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"He didn't think of burning them, that kind of gesture doesn't exist in reality, in reality we forget things, we lose them or we throw them away, we don't light a great fire with the fragments of our life."
Véronique Ovaldé, What I know about Vera Candida (translated by me)
"I don't understand poetry."
Cross-legged on the edge of his cot spread directly on the beaten earth, Lan looked up from the boot he had been oiling, toward the corner of the shelter Moiraine had picked to rest.
Against the dark logs of the cabin, his Aes Sedai sat wrapped in her shawl near the fire, notebook and quill in hands. With her gloved fingers and the tip of her nose barely peeking under the layers, she appeared deceptively small. The trembling flames lit strange reflections on her impassive face.
The bond seemed unusually thin, as if her emotions were held in suspension, barely moving. Despite Moiraine's nature, it wasn't deception on her part, but a difficulty to catch the proper feeling, a way to keep watch in silence, waiting for something to emerge.
He let her.
The subject of their last conversation had been thoroughly practical before Moiraine had teased him about the state of his boots. Not exactly a poetic matter.
Yet, poetry was a topic they touched on often during their travels. Neither had room in their bags for more than a couple of books, and Moiraine's copy of the Karatheon cycle weighed enough to make up for two volumes of Anasai's works, but they both indulged. The road stretched dark and long, ten years now, more often silent than it was dangerous. Tiredness was dull after a while, waking at dawn, falling to one's cot with the night, even for one as stubborn in their conception of duty as they were.
Poetry in contrast appeared an incredibly light and uncommitted matter, always surprising, and so very easily practised from the back of a horse.
His masters of arm had often been masters of words, keen on teaching him the names of the greatest warriors alongside the greatest poets from his dead nation. And now Moiraine and he would read out loud to fight boredom or anxiety on the road. Moiraine would draw the line at channeling to hold the volume before her, but she knew her authors.
Still, her confession must have come from somewhere.
Staring at the fire, Moiraine seemed to have completely forgotten about her words, yet the bond was far from quiet. It was roiling with something Lan knew by now not to disturb before she was ready.
The steady rubbing of the leather started again, as did his quiet watching.
When he was satisfied with his work, Lan swapped the cloth soaked in grease with the gentler one to remove the excess oil. For several minutes, only the brush of the fabric against his leather boots and the spluttering of the wood in the rudimentary chimney could be heard. Not even the call of a night bird or the wind in the high pine trees disturbed their silence.
Perhaps, she did require a little nudging.
"I enjoy poetry even as I fail to understand it." Lan mused out loud as he inspected the shine of his shoe in the dancing light. "The words used by Borderlander poets speak to me, but some of the images summoned by wordsmiths from, say, Mayene or Cairhien, are as mysterious to me as a foreign language. There is beauty in that silence where meaning has to fight its own emergence against the spirit."
Her quill hadn't started its rhythmic scratching on the paper.
Lan drew near the fire to get a better look at his work. Leaning, he placed a hand on the stone over the fire and let the warmth penetrate his bones. The Saldean had done a remarkable job for such an unassuming mountain shelter.
The cabin rested on the edge of the forest in the pass leading to a recluse village in the Banikhan mountains, where Lan and Moiraine hoped to find a boy born near Dragonmount. The people of Kayacun had assured them they would be safe and warm in the old building on their way, but the walls, if solid and well insulated, did not contain much in terms of amenities.
The sole stool inside did not look like it could withstand any weight, so Moiraine had elected to use it to hold her ink bottle and the small map she was referencing for her notes. This close to the sea the Borderlands air had a milder undercurrent that made sleeping under the stars more comfortable, but neither Moiraine nor Lan wanted to pass the opportunity for a warm room, even if it was bare.
"When I was a child, the analysis of rhymed compositions was mandatory teaching in Cairhien," Moiraine started in an even voice at last. "The use of a meter over another, the structure of a verse could tell much about the intent of the writer. Not a mere tool for romance or political intrigue, it was a grid for understanding the mind."
Lan hummed in approval before answering.
"In part. It is a form of expression in which everyone will read a different meaning."
The leather under his touch was much softer now that it had been before. Lan put aside the boots and started applying grease on the leather shoestrings put aside in his pocket.
"In the Borderlands," Lan continued with nostalgia. "Great warriors are often poets. Only poetry can faithfully render the awe and terror of the battle, the beauty and hope in the endless war against the Shadow. Such a martial art is as vital as knowing one's forms."
Glancing up at Moiraine, he caught her pensively tapping her quill against her notes. A well of uncertainty seemed to stagnate at the bottom of her mind, building to release something.
There were still stumbling blocks, particularly when one tried to force vulnerability out of the other, but after a decade together they were well acquainted with each other's reserve. Tonight, there was no emergency, no plan Moiraine had failed to disclose to him, no stranger he would have to trust for her sake: he had time to let her guards melt.
