#for the record Nicky used to be a Whitecloak and Quynh is trapped in the Ways

[sixth-light]

Is this what I’m meant to be writing? No. Does this actually cover what I wanted it to cover? No. Does it make thirteen-year-old me incredibly happy? Yes fine shut up

(cw for canon-typical violence/gore)

“Well, I’m not an Aes Sedai, no matter what those bloody Whitecloaks