Insanity


The Aiel were here!

How did the Aiel get here?

Lenovire breathed hard, panted.

Trunks of trees in the grove stretched up away from the broken forest floor. Branches laced uncountable shadows together that flicked and frolicked under a gentle breeze. Old wood groaned softly. The pine scent stirred memories from the beginnings of life. Men in gray and brown cadin'sor with their shoufa pulled only to reveal their green eyes stole from hiding, their bull-hide bucklers and little bows at ready, their spears held with menace.

"Lenovire," the shadows of the trees reached and clasped. A nearby trunk breathed and a knot seemed to open to reveal teeth.

Lenovire did not know how he could fight the Aiel, stave off the ten Aes Sedai searching for him and keep the illness at bay all at the same time. He felt so exhausted. With saidin ice sloshing in his every vein, he wove Fire and Earth and attacked. He blasted the breathing tree into a cloud of flying debris and cut through two poised men with a single strike. The shards of exploded wood seemed to contain an unnatural number of thick, white eyeless maggots.

He ran. If the Aiel got to Ardri before he did, he would never forgive himself. Why weren't the Aes Sedai fighting them off? Aes Sedai cooperated against Aiel the last time, didn't they? Dumai's Wells had been so chaotic that he could not clearly remember anymore. He just remembered killing with the power over and over.

"Light-blinded fools!" He coughed raggedly. The epithet felt weak, but it gave him reason to keep moving.

"Don't be profane," It told him from the twisting shadows of a particularly thick tree. "You knew this would happen."

"I will get to Ardri first," Lenovire shouted with as much defiance as he could muster.

It chuckled, "Run as you will, how can you know that they don't have her already?"

Fire and Earth together wrenched apart the roots of the huge tree and sent the trunk tumbling down the hill with a profound crash, "I will cut you out! You will not have her!" Lenovire assured It. He sent another emergent Aiel to the grave in a bloody blast which blew fragments of brush and grass everywhere.

"You have not been here for so very long," It reminded him, chasing him through the dusty gloom, "You can't know if she still needs you."

"Blood and ashes, this is my Ardri you scum!" Lenovire bellowed at the forest as he continued to run. "She knows me! She is waiting!"

"How long has it been?"

Another Aiel died miserably when Lenovire spotted him and another tree hit the ground in the process.

Which way was the village again? The light was strange here and a nearby clearing did not look familiar to him. When they were children, he and Hoften built a lean-to fort in a clearing much like this one, but the trees all looked so different. Nothing seemed as it should be. The stony face of a short lip of hill yawned open with jagged teeth into something other than a cave. Lenovire struck at that too, yanking out the hole from the ground with a violent twist that landed uprooted trees everywhere. He killed another Aiel in the process, splattering the man with a fit of malice.

"They may have her already," the whisper standing behind his head reminded him.

Stumbling, Lenovire struggled to keep on. What time of the day was it? He could not remember the forest grove looking like this. He did not think the village was so far away, but he had not yet found it. He fought his way through, searching and killing, struggling to keep the illusions from becoming more dominant. He sometimes thought he heard laughter. Maybe the Aes Sedai were finally taking on the Aiel. No lightning had fallen for quite some while.

A lighter patch reached through the trees. Lenovire fought toward it, toward laughter he was certain he was hearing. The edge of the forest grove: it had to be! The village would be close, unless he somehow got himself turned around. He knew that tree there; it had been smaller once, but he remembered Lenala climbing it high enough as a girl to get stuck.

The forest had been pushed back around the village in a long ago effort to form a fire-break. Familiar cottages sat within the vale. The place he shared with Ardri for years, inherited from his father, stood over beyond the village green.

Aiel were in the streets. They were here already!

"NO!" Lenovire screamed, summoning more saidin, if that were possible.

As he emerged from the trees, the Aes Sedai met him.

She seemed young and somehow cruel, her face barely ageless, but haughty and practiced at turning up her nose. Lenovire felt the weave closing on his connection to saidin almost as soon as he saw the woman.

"...I have to stop you," Lenovire thought she said. Something in her voice stirred a memory in him, but he simply couldn't quite place it.

Were the Aiel laughing?

That this woman could still be after him with the Aiel pillaging the town at her back, taking their fifth, or whatever they called it, made him furious, "Why aren't you stopping them!" he shouted.

