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“She’s no threat to me.”
The words echo in Moiraine’s mind as Leane stalks out of the room. They might have made it past Siuan’s oaths at any point in the past twenty years. The past eighty, even; Siuan’s refusal to see her as a threat had baffled and enamoured a young Moiraine in equal measure. But she knows how Leane is meant to read it, and reads it just as clearly herself. Siuan knows. Stripped of her powers, she could not match a novice.
She continues to stare forward blankly. The look is credited to the Aes Sedai, but she finds that Cairhien brings it out in her most - the fixed look of bland acquiescence.
Siuan seeks out her gaze, and Moiraine’s eyes flick away quickly against her will. It is humiliating and it is ugly. To be so transparent, and for this transparency to show Siuan nothing. Only the ragged and rotten edges that Ishamael had left behind. It feels like a constant pang of hunger, a battle not to bend double and retch on nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Siuan’s voice is firm. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been stilled?” The word echoes through the cavernous room and Moiraine almost flinches. Terrible to think it, terrible to write it, unbearable to hear it from Siuan’s own lips.
“Six months of letters, Moiraine, and not one word about this-” Siuan’s voice falters, “This violation."
The wave of shame at the back of her throat is both familiar and confused. Her mother, crumpling a flower between her fingers, crushing the petals whose softness a small Moiraine had brushed against her cheek. Ruined, her mother had said, her gaze not leaving Moiraine’s face. Shameful, Elaida’s low goading, and an unrelenting lash of Air against the same cheek. Try again.
For the first time, Moiraine looks up to meet Siuan’s gaze. She knows Siuan well enough to know that if there is disgust, it will be well masked. The warm pity in her eyes is almost worse.
Siuan breaks eye contact first, seeming to realise that Moiraine is unable or unwilling to respond. She turns away and walks towards the Seat, the ridiculous replica which Moiraine can picture being frantically dusted off and hauled out by an unlucky footmen. Siuan sits down heavily, roughly passing her hands across her face. Inanely, Moiraine worries for the stability of her absurd headdress.
“This snare of a Seat,” Siuan looks back up at her, and Moiraine slowly approaches the dais. “Sat here, I’ve let you carry this burden for twenty years, love. You’ve given everything for it.”
Everything. It is as if the word itself from Siuan’s lips makes Moiraine aware of her instability. What was left capable of holding her body up?
When she sinks to the ground it is almost against her will. Her knees hit the cool marble floor and she speaks for the first time without a thought.
“Forgive me, Mother.”
It is cruel. Moiraine is not even sure what she is asking for, to invoke Siuan’s title in private, to refuse to speak to the real woman who loves her. Asking from the Amyrlin Seat for the absolution she does not have the words to beg from Siuan. Siuan’s face twists momentarily, the edge of a sob, and then smoothes into something serene.
“I hate it when you call me that.” She chokes out the rote response humourlessly, even as she reaches towards Moiraine, clasping her cheek in her hand.
For a moment Moiraine shies away slightly, resisting the urge to lean into the touch. To push into it, even, she recognises with a flare of shame, like a seeking animal, knelt at Siuan’s feet. Siuan’s touch is firm, soothing, following the movement of her head and lightly guiding her back into place.
Moiraine’s eyes fall shut as she surrenders into the soft darkness where there is only Siuan’s hand and Siuan’s soft breathing in tandem with her own. She embraces the sensation like she might have saidar, its absence at once soothed and foregrounded.
She feels rather than sees Siuan’s fingers trace the lines of her jaw, passing briefly over her closed eyes and brushing a thumb softly across parted lips. She seems to be relearning the lines of Moiraine’s face, with a hesitance Moiraine knows to be born of her own withholding.
She hears the rustle of the Amyrlin’s golden skirts moving, and feels the heavy embroidered hemline brush her bent knees as Siuan leans forward in the seat. She almost flinches as another hand comes to the side of her face, exhaling sharply and unevenly into the quiet room. The hand pauses only briefly before moving more surely into her carefully styled hair, firmly clasping the back of her head.
Her eyes blink open slowly, suddenly dazzled by the golden expanse of the robes before her. She focuses slowly on the warm brown of Siuan’s face, the contrasting darkness of the tattoos still slightly visible at her chest.
On her knees in the throne room of Cairhien, the Amyrlin Seat above her. Siuan Sanche above her. She has the fleeting thought that it should have been Siuan they sought for Sun Queen. Nonsense, of course. Siuan had none of the blood of the Damodreds, and none of its poison. She almost chokes out a laugh at the idea of a world where she and Siuan had made it to Cairhien after the war. Perhaps if they had succeeded in putting her on the Sun Throne they would have allowed her a fishwife for a consort. Positioned perfectly to watch the darkness of the Damodreds spread out from her like an opened vein.
No, Siuan would not simply watch. Moiraine had always taken comfort in that knowledge.
Her eyes are still on Siuan’s face, Siuan’s eyes. They are as searching as her hands as she scans Moiraine’s face. Scanning for physical evidence of what she now knows has been done to her, perhaps. For something lacking, a small voice whispers. You’ve given everything for it.
She is pulled from those thoughts by a slight tug at her scalp, a hair catching slightly on Siuan’s still-callused fingertips. Siuan had always liked to keep tangible proof of the work she was doing, weaving and unweaving ropes parallel to the nets of Tower politics which her hands would never be marked by. Siuan’s fingers move through the coils of Moiraine’s carefully pinned hair as surely as through the knots of a net, searching for the solid anchoring of bone. As a novice, Moiraine had often wished, in a way both abstract and humiliatingly tangible, that those clever fingers might reach beyond the surface of her skin, reach within her and deftly unknot whatever darkness this turning of the Wheel had weaved within her.
