Work Text:
I waited for you for months. You said, "Spring," and I kept the bed warm, held a candle. It's way past that now. Now try to find me in the dark.
Spring in space / Brenda Shaughnessy
Night insects chirred in the humid Tairen air, mingling with the rush of the river to form a soothing chorus that was as familiar to Siuan as the sound of her own voice. Inside a hut nestled deep in the reeds by the water’s edge, she stood before a small table—finally free of the stole for a few hours—and breathed deeply. She rolled her shoulders, feeling the weight of her office lift a bit for the first time since she’d risen from her bed that morning in the faint pre-dawn light of Tar Valon.
Her neck gave a satisfying crack as she tilted her head first in one direction, then the other. It had been an especially long day. Leane was an excellent Keeper, but she seemed to take any gaps in Siuan’s schedule personally, as though ten minutes of free time for the Amyrlin Seat reflected poorly on her own work ethic.
Siuan despised meetings, and today had been filled with them. Leane had nearly driven her mad in her effort to keep her on schedule. She’d appeared precisely at the end of each hour to move Siuan from one to the next regardless of whether she was finished, looming in the doorway with her staff until Siuan lost her patience and barked at her to stop hauling in the nets before she had a full catch.
Leane had been too long an Aes Sedai—and too long Siuan’s Keeper of the Chronicles—to react to Siuan’s temper, but no one enjoyed being shouted at, and she had shown her displeasure by retreating into curt formalities for the rest of the day. Siuan would have to smooth that over tomorrow.
Wincing at the memory of Leane’s stiff “My apologies, Mother,” she ran her finger around the rim of a tarnished brass cup on the table in front of her, feeling the familiar dent in one side. Her hand lingered on the dented cup for a moment before she lifted the undamaged one beside it and poured herself a measure of ale. She never drank from the dented cup. That cup was Moiraine’s. Easy enough to replace if she wanted, but she never had.
The scar it bore was old and tied to a memory. Not a particularly happy one, for either of them, but Siuan would no sooner erase its evidence than she would her own tattoos. Their time together was never enough, and every mark Moiraine made on this place that they shared was precious to her. Even those made in anger.
Siuan sat on the edge of the bed and peered down into the ale as she swirled it around, watching her distorted reflection dance and jump in the tiny ripples of thin, pale liquid. She scowled as it stretched out of shape and then swung back the other way, never still enough for her to get a good look at herself. Not that she particularly wanted to. The eyes of the entire Tower were on her all the time, giving her the constant feeling of a basket of fresh trout surrounded by fisherbirds. She had no desire to add one more pair, not even her own
With a snort of impatience at this brief moment of self pity, she took a sip of the ale and let it roll over her tongue. Moiraine hated the stuff, but she still drank it when she was here, enduring the sour flavor that reminded Siuan of home.
Her eyes landed on Moiraine’s cup again, standing alone now. The lamplight shining on its dented rim made it seem to stare back at her. Suddenly exhausted, Siuan drained the rest of her drink and flopped backwards onto the bed, balancing her empty cup on her stomach. Staring up at the rough bamboo lattice of the ceiling, she let her mind drift, and found herself thinking of the night that dent was made so many years ago. When Moiraine had come as close to her breaking point as Siuan had ever seen her. When they both had.
***
On that night, Siuan had stepped through the doorway into their hut already seething after an excruciating day in the Hall. The Sitters were a conniving, backchanneling lot, obsequious in their manner, though it was obvious they saw her as little more than a child to be led. They were as politely vicious a school of silverpike as she had ever seen, and never was the Hall more tiring than when they smelled blood in the water. Trying to accomplish anything in that atmosphere was like trying to catch minnows with her feet.
Although she was barely a year on the Seat, Siuan already found the position to be frustrating, restricting, and beyond isolating. She could not take meals with those who had been her friends before, lest it be seen as favoritism. Any conversation she had with another Aes Sedai—no matter how innocuous—caused a flurry of political rumors. She couldn't even smile at a novice. The last time she had, the girl had turned a frightening shade of green and curtsied so low that she tripped over the hem of her dress.
The loneliness was more than Siuan had prepared herself for, and she ached constantly for Moiraine. But when she finally arrived in their private retreat—later than she meant to—she found Moiraine agitated, picking at the neckline of her shift with one hand and clutching a drink in the other as she paced the confines of the small room.
Moiraine's dark hair hung in loose curls around her shoulders, framing a face pinched with worry, and all at once Siuan wanted nothing more than to tangle her hands in it. A sudden heat flashed through her body, ending with a pulsing heartbeat between her legs. She wanted to lose herself in Moiraine more than she wanted air. Moiraine was here, she was here. It had been so long.
But Moiraine was practically bursting with impatience, and greeted Siuan with little more than a perfunctory kiss before releasing a torrent of worries that Siuan had hoped for just a short time to lay aside.
“It is taking too long, Siuan, and with the names lost, I am searching blind. The boy will be eleven now, nearly twelve! I thought we’d have more time. If I cannot take him in hand before he begins to channel…” Her shadow leapt across the walls as she paced, echoing her sentiments in exaggerated movements, and Siuan had had to bite the inside of her lip to keep from interrupting.