He wove Spirit and managed barely to protect himself from her Shield by threatening her connection to the power. Finding her link to saidar proved a clumsy challenge, but the mere threat got her attention. She released the Shield just quickly enough to protect herself. The feint lasted only an instant before she recovered and redoubled her efforts. She was not that strong, but neither was he. Lenovire growled fiercely and tried to push her back. He lashed blindly against her with threads of Spirit, parrying each thrust that seized at him while slashing back at her.

He needed past this foolish girl; the Aiel were wrecking his home!

"How can you ignore them?!" Lenovire shouted at her in panic, "They kill 'wetlanders' like us! How can you be so blind?!"

The woman's face hardened further, her determination showing. She parried another of his attacks, her invisible threads of power slipping through a momentary hole in Lenovire's defenses that he then struggled to fill.

"The Aiel will kill my wife!" Lenovire pleaded with her, attempting to make her understand. As weakened as the illness had left him, she would gain the upper hand soon.

Where he could not go behind the Aes Sedai, a big Aiel dragged a woman out of the cooper's house, proceeded to force her flat in the dirt of the street and slit her throat ear to ear with the glinting tip of his spear. Lady al'Masteen, her hair grayer than Lenovire recalled, died emitting a rasp that might have been a scream were her throat left to her.

"No!!" Lenovire cried out.

"Your wife..." It teased, then laughed, "What if that happens to your wife?"

Lenovire twisted away from another of the channeling woman's Spirit thrusts. On what breath he could summon, he shouted at the top of his lungs, "ARDRI, RUN ARDRI!" If there was any hope of giving her that split moment of warning, he would do it. He would cut out his own heart for that spare instant.

The Aes Sedai's eyes changed suddenly. Her look of stolid determination evaporated and her Spirit onslaught slackened.

Surprised by the abrupt fumble, Lenovire forced her powers away. He did not know exactly how to perform the Shield weave, so settled instead for upending her by tilting the ground at her feet and swallowing her up to her neck in a tide of Earth. He had no time to see if he had left her senseless, but instead ran past her toward the beleaguered village. He thought about clipping off the Aes Sedai's delicate and annoying head, but some impulse kept him from it. Maybe it was the same impulse that kept him from using his lethal Fire and Earth weave upon her.

The Aiel standing over Lady al'Masteen's body was not so lucky. Lenovire popped the man in half with hardly an effort and turned his eye on the next. Shoufa and soft shoes went opposite directions. The front of the nearby cottage came apart as if in echo.

"Don't do it!" someone cried desperately, "You don't know what you do!"

Lenovire attacked the next Aiel as forcibly as he did the first two. He hardly noticed the swaddled baby that hit the ground at his feet and spent a moment thinking just how odd that seemed.

"Don't do it, father!!" a shrill female voice behind him called.

The front doors of the cottages seemed to breathe and even the Aiel seemed to run away now. Where was Ardri? She had to be safe. She just had to be. Lenovire did not know what he would do if he came all this way just to find her gone, her throat slit by some black-veiled Aiel. The earth itself trembled with anticipation. Laughter still swirled around him, though he did not know who was laughing.

He ran.

Bands of shadow oozing along the street tripped him. The pathway seemed to curve left and right in frightening bends, trying to place houses in his way, but he used the power to clear his path. Earth and Fire together moved most walls as easily as breath.

He had to get to his family's cottage. It was just ahead. So close.

Two Aiel were at the door to the cottage, their veils in place and their weapons at ready.

"NO!!" Lenovire screamed, hoping to keep them from going in.

Both Aiel turned fractionally to see him coming.

"Lenovire?" the big, bulky man said.

Lenovire struck his head off with the Fire and Earth weave and imploded the front of the cottage in the same stroke. He just couldn't hold himself back any longer...

Screaming, the other Aiel fell backward drenched in blood and scrabbled away in the dust on hands and knees.

"NO!!!" someone was crying.

Turning toward the second Aiel, he tripped over something rolling free in the street. Were the shadows rising up again? Lenovire tried to bypass whatever it was, but ended up stumbling and falling.

The face of the man he had just felled looked at him in dead surprise from the loose head. He knew this man. How could that be? No shoufa wrapped around his head, this was...

It couldn't be...

It was Hoften.

He knew the matted hair, streaked gray and white with age and remembered when it had been a chestnut brown. He remembered the face as a child and knew the smile lines almost as well as his own. He remembered playing stones with this man, playing swords when sticks were still just as good. He remembered this man giving him a gift the day he married Ardri.

Lenovire was laughing.

How could this be? How could this be Hoften?

