"El'Moiraine!" a woman calls, and Moiraine turns without thought. Myrelle, walking with her, also turns, eyebrows raised in an expression Moiraine is tempted to start calling habitual.
It is nothing time sensitive, just something the woman wouldn't have brought to Lan, and Nynaeve has locked herself in her stillroom with Edesina. Moiraine is tempted to go rescue the other Yellow sister, but she isn't sure Myrelle or Edesina need to know she has one of three keys to the room, and she isn't at all sure that Edesina deserves rescuing.
"You have a place here," Myrelle remarks when it's dealt with.
Moiraine does not dignify the comment with a response.
"You have one at the Tower too," Myrelle continues, hands folded carefully in front of her. Her warders are prowling here and there, but none are immediately visible – not that that means anything. Thom isn't visible either, and Moiraine can tell he's just inside the clerk's room two doors down. Just because Lan would have been at her shoulder in the old days is no reason to feel so suddenly vulnerable.
"Did you bring Natasia to replace me?" Moiraine asks. "Nynaeve will rattle her within a week, if not sooner."
"Nynaeve would rattle a ghost," Myrelle says, and Moiraine chooses not to point out that Nynaeve actually has rattled a ghost. "She doesn't like me, you know."
Moiraine does know. She has been treated to several discussions on the subject. She is rather selfishly relieved that Nynaeve has settled on disliking Myrelle instead of Moiraine herself.
"She respects you," Moiraine says instead of any of that. It's true, but Nynaeve respects several people whose faces she would rather never see again. Moiraine knows the feeling: she is trying to avoid going to one of them now. She wonders sometimes if Nynaeve would care about her at all, if she did not have some claim on Lan still.
But then, Myrelle might be said to have some claim on Lan. He isn't ever anything but polite with her, but he also avoids being in the room with her without Moiraine or Nynaeve present. Moiraine wants to know what it means: he isn't afraid, or Nynaeve would be hissing every which way – as, Moiraine admits, she would be, though she likes to think she would be more subtle about it – and he doesn't dislike Myrelle or he would be a great deal more polite and a great deal less in Myrelle's company, Moiraine and Nynaeve's presence or not.
Myrelle waves it off. "I had thought that maybe a familiar face would soothe them, but Nynaeve seems standoffish with Edesina and Bera and Jolene too."
"She doesn't like being pushed," Moiraine says, and meets Myrelle's eyes straight on for all the height difference. Myrelle knows her well enough, maybe, to read that: I don't like being pushed either.
Myrelle takes her leave, and Moiraine collects Thom on her way to Nynaeve's stillroom.
"She's going to wonder why they call you El'Moiraine," Thom says.
"I wonder why they call me El'Moiraine," Moiraine says, and it is just enough of the truth to weasel past the oaths. Barely. She only feels a little tightening of her throat, anyway, and that could be from Nynaeve's smile when Moiraine walks in and shoos a grateful Edesina out.
Later Lan escorts both of them in to dinner, the first truly formal one in the new palace, and she ignores Myrelle's knowing look.