Now, these hands guide her forward without a care for the indignity of Moiraine shifting forward on her knees. She accepts it without a sound. Moiraine had long understood, since novice dreams of clever hands, that she would accept anything at all from Siuan Sanche.
She sways slightly as she allows Siuan’s hands to take her weight. She almost protests as her eyeline is guided away from Siuan’s precious face, a protest Siuan seems to anticipate, soothing her with a soft noise and a hand across her hair before she can speak. As she guides Moiraine’s cheek to rest against her lap, the rough gold of the Amyrlin’s robe might have been as soft as the wraps Siuan favoured in private. The scent of Siuan surrounds her, the perfume she has worn since Moiraine had bought a vial on an illicit trip into Tar Valon. It drowns out the cool nothingness of the Sun Palace.
As teenagers they had resolved - to the point of absurdity - to walk in lockstep through the world together. These had been the resolutions of a different time, one where the Wheel had willed two girls to the Tower on the same day, made equal in the One Power.
Now, Moiraine did not feel when Siuan drew on saidar, not until the tendrils of power touched her, dancing across her skin like Siuan’s own fingertips. Like a blind woman given a book of raised letters, she felt Siuan supplementing her lost sense, directing into her body the power she could no longer sense in the air. A silent mantra, we are one, still.
It was momentarily a desperate and selfish relief to feel Siuan more powerful, to let her own dead weight fall completely on her lover. Moiraine felt giddy with the desire for Siuan, her presence and her power, to flood every crevice of the gnawing emptiness.
A wracking sob brings her back to herself. Her own, she realises dimly, wrenched out like a knife. Siuan’s weaves move across her skin in threads as if delving for the wound, enmeshing Moiraine in a shimmering net. Time stretches and distorts, and she is unsure how long she allows herself to stay like this, slumped on the cold floor, Siuan’s dress digging into her cheek. Too long, she is sure. She is aware only that she is nauseous with sobbing by the time she finally quiets, coming back to awareness of the weaves and fingertips still gently stroking over her skin.
It takes several shaky breaths before she can raise her eyes, meeting Siuan’s gaze. The sight of brown eyes shining with unshed tears sends guilt lancing through her sharper than any Trolloc blade.
She is unsure what she was moving to do when Siuan catches her hand. Clumsily trying to wipe the tears away, perhaps. Instead, Siuan gently brings Moiraine’s hand to her lips, kissing her palm lightly.
“Light, my love, you cannot-“, Siuan begins to speak, her voice halting, “If you’re hurt, I wish- I need to know. To know that you will tell me before it is on your knees as a bloody penitent. Burn me, this mission cannot-“
As if cued, the side door of the throne room crashes open. Several things happen at once: Moiraine moves to jerk her head up, Siuan’s hand tightens in her hair, and the voice of the Dragon Reborn echoes through the room.
“Moiraine-”, she hears him stop short, “What… what is this?”
A wave of panic rushes over her, mixed with a scandalised shame more at home in this body sixty years ago. Every possible redirection or explanation flashes through her mind, each more absurd than the last. What a picture they must make. The Amyrlin on her Seat, one hand in the hair of the Lady Moiraine Damodred, knelt at her feet and still half slumped across her lap. Nothing truly untoward had happened, of course, but heat rises to her cheeks nonetheless. It put her uncomfortably in mind of some of the awful novels Siuan used to delight in scandalising her with. The memory does not help with her blush.
At least Rand cannot see the tendrils of Siuan’s power still wreathing her body, dissipating slowly as Moiraine fights the urge to physically claw them back around herself.
Moiraine knows that she must look up fully, must speak, to reassure or enlighten or lie to Rand. It is a blessed relief when Siuan does not allow her to.
“I do not recall granting you an audience, Rand Al’Thor.”
Moiraine feels Siuan raise a hand, presumably halting him before he can utter a response.
“Dragon Reborn or no, you enter this Hall only by my leave. And will leave it at my command. The business of the Amyrlin Seat and her own is none of yours. Return to Lan, and I will see to you shortly.”
Moiraine has never yet witnessed Rand do as he is bid. As she sees boots recede and hears the doors click shut far more timidly than they opened, she once again marvels at Siuan's talent for the impossible. Or perhaps it truly was too disconcerting a picture. Light knows he thought her made of stone.
She has never felt less stone than she does now, coming back to the realities of her body. Her knees are beginning to ache from the hard floor, and as she brings a hand up to her face, she can feel an imprint of the pattern of Siuan’s robe on her cheek. She traces the floral patterns mindlessly.
She feels a wave of shameful satisfaction. Indiscrete, to be sure, unless they wish to, at best, put about that the Amyrlin had put a rogue Aes Sedai across her knee. The thought almost revives her blush. Not the marriage tattoos Siuan had promised, once upon a time, but Moiraine’s starved body relishes what it can have.
Her throat feels scratchy when she speaks again, as if after years of disuse. “I did not think we would have even this time.”
Siuan does not attempt to continue her previous plea. Much like his entrance into the world twenty years ago, Rand’s entrance into the room has marked an end to their time together. Instead, she strokes her fingers lightly across the imprint on Moiraine’s cheek. Moiraine’s eyes close, allowing herself a final moment of half-respite.
Eyes closed, Moiraine does not see Siuan’s own giving her a last anxious once over, or her lips wavering with emotion. She does not see the steely resolve harden her features.
She only hears Siuan’s voice, firm and confident as it ever had been: “Row on, my love. Today, I can steer for us both. It’s time I truly met Rand Al’Thor.”