It was all dark, her days and nights delineated only by the subjective markers of bad and worse. It always hurt; only, some times it hurt more than at others. She could not make out clearly even now her rapid decent—or how far she'd truly fallen. She faintly recalled crying out for help, because the mia'cova bade her so. Calling out for help, because she could not stand it any longer. Screaming for help, and praying halfheartedly—with more fervor than she had ever prayed for anything in her life—that Lews Therin was still as canny as she gave him credit for, canny enough to step through the trap she laid under coercion and to spring one of his own. But it hardly mattered. She'd been playing both faces of the coin so long, now, she'd worn clean through.
Abruptly, everything became still. It was always dark, but at last it was quiet. Perhaps, she considered briefly, she had died at last despite it all. To the thought, she could conjure only mild disappointment, and damn the Creator and the Dark One both. It was quiet, and still, and she no longer burned. If that was the price of death, then so be it.
But no. Her darkness was interspersed with evanescent flares of light and sound, and she became aware of a heavy, dragging sort of pain. Exhaustion, she told herself. I'm exhausted. To feel pain meant that she was alive, somehow. In response to that realization, the confines of reality shrunk to the smartly defined boundaries of a body—her body. Well. If she was a prisoner in her own flesh only, it was freer than she'd ever hoped to be again, and her head was miraculously silent.
Something hard at her lips, and a substance spilled between, clean and cool and bitter. She choked and spluttered, forgetting how this was done. The foreign liquid withdrew, and her body raised a weak protest. It had soothed some nagging discomfiture, made it easier to breathe. Thirsty. she realized. She was thirsty.
She stopped resisting.
"Good; that's good." someone was praising her. "You keep that down, you can have some more."
She opened her eyes, and reality expanded exponentially, overwhelming her in its depth and complexity, and her eyes snapped shut again reflexively. But the dark was suddenly oppressive and frightening, and so she mustered up her courage for a second attempt.
"Come on, now." the gentle voice coaxed. "I saw you peeking, there. No good hiding any more[: we need you on your feet.]"
She faced her own existence with wide-open eyes and saw that it consisted of a small, dim space, a low flame casting flickering shadows. A strange woman leaned nearer, offering the dipper once more. She studied this oddity: dark hair pulled back in a knot, blue eyes painted in rings that told of care or fatigue or recent weeping. She struggled for a moment to puzzle out which before deciding that was beyond her. As she drank, her eyes focused on the woman's most incongruous feature, a thumbprint of blood hovering between her brows.
The dipper moved away, and she concentrated on remembering how to breathe in this body: she had the feeling that breathing was rather important. When the rhythm sustained itself well enough not to falter as soon as she stopped watching it, she relegated her remaining strength to form a word as the other woman had done.
"Why?" Her voice was beaten down to an ugly rasp: neither the low thrum of strings she expected still, nor the silver chime she so resented.
"Why?" her keeper echoed. "That idiot boy has taken it into his fool head that he needs you for something. It's more trouble than it's worth to begrudge him every trivial request, really."
"No." She brushed the woman's sarcasm aside She had not the time for playing games—there was so very little time at all. She fussed at her blankets. "Why are you doing this?" A feeble gesture encompassed the dark room, the bed, the small nurse herself. "You could keep me alive without being kind about it."
The other grew suddenly solemn. "Because, Mierin—" the name hit her like a blow. That was her name, wasn't it? "—I, too, know what it is to need someone more than breathing."
Care. It was care, she decided, that shadowed her eyes that way.
["It is the most wonderful thing," her captor-caretaker went on, sorrow pulling up the corner of her mouth oddly. "But it also hurts." She closed those eyes briefly. "Oh, Light, it can hurt." The one who had once been Mierin Eronaile felt the quaver in the woman's voice reverberate in her soul—she had a soul?—for what she said was unbearably true.
The seated woman peered into the eyes of her patient—she was not a prisoner, she was not! Lews Therin would not do that to her—and spoke aloud, but almost as if to herself. "You would do anything for that person, wouldn't you? Whatever it is they require. No matter how much it costs, or how badly it hurts. Not only because it is the right thing to do. But because you love them. Don't you see?" Ending her sermon with a smile, the odd little woman in her mismatched jewelry took the other's hands and closed her eyes.
That was a clumsy trick, Mierin knew, as prickling reams of light traced her veins, but forgave her. The people now were so backward, but this one spoke too much truth for one so young. Indeed she was, and more naive than the other fancied herself she'd ever been, even in the cradle. But she was far-seeing, and kind—she hadn't once threatened her powerless charge, and offered only mercy, however distasteful—even if she was so unformed as to have yet come into her full strength in the Power. As it was, gauging as the shock of loose-ended Weaves broke over her, the girl would stand toe-to-toe with the quailing Spider as it was. Shivering with the aftershocks and the rekindled associations that name brought with it, she put voice to a fleeting burst of recognition. "I know someone who wants you dead," she croaked amiably.
"Is that so?" the al'Meara girl sounded faintly amused. "And, I suppose, I could say the same of you." Rising, she receded past the threshold of sight, but her muffled voice carried through the gloom as she pottered among invisible objects. "But as for myself—" she reappeared abruptly, a steaming copper kettle in one hand, "I have no quarrel with you. [We can't be too picky where our allies come from, these days.] The Lord Dragon has decided that he requires your assistance. Far be it for me to argue. So long, mind you—" she held up a warning finger, "as you uphold your end of the bargain...whatever that turns out to be."
This impossible girl clearly had the upper hand: she could stand under her own power, she could move about, and clearly she could Channel. But even though her voice held firm, her words gave off the scent of entreaty. "You've helped him before. Do so again, and it doesn't matter to me what old blood there is on your hands." The kettle clanked against something large and hollow, and her nurse returned to meet her eyes purposefully, cutting off any avenues of escape. "That boy is a son to me; he's like my brother. He needs every bit of aid he can gather about him. If it works, I don't much care where it comes from." Peeling back the fusty quilts, the young woman easily levered up and supported the emaciated limbs in Mierin's vision, the sticks draped with skin that surely did not belong to her...
Close enough to bite, the woman turned and mentioned casually, "Turn on him, and you'll wish he'd left you behind. We really didn't have to come back for you, you know." More than half carrying her charge, the awkward pair moved away from the support of the bed. "But you won't." The assurance was effortless; she smiled as she said it, her eyes too knowing. "A distance you choose is the hardest to bear, I know, but if that's what he needs of you, you'll give it and be grateful he thinks enough of you to ask politely." With practiced care, the woman who called herself Aes Sedai lowered the Forsaken's tender body into the steaming water of the bath. "Now. You'll feel worlds better after you've bathed." she promised. Wrinkling her nose, she added, "I can't see you stand the reek."