Nothing was more important than finding the child, nothing. Not her trouble with the Hall, not how much she’d missed Moiraine, and certainly not her own comfort. She knew that. But Light, she would have given her father’s only fishing boat for Moiraine to stop talking and simply hold her for a little while.
Looking back now she could not remember what had started the argument, only that it was explosive. More than a year of pent up stress demanded release. That release could usually be found in their bed, but on this night the air had been charged with something different. Something sharper.
Moiraine’s anxiety was contagious and it made Siuan short and snappish, and before long they were both shouting, frayed nerves pushed to the limit. The weight of their secret felt heavier than ever, and with only the two of them to carry it, there was nowhere else for it all to go. Nowhere to aim but at each other.
And so they had screamed and fought, Siuan’s shouts thickly laced with curses and Moiraine’s crisp Cairhienin diction razor sharp and cutting.
“I have had one missive from you since you were last here, Moiraine. One! Burn me, how am I supposed to prepare the Tower for what’s coming if I don’t bloody know what you’re learning out there!” Siuan bit off each word like she was chewing a mouthful of gravel.
“There are Sitters who think I should never have been raised to the Seat in the first place. I’ve slipped the net only to swim right into a school of bloody silverpike, and they’re just waiting for me to put a foot wrong so they can string me up and gut me! They already think I’m too free with you because I came from the Blue, and you don’t make my position any bloody easier by coming and going as you please, gallivanting across the continent for years at a time—”
“Gallivanting? ” Moiraine cut her off in disbelief. “Do you think I have been enjoying myself all this time, Siuan? That this search is merely some extended holiday?” Her eyes grew bright with anger, snapping and sparking as she picked up speed.
“I have not written to you because it is not safe! I spend my life looking over my shoulder, one step ahead of the Shadow, ducking other Sisters lest any of them learn what we do and move against me. Or you! Always traveling, never more than a few days in the same place, sometimes weeks between a bed and a real bath—”
“And my life here is so easy? A bath! I am under the scrutiny of our Sisters every flaming day, and if they catch even a hint of what we are doing they will Still me, and then you, and have us both executed as traitors!” Siuan was shouting loud enough to be heard in the Borderlands now, her chest heaving with rage.
“And that does not take into account the bloody Black Ajah! You know they have women in the Tower, Moiraine, right under my nose as sure as salmon swim upstream, and I must root them out. But I haven’t a bleeding clue where to start! I am steering my boat between rocks on one side and rapids on the other, with a whirlpool waiting to open beneath me and pull me down at any moment. But perhaps you would like to change places? Since you seem to think the Seat is such a soft, comfortable place to rest your flaming arse— ”
“I have never thought that, and you know it!” Moiraine cried, gesturing wildly as though to ward off Siuan’s onslaught.
They’d continued on in that way for some time, raging back and forth in their fear and frustration, hurling poison-tipped barbs at each other, until finally an overwhelmed Moiraine turned and flung her empty cup at the wall. A terrible silence had followed then, both women shaken by how far they had gone but neither knowing what to say to mend it.
In the tense quiet, Moiraine retrieved the cup from where it had fallen—dented now, the soft metal no match for sturdy bamboo—and wiped it dry before carefully placing it back on the table with the others. Her movements were measured and precise though her hands shook, and her stooped shoulders told Siuan that she was ashamed at her display of the temper she had fought so hard to master.
Siuan felt no small measure of shame herself. Moiraine had given so much to their mission already; Siuan saw how it wore on her with each year that passed, eating her up little by little as layers of softness were planed away to reveal the hard angles underneath. A decade of fruitless searching had left a persistent tightness about Moiraine’s eyes, and while her smooth Aes Sedai countenance bore no lines as of yet, Siuan could see the ghosts of where they would begin to appear, years before their time. She closed her eyes as guilt sent a hot flush creeping up from her collar. She hadn’t meant to pick a fight.
Without speaking, she crossed the room and took Moiraine’s hand, threading their fingers together in a silent apology. It saddened her that Moiraine’s royal hands, once silky and smooth, were now rough and calloused from life on the road while her own skin had softened from years in the Tower. Time had worn away at them both, in so many ways. Changes that might have gone unnoticed day-to-day were painfully obvious when they saw each other so rarely.
“I should not have said—” Moiraine began, but Siuan shook her head and leaned in to press their foreheads together. She didn’t want to talk anymore, she only wanted to be as close to Moiraine as she could. To press herself against Moiraine’s lean form, and bury her face in her hair, and remember that she wasn’t alone. She wanted to feel safe.
Releasing her grip on Moiraine’s hand, Siuan reached behind herself and unfastened her dress until the heavy silk slid from her shoulders and pooled in a golden heap at her feet. Moiraine looked at her with eyes too large in her face and unbearably sad, then slowly pulled the hem of her shift up and over her head and let it slip from her fingers to mingle with Siuan’s dress on the floor.