"It is the reason why your people write poetry, but it is the effect I cannot grasp."
Moiraine's voice had that low and far-away quality it often took when she was beyond weariness, but her mind would not allow her to rest before it got an answer.
"I understand the estranged lover writing her agony," she marveled. "Or the old scholar weeping for the world lost, or the youth raging at the cowardice of fate. But I never could grasp the expected outcome, consideration of objective beauty aside."
Some guards even poetry could not melt then.
Lan was looking for a clean cloth to wipe the grease from his hands when Moiraine gestured him to come close.
"Beauty is an end itself, but so is pure expression," Lan observed as Moiraine frowned at his hands. He opened them before Moiraine out of habit. "Have you ever seen a bird stifling its song? The expected outcome is communication, not of information but feelings."
"Like a bond," Moiraine concluded in his place.
With a flick of her wrist, she channeled his palms clean. The sensation of her channeling, intoxicating through the bond, combined with the coolness of the weave on his skin wasn't exactly unpleasant, but it felt as unsettling as the breathing of a large beast against his body.
"Like a bond," he confirmed in a whisper.
Her hands disappeared under her shawl again, notebook and quill clutched tightly. She locked eyes with him, a hint of amusement dancing on her chafed lips.
"For all to be caught into?"
Of course, she would tease him about that nosy gleewoman he scared to death on their way here. Oh, she knew her chants, but Lan didn't like her keenness to know theirs.
Shrugging, he walked back to his cot and started settling for the night. The comfort of a roof under their head and a heavy door between them and the dark could not be overestimated. Even if they would wake up with straw in their boots tomorrow. Perhaps, it was precisely that rarely awarded comfort that had encouraged Moiraine's candidness.
"People are lonely," Lan answered, appreciatively stretching his arms over his head. "It is a manner of breaching distance and borders, sometimes beyond death."
Light, poetry had been almost all he had left from certain traditions of his people. He would never hear the song of his ancestors, nor see their dances, but when he recited the words of their poets, he could imagine he sounded just like his father. When their pain swelled through their words, the strain of the exile, it had the shape of his own grief when he wrote about a city he had never known, a people he'd always fled.
The spirit of Malkier would remain pristine as long as it could escape the rotten claws of the Blight. Through tales, through songs, through poems.
A faint shuffle told Lan that Moiraine had not claimed her cot by his side and was still puttering around the makeshift table. The map had been put away, but Moiraine was now caressing the pages of her notebook with sharp focus.
Her feelings spun a touch erratically, wanting. That want hang familiar in Lan's mind.
"Everyone thinks their experience of loneliness is unique," she commented, eyes downcast. "It is not. I cannot see the point in sharing it."
The shadow from the ink bottle on the stool twisted in fantastical shapes above Moiraine's hunched form, half beast fighting itself, half crazed dancer caught in the last rites. The blue of her travelling clothes, the depth of her irises, had turned black in the penumbra, making her appear even more estranged.
They were lonely people.
This was what had drawn them toward each other when their path inextricably entwined in Chachin, although their pride would not let them confess to it. Later, he learnt this was also what had drawn Siuan and Moiraine together, but for a while, their experience of loneliness had been truly unique.
It didn't take many conversations with other Warders to gather that exchanging nothing but a few fragments from a lost poem over several days of travelling wasn't common among bonded individuals.
But then, Siuan sometimes reunited with Moiraine once a year and the letters sent were as economical in feelings as they were in information.
He envied her that bond with her lover when he first bore witness to the intensity of Moiraine's passion, but then the dull ache of longing lingered like a boulder in the pit of her stomach and he wondered if he would not drown in a river carrying that weight inside him.
Still, she would so very rarely talk about that love that consumed her every waking moment. She so very rarely showed it. The silence oath was entirely justified especially since Siuan's rise to the Seat, yet it made Moiraine's ironbound watch of herself and her affection terrifying.
That sense of service, of devotion to a person rather than a nation or an ideal was something foreign to him before Moiraine. Her longing, as suffocating as it was, became a discipline for the heart, teaching him every day new ways to care.
She would never let go of that weight, he knew.
Perhaps, there was a way to get her to share it at last.
"But you do see the benefits of the bond," Lan prompted and although he was innocently studying the beams and hatched roof above them, he could feel her eyes burning a hole in his head.
"I do read poetry, Lan. I continue to read to understand it." The beaten earth and straws under her feet were disturbed as a mass of warm air moved with her until she loomed over him. Now around her shoulders, her shawl had disrupted her carefully tied hair. "I can grasp the appeal, otherwise I would not lose my time with it."
Crossing his arms behind his head, Lan chuckled to himself before taunting her.
"Have you considered that you may be missing a piece by only studying the end result? Why not let your heart express itself?"