"You see," It said to him, It's voice sounding so softly in his ears. It seemed to stand all around him, "Just as easy as that, Lenovire." It patted him comfortingly on his back, It's talons scratching through his shirt. There was no missing It's dry amusement and indifference.

"I... I... killed... Hoften?" he did not understand. Tears blurred his eyes. How could this be true? How?

The front end of his family cottage lay in tangled ruin, by his own hand. What if Ardri had been caught in that? He caused it. He had finally stepped across the line...

Houses warped and shifted, trembling on their foundations. Runnels of cloud flicked across the sky. Shadows came oozing from every seam, through every doorway, teeth, claws, things with many feet that drooled blood and mucous. Lenovire sat down in the dust stupidly.

It was time. The moment of the day had come. He had tried so hard to make it before the inevitable, but now he knew that even Ardri was at risk if he went any further, if not already dead by his own hand. He could not bear to look at ruins of his life-long residence, but could not tear his eyes away. He dug the phial from his coat pocket. Intended for Ardri's hands, it had been his last preparation when he left the Black Tower. How many times had he stopped in exhaustion to sit on the roadside during his trip across Andor and stared into the tiny glass phial that contained his ultimate escape.

"Father!" The Aes Sedai had managed to unearth herself and came running up the street with her grungy dress hiked up.

Her Shield weave slipped into place and the icebound ecstasy of saidin winked out. Not that Lenovire cared any more. The world reeled around and he ended up lying on his back, vomiting hard through his mouth and nose. The illness overwhelmed him.

"By the creator and all that is Light, what have they done to you father?" The Aes Sedai was there, cradling him and lifting his head. She still sounded haughty, but more tired and sad.

Strange how the Aes Sedai now wore Lenala's face...

How could this be? The world pivoted in a reverberating mess of shadow and light. Lenala's face, the face of a laughing child, baby-fat burned off into the form of a distinguished woman. It was a face close to ageless, but also that of his daughter somehow.

"Where are the other Aes Sedai...? The Aiel..." Lenovire mumbled in disbelief. "Why is It laughing at me?"

"There are no other Aes Sedai. There are no Aiel. Oh father..." Lenala said to him, rocking him and cleaning the vomit away from his mouth with her ruined dress. "Father, no one's laughing."

"Is that you, Lenovire?" another voice asked, shaken and rough with tears.

The blood soaked Aiel managed to crawl from where she had fallen. No shoufa around her head. No cadin'sor; only a farm wife's dress.

Ardri.

The name slipped out of his mouth without him realizing he had said it.

"Lenala, I don't understand what happened to Hoften. Why is there so much blood? Did Lenovire...?"

She looked as beautiful as the day they met. Her hair was still very black, despite the wrinkles on her face which had deepened and matured her without diminishing her. Her bright brown eyes remained as sharp. He fell in love with her all over again. He was speechless.

"The..." Lenala struggled for words, "...the Taint killed Hoften, mother. Father didn't know what he was doing."

"I killed him," Lenovire volunteered stupidly.

"No father," the Aes Sedai said in exaggerated gentleness.

"I- I don't understand," Ardri said, struggling not to break down into stunned tears. "I don't know what happened. It happened so quickly. I don't understand," She fingered Lenovire's poorly kept black jacket, "Is he really... one of... them?"

The shadows, the teeth and molesting touches pushed back away from Ardri's face. It yielded faintly and the laughter stopped for a moment. Lenovire breathed in and summoned his remaining strength. Without saidin to brace him, the illness had robbed him of everything.

He raised his hand. She seemed to glow. He remembered the world of her. He remembered her shape with his every breath and dreamt of it. Her scent flooded his inhalation. The sorrow in her warm eyes was unmistakable. He stretched out, reaching toward the image he pursued the length of Andor. Her skin felt so smooth to the backs of his calloused fingers. Her tears were wet on his knuckles. Her careworn hands danced up to clasp his fingers.

Lenovire lifted the glass phial and gently slipped it into her grasp, "Ardri, I'm sorry. I have to go now."

"I don't understand," she said again, crying. She understood. He knew she understood. They had been together an eternity and made this darling daughter of his; he knew she understood.

He drew her down for that final kiss. Her lips seemed as soft as they ever had, from their wedding day and night. From every day since, every fierce kiss, remembered itself in the touch of that instant. Every night and every morning. Every moment of pleasure or quiet contemplation.

The laughter had finally stopped. It became silent.

"I love you Lenala. I love you Ardri."


Continued in Chapter 4