena— shouldn't have known. The way she leaned into Siuan, brushing against her arm, her hip, had nothing in common with the quick, timid touches the two of them would exchange in dark corners when they thought their teachers could not see.
"It is nice to see a familiar face, Elena Sedai," Moiraine added. A musical hum passed her lips, stretching into a smile at last. "Didn't you also once teach Martine Sedai's classes when she had a cold?"
"She was on an errand outside the Tower that time," Siuan corrected her with a fond look. "Otherwise she would have found a way to break the third Oath and kill you on the spot for burning one of the ter'angreal she was working on, Sister."
Elena didn't miss the way Siuan brushed a hand against the small of Moiraine's back. In return, Moiraine gave her a quick, reassuring blink.
A language of their own, spoken as plainly now as it had been twenty years ago.
Perhaps, as old as they appeared, they had much to live still.
"Well, I am flattered you remembered that lesson instead of all the ones on compound words," Elena mumbled at last, not too pleased to discuss that particular incident. It had nearly split the Brown Ajah in two.
Siuan grimaced, but the fondness was still present. It seemed she had grown perpetually mellow in her old age.
"You'd be surprised what lessons one carries through life, Sister," Siuan whispered with a knowing smile.
Around them, some Aes Sedai and Borderlanders were throwing curious glances at them. As vivid as the image of them had been, younger but not necessarily happier, they had written a story larger than the cot they and countless other novices had slept on. Here they were probably renowned Aes Sedai for their part in the Last Battle, like many of the Sisters Elena had met tonight.
But for Elena, the image remained in her mind, of two girls wrapped under a blanket by candlelight, haltingly reading dead words and holding each other’s frozen hands with more care than the uncooperative syllables.
Thirty years later, the shape of their love hadn't changed much.
The Queen of Andor was now singing with the drunk-looking character and attracted her companions' attention for a second.
"What have you two been doing with yourself?" Elena asked softly, unwilling to let them go yet. "Besides terrorizing Sisters into giving you the shawl at some point?"
Siuan and Moiraine exchanged wry looks.