The bond had the temperature of a furnace for an instant, burning hot with a mixture of shame, anger and passion that belonged to one person only. If his Aes Sedai could write love poems, she would be the most fearsome warrior this side of the Spine of the World.
Lan wondered if Moiraine knew only Siuan could trigger such emotions in her. He doubted she showed the full strength of it to Siuan. She couldn't even disclose it to herself.
With a disapproving noise, she folded her shawl neatly to place the bundle over her coat and bags nearby and dropped to her pallet beside him to slip under the cover. Not a word escaped her lips for a few minutes, barely a breath. The bond was so still again, he wondered if she'd masked it.
She could be prickly like that.
"I don't have anything to say, let alone in meters and rhymes," she retorted suddenly in a clipped tone. It didn't feel reproachful, merely peeved. "I know you do write poetry, but you have things to say."
Things about longing, spring, death and horses, what he felt when he watched the sun rise over the mountains, what the last fruits of summer tasted like before winter, how swift life was, how cold the night was, the colours of her dreams, the void in his.
He knew she could feel all through the bond.
Lan simply hummed in answer.
"I'm out of ink anyway," Moiraine grumbled before pulling the cover over her head and facing away.
***
Siuan always burnt Moiraine's letters after reading them.
Not that she couldn't trust Moiraine's cyphers, but the sole act of keeping letters from a Sister was incriminating when all knew Siuan's memory would allow her to read a document once or twice and have its most important points engraved in her mind like the river carves the stone.
So when the first letter arrived a few months after their farewell in Chachin, Siuan took the habit of immediately committing to the flames Moiraine's words. Soon enough, it became apparent that Moiraine's progress would not justify keeping them anyway.
For all the sweetness Siuan remembered of the stiff little clerk who would work at her side in the Tower when they were Accepted, Moiraine as a traveller turned out to be arid in her reports. It brought intensity to their reunions that they both enjoyed, at first because it wasn't like anything they've experienced before together, then because it numbed the pain of their parting.
But in the long months she would wait for news from Moiraine, that reserve was like a hook in her mouth. Pulling and twisting her love until it became something alien to her. Unknown to the reverent caresses Moiraine would welcome her with, the sweet laughter she would entrust to her, the absolute way she would say her name.
But Moiraine would leave, the letters would come, and the hook would sting.
Sometimes, Siuan secretly hoped Moiraine forgot herself in her letters and let a word slip, a smudge form that might suggest how Moiraine was doing. If she was content, weary, frustrated, even bored. If she missed Siuan.
The moment Moiraine was in her arms, tucked against her heart, the vaporized ink and dangerous wishes mattered little. There was no room in the instant for such considerations.
But the unmentionable hope came back as Moiraine left the Tower to resume the hunt, and with it the fear of missing everything in her beloved life. With how public Siuan's schedule was, Moiraine knew all about Siuan's whereabouts, her comings and goings. She could ask a peddler and learn Siuan was in Caemlyn or Ebou Dar. Precise as the tide, Moiraine's letter knew exactly where and when to find her.
In return, Moiraine's reports barely told Siuan if she was alive.
And never if she was happy.
As Novices, then Accepted, not a day went by without seeing each other, working in the kitchen, teaching students. The hours not shared mattered little when they would lie in bed at night, so close Siuan didn't need to ask how Moiraine was doing. The rhythm of her breathing, the way she stared at the night, the weight of her palm on Siuan's stomach — their life, in letters only they could know, cyphers.
Ever since the prophecy, Siuan had that small, irrational fear that one day Moiraine would come back and neither of them would know how to read each other.
And Moiraine could be —was— elusive, eager, always more urgent during their brief meetings.
Siuan almost dropped the letter the first time she deciphered something that didn't read like Moiraine's usual meticulous report.
"The tragedy of my wandering is the relentless parting, leaving behind places and things that one might never see again. How could I miss fragments of the world that appear so very evident and permanent that to lament their passing would seem a folly? Yet I miss them the moment I leave them.
I miss the smell of mist and lightning when the sun is out and scorching the land.
I miss the golden bark shimmering so dark it looks purple in the failing daylight.
I miss the feel of limestone sand hiding pine needles, cold and smooth like nails.
I miss the sea appearing between the trees for the first time after a long journey in the forest.
I miss the brook racing by my side as I walk with Arrow, overtaking us, chasing our boredom.
Most of all, I miss the sound of rain on leaves, the weight of the water on the surface, a fall that feels like fate, as the path followed by each drop is always different, but will always find the tree."
Siuan could laugh.
It betrayed nothing — she hoped—, but the hook loosened in her mouth and the iron tasted warm, soothing.
Siuan didn't find it in herself to burn that particular letter, and the many like this that came afterwards. She locked everything in a box.