“I’m afraid, Siuan,” she whispered, and Siuan’s heart broke at the strain in her voice, even as her own fear curdled like sour milk in her stomach. “The child will not be a child for much longer, and we are no closer to finding him than we were ten years ago. What if our efforts are not enough?”
Siuan took Moiraine’s hand again and raised it to her lips, brushing a soft kiss across her knuckles before leading her wordlessly to the bed. For a long while they lay silent and still, clinging to each other like drowning women.
The minutes passed slowly, and after a time the stillness became too much for Siuan to bear. The air suddenly felt thick and stale, the room seeming to shrink around her, and in the next instant she was seized by an inexplicable sense of dread. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, overwhelmed by the feeling that if she did not do something to prove she was alive—right now—she would die.
With shaking hands she pulled Moiraine closer, dragging a trail of hot breath from the crook of her neck up to her jaw, blindly seeking her mouth. When she found it she claimed it with her own, crushing her lips against Moiraine’s in something not quite a kiss, but a silent plea: Show me how frightened you are. Show me how heavy your burden, how painful your love. Share it with me, so I can help you bear it. Show it to me, so I know I am not alone.
Siuan pressed all of her need into Moiraine with the force of that not-kiss, and Moiraine responded; slowly at first and then in a rush, mouth hungry and hands pulling, grasping, needing Siuan just as badly.
The sex that followed was rough and urgent, both of them sad and frightened and terribly lonely. In previous encounters they’d taken their time, savoring every touch and making it last, but on this night their hands were between each other’s legs almost immediately. Neither of them wanted to draw it out.
Before long the room was filled with the harsh sounds of gasps and grunts, of plunging fingers and mouths clashing in fierce, biting kisses. They thrust together in mutual desperation, sweating and panting, each urging the other harder, faster, more. There was no teasing or tenderness, only the essential hunger to be as close to each other as possible. A frantic, driving need.
The tension mounted rapidly, spiraling tighter and tighter as they drove each other relentlessly toward oblivion, until finally Moiraine stiffened with a sharp cry, shuddering and clenching around Siuan’s hand. That was all it took for Siuan to follow, and with Moiraine still straining in the throes of release, she came in a hard, wrenching spasm, the force of it tearing a deep groan from the back of her throat that she buried in Moiraine’s neck.
Then it was over, the whole thing having brought them mostly exhaustion instead of relief. Afterwards Moiraine had cried in a way that she rarely did—low and despairing—and Siuan had let her, holding her close while her own tears fell silently onto Moiraine’s hair, until the tangled curls glittered like diamonds in the lamplight.
Since that night, each time she visited, Moiraine always chose the dented cup. Not in recrimination, but as an acknowledgement of something precious: here in this room, in each other, there was freedom. No Warder bond to manage, no Ajahs, no Amyrlin. No need to watch every step or mind every word. For a handful of nights every few years, they could truly lay themselves bare. For a little while, there was someone else to share the pain.
***
Siuan’s eyes fluttered open, once more taking in the ceiling of the hut. The single lamp she’d lit was nearly burned out—she had dozed off without meaning to. With a heavy sigh she shrugged off sleep and the thick pall of memory and forced herself to sit up, then stand. Her stomach fell at the thought of the mountain of reports that Leane had left on her desk for the morning. Well it’s nearly morning now, she thought wearily, and time and tide wait for no one.
Scooping up her cup from where it lay on the bed, Siuan wiped it clean then placed it back on the table, pausing briefly to trace the rim of its damaged neighbor again. She nearly always did that before she left. A private little ritual. It wasn’t the same as touching Moiraine, but it made her feel closer.
She came here often, and it comforted her to see evidence of Moiraine. Her own marks were commonplace—the rim of the cup she favored, burnished to a warm sheen where she habitually placed her lips; her soft slippers, the insoles worn down from her feet; and yards and yards of netting, slowly woven as she turned one problem or another over in her mind, her fingers knotting and unknotting and knotting again until it was solved.
But impressions of Moiraine were few, and Siuan treasured them all the more for their rarity regardless of how they were made. The dent in Moiraine’s cup from its furious impact against the wall was just as dear to her as the snag in her favorite blanket, left behind on an occasion when Moiraine had arched her back in pleasure for a second time—still breathing hard from the first—and caught her ring on a loose thread.
Those marks had materialized in single, blazing incidents that left Siuan dizzy and breathless, each one a jewel to her eyes. They were tangible evidence that this small space they had carved for themselves over the years was real, as close to a home as either of them were ever likely to have. And unlike Moiraine, when the night was over, they stayed.
With a last glance at the room behind her, Siuan straightened her shoulders, preparing them once again for the Amyrlin’s stole. Light spilled from her fingers as she formed the weave to open the doorway, growing brighter and brighter until it filled her vision.
Out of that brightness an opening formed, brilliant white and shining, and without hesitation the Amyrlin Seat walked forward into the light and was gone. In the hut where she had stood just a moment ago, there was only the faint smell of lamp oil, a pair of worn slippers, a pile of netting, and a polished brass cup to show that Siuan Sanche had ever been there at all.