They leave Thom in Tar Valon, ostensibly to monitor the goings on. At Moiraine's request, Aviendha sends a messenger to Malkier when they reach Rhuidean: Moiraine can only imagine what Lan will think when he feels her skip leagues east of where she is expected to be, and Nynaeve, when he tells her, will probably appear in Tar Valon in a spitting rage over Moiraine's presumed kidnapping. Moiraine wants to avoid that.
The messenger returns only minutes later with Nynaeve's instructions not to pass out again.
"As if it happens all the time," Moiraine mutters, and Aviendha pretends politely that she hears none of it.
Bair and Sorilea wait in the room Aviendha leads her to.
"I was not aware I still needed testing," Moiraine says dryly.
"A formality," Bair replies, and pours them all small cups of water. Moiraine accepts one and joins them in sitting cross-legged, arranging her skirts as neatly as she can with one hand.
"I wished to see you, when the Aes Sedai who visit tell me you are humbled," Sorilea says once they have all drunk. She smiles crookedly. "You do not appear humbled."
"Am I in need of humbling?"
Bair cackles. "You always were my favorite, Moiraine Damodred. After Egwene al'Vere."
All four of them take a moment to remember Egwene. I want to learn, Moiraine hears again, memories so strong she doesn't think she will ever shake them. Egwene will always be numbered among her successes, but she will be listed in Moiraine's failures too.
"Egwene was a great Aes Sedai and a better Amyrlin," Moiraine says. She knows it to be true, no matter how little she experienced it. "I would have served her gladly."
"You would have advised her gladly," Sorilea corrects.
Moiraine shrugs. "It is much the same thing, among Aes Sedai."
Aviendha nods. "I have brought Moiraine Sedai to walk the pillars. By custom, three Wise Ones must approve. I am the first."
"I accept Moiraine Sedai's right to walk the pillars, as one who has walked the rings," Bair replies. "I am the second."
"I am the third," Sorilea says. "I charge Moiraine Damodred Aes Sedai of Malkier to see as well as walk. I bid her put one foot forward and then the other, and I bid her to bear up under the weight."
Moiraine wonders if these are new words or old, and how much the Aiel have had to adapt their traditions, but she says only, "I take this charge and swear to do so."
The response is, apparently, acceptable. Aviendha opens a gateway there in the room. Moiraine thinks she recognizes the spot, but she isn't positive. The desert is not her prefered environment.
She realizes, as she had not before, that she is expected to walk to Rhuidean. Of course she is. She holds in her sigh, straightens her skirts (mourning for them preemptively), accepts the large flask of water Bair hands her and Sorilea's gentle touch to her forehead, and steps through.
Aiel, she thinks, sounding like Nynaeve in her own head, but then she starts forward. One foot, and then the other.
Moiraine does not cheat even a little. No one told her any rules, and therefore she is not barred from using saidar any more than she is barred from using any other tool. A quick bolt of fire sears a lizard that hisses at her, and she delves it to make sure it won't poison her if she eats it. It won't, so she cooks it just a little more before she creates and ties off a weave that lets little breezes run over her constantly.
The heat does not bother her as much as she remembers, which is a good thing, since even those tiny exertions are enough to leave her panting. It seems that she can maintain multiple weaves without her angreal. It also seems that it is unwise to do so.
She rests during the hottest part of the day in the hollow of a dune as Lan taught her to do last time, ignoring the sand her tiny breezes kick up, and when it is cool enough she stands. Sorilea laid the directions in her head with that touch, so she knows the way.
She puts one foot forward, and then the other.
It takes her five days to return to Rhuidean. Probably an Aiel could have done it faster, but Moiraine is not an Aiel. The pillars stand in front of her and she walks through them.
She is not an Aiel, to be broken and remade by the story of her ancestors, and though it is interesting on an academic level she already knows her forbears were not people she would choose to spend time with.
On the other side she sighs and drains the last of her water. Aviendha wanted her to look at something. What else is there?
Something flickers at the edge of her vision. She turns.
There, halfway through the walk of pillars, sits a fox. It's laughing at her. She fixes it with her best quelling stare and examines the area around it more closely: there, wrapped around a nearby pillar, is its snake companion. It flicks its tongue at her.
She supposes it won't hurt anything to go back through.
Moiraine steps back into the pillars, one foot and then the other.
She is El'Helane Mandragoran, last True Blade of Malkier, and she stands alone. The mosaics of her ancestors that line the walls stare down at her in judgment or maybe pity, and not least among them are Al'Lan and El'Nynaeve and El'Moiraine, who hold pride of place above the entry doors and over her head. Maybe those three could have found some way out of this, but they are centuries dead. Helane is at fourteen years old the last in a long line of kings, and she has only this.
The doors burst open, trollocs and myrddraal and channelers aplenty, along with all sorts of unnamed monstrosities left to languish in the blight. Helane bats aside the shields the channelers try to bring to bear - she is of the line of El'Moiraine, and shields mean nothing to her, not now.
Perhaps if El'Nynaeve's line had survived, Malkier would not be as it is - or, she supposes, was. Perhaps if El'Nynaeve's line had survived Malkier would be a nation of healers, a nation led by kings and queens who purified the land, who fed and seeded and grew, but Helane is of the line of El'Moiraine. Her talents lay elsewhere.
Helane calls her foxes and her snakes and her tiny, barely-there connection to somewhere else, and she wishes with all her might. Because Malkier is hers - because she is Malkier - her wish is answered.
Malkier - Malkier, who stood a thousand years before the blight before it fell, Malkier who rose again, Malkier who now stands alone - Malkier splits open, cracks rending the earth from border to border, from Moiraine's Wall to the Cairhein border, and fire rains down. Malkier burns, and the invading hosts burn with it.
Helane burns too.
Moiraine coughs, her throat full of ash and dirt and terror, but she puts one foot forward, and then the other.
He is Al'Tyr Mandragoran of the line of El'Moiraine, and he shakes his head at the dithering of his fellow rulers. They are fools if they think even Moiraine's Wall will keep shadowspawn from invading entirely. Malkier might hold longer than the other borderlands because of it, but it did not mean they will not fall eventually.
Then again, if Malkier falls Cairhein will be a borderland nation. It will serve them right, and probably all of Malkier's Shienar-blooded citizens will feel that even more strongly than Tyr, whose Andoran cousins are still bitter over Andor's loss of Cairhein and whose other cousins are dead in Cairhein's pursuit of influence.
He doesn't count the Cairhein cousins. Moiraine hadn't either, when she had mobilized her Aes Sedai to crush the threat to the Dragon's Peace that Cairhein represented.
"We can send no aid to Malkier," Setalia of Far Madding says finally, when all of the bickering is finished.
"You are making a grave mistake," Tyr tells her, daring to meet her eyes, His Andoran cousins tell him it makes him more convincing to women who aren't Malkieri.
"This body has decided."
Tyr grits his teeth and says, "When it is Cairhein that protects you from the blight, you will regret this."
Setalia raises an eyebrow at him. "If Malkier is so in need," she says, "perhaps they should ask the Tower. We know how the Aes Sedai care for you."
Moiraine chokes on bitterness and Tyr's fury and the pure disdain in Setalia's voice when she speaks of the Tower. That anyone can be so openly contemptuous of it, imply some sort of favoritism, makes her furious. That she is involved in it somehow… nausea curls in the pit of her stomach.
The worst is these Malkieri, these Mandragorans, helpless. Trapped. She doesn't want to see more.
But the only way out is through, so she puts on foot forward, and then the other.
She is Alwyn Mandragoran Aes Sedai, niece of Al'Rand Mandragoran of Malkier, and she cannot seem to stop stroking her shawl. It is a gift from the Amyrlin Seat, a show of favor to a granddaughter who followed her into the blue. How Moiraine knew Alwyn would choose blue, and known it certainly enough to have a shawl made, is a mystery. Her mother is a green.
"The better to defend Malkier," Emmeline says, but Moiraine always points out that she and Alwyn's other grandmother have always defended Malkier perfectly well, and they are a blue and a yellow.
Alwyn will be her cousin's Aes Sedai advisor, though, and she is a blue. They have known it will be this way since they were barely old enough to know what an Aes Sedai advisor was when Aes Sedai advisors were not also their grandmothers. Blue is the best option for that, Alwyn has always thought. She will defend Malkier as a blue, like her grandmother, who understands about the snakes and foxes and smiles when Alwyn shows off her ability to win the game.
Alwyn always wins Snakes and Foxes.
A breathless novice interrupts her thoughts and her absent fiddling when she opens the door without knocking.
"Apologies, Alwyn Sedai," the girl says, panting, "but the Amyrlin Seat calls for you. Immediately, she says. It's about Kana, she says? She says, run."
The novice drops a belated curtsey as Alwyn bolts past her and down the hall. When El'Moiraine ti Damodred Mandragoran Aes Sedai, the Amyrlin Seat, says to run, you do so.
She notices other sisters, Malkieri by their ki'sain, running through the halls trailed by their warders. Some of the Aes Sedai do not wear ki'sain at all, but they are invariably followed closely by a man in a hadori. None of them stop to converse.
When Alwyn skids to a stop in the Amyrlin's study, nearly running into Iseult Brangaine, she isn't the first to arrive, and she isn't the last, either. The warders wait outside, but the Aes Sedai are packed in like fishermen's pallets in Tear by the time the doors close. Alwyn worms her way nearer to the front.
Moiraine stands by the window, Aes Sedai calm wrapped around her like a cloak. She has no warder anymore, but she still looks strangely alone without her usual tail of armed men and women in traditional Malkieri dress around her.
Moiraine turns to look at them, the white stone in her kesiera catching a bit of light and sparkling like a tear.
"Malkier has been attacked," she says. "Al'Rand and his children are dead. The Dragon's Peace is broken."
Alwyn feels something gnawing at the edge of her mind, something slithering through her heart, as Moiraine continues, "I have a question for all of you, and then I have instructions."
The sisters all nod, though some do it slowly, distantly, as if they cannot quite believe what they are hearing.
"My question," Moiraine says. "Where do your first loyalties lay?"
Alwyn, on reflex, opens her mouth to say the Tower, and she is not the only one who chokes when the Oaths clamp ruthlessly down. She coughs, and swallows, and Moiraine smiles grimly at the now-silent room.
"Well?" she asks.
Alwyn says, "Malkier." She does not say it quietly, as some do, and she does not shout it as others do, but however they say it ever sister in the room answers the same way.
Moiraine nods. "Pack for battle. Greens will lead under me, and everyone but the yellows will take the front. Except Alwyn. She stays back."
The Aes Sedai curtsy, some barely, and rush out.
"I am to stay back from the front?" Alwyn asks.
"I cannot endanger the heir to the throne of Malkier more than I must," her grandmother says, turning back to the window. "Your mother is already on the wall. One of you needs to come out of this alive."
Alwyn swallows, thinking of her uncle, who would always swing her as high up as she asked, high, higher, and Kana, who had her grandmother Nynaeve's gift for Healing but no interest in the Tower and who had always healed injured animals and people indiscriminately.
"What are you planning, Grandmother?" she asks.
Moiraine sighs. It's deep enough that her shoulders heave, making the snakes embroidered across her shoulders and around her collar and down her arms seem almost to be moving. The foxes on her hem, large and red-orange and bright against the blue of her dress, look as if they are barely held in check. Her angreal shudders on her wrist, and Alwyn realizes that her grandmother is shaking.
"I am going to wish very hard, Alwyn," El'Moiraine of Malkier says. "And I am going to kill them all."
Moiraine puts one foot forward and then the other, and blinks at the three Wise Ones who stand before her.
