Marks
A/N: Deviates from the timeline I have set out for Elaida. Very different.
They said I would be the best. I had it all. Power, ambition, strength of mind, even the foretelling...I could be great, one of the strongest in the Tower, if not the strongest. Amyrlin Seat, maybe.
I hated the training. I loathed every minute of it, sitting in a classroom of Novices who did not like me. They did not hate me either. I bore a faint indifference, which is, in the end, far worse than hatred.
My willpower kept me going. I would not let them see how they hurt me, how their indifference wounded me and drained the resolve out of me. How I came close to tears every morning when I heard the bell toll for classes.
I had one friend, Meidani. Well. Not a friend exactly. Someone who half-liked me, who was not completely indifferent, who thought me worthy of being known.
I kissed her first. She giggled and kissed me back, but pushed me off when I reached out to cup her breast in my hands. No, she whispered, face flushed, no, she did not want that. I stared at her, rejected and embarrassed.
I broke off my friendship with her when I was raised to the Accepted. I spun her a story about 'not wanting to show favouritism' and she believed it – and has believed it for thirty years hence.
Thirty years and I have been friendless. I enjoyed the Accepted's training – more than the Novice's, at least. I did not have to talk to anyone but my teachers and I enjoyed being alone – or so I told myself. I had no need for companionship.
I wasn't very good with numbers. It was the one thing that held me back from achieving the Shawl. Merean warned me that I would have to improve if I wanted to become Aes Sedai.
I was satisfactory, Hellina Sedai told me, but satisfactory wasn't good enough for her. Apparently, all her students had walked away mathematicians. She would not give Merean the go ahead unless I met her expectations.
I slept with her to gain the Shawl. She wasn't pretty or subtle, but I didn't care. She stoked my hair and called me 'sweetheart' after it was done.
She had not, I think, expected me to threaten to tell Merean she had raped me if she did not agree to me being tested immediately.
She was indignant.
'She'd never believe you...you're only an Accepted. I've sworn an oath,"
'And when Merean asks have you slept with the girl, what will you say?' I countered sweetly.
That left her spluttering, pulling the blankets up to her chin.
Nevertheless, the plan worked. Hellina grudgingly deemed me worthy and I passed easily, as I knew I would. It was hardly a challenge.
Hellina never did speak to me again.
Aes Sedai life was not as I expected.
I would never, I realised, amount to what I had been promised. The Aes Sedai where as corrupt as individuals as any I had met.
They had their pyramids of power, their popular and unpopular, and their unspoken rules.
It is strange how lonely you can feel in a tower full of people – in the most crowded of all the Ajahs, the Red.
Surely, I was not lonely. I was never lonely.
I enjoyed my own company, enjoyed my own administrations on my body. Hellina had been an experience...not a pleasant one, at that.
It was late on Winter's Night when I fell into someone else's bed – when I was finally forced to accept that I was lonely.
Galina Casban was head of the Red Ajah – and still is. She came to me room and told me she was worried about me – it was her job to take care of all Red Sisters and she did not like seeing 'her children' unhappy.
So she gave me my Winter's Night gift. She was tender, I remember. She was even there when I woke up the next morning, caressing my cheek in much the same fashion as Hellina had.
Galina's gift made me think. I still had that potential.
I thought the best way was to attach myself to Morgase Trakand. I could influence her – keep the world safe, fulfil my potential at last.
But I couldn't, as emphasised by my failure of not being able to persuade Morgase to take me back to Andor. Of having to suffer the humiliation of being unceremoniously dumped back at the Tower, me being the scapegoat for Siuan Sanche's failures.
Me! A scapegoat. Me, who was better than any of them. It obviously wasn't my fault. It simply was not what the Pattern had planned for me. I doubted Siuan Sanche's sanity.
The Tower was corrupt, I decided, corrupt at its core, where it should have been purest. The Amyrlin's office was rotten to the heart.
I would cleanse the Tower. I would get rid of the Sanche woman. And I did. Not by honourable means, but the ends justifies it, does it not?
I had at last made a mark. They where no longer indifferent. They know longer said they knew who I was 'kind of'. They knew who I was.
They may not have liked me. But hatred was indefinitely better than indifference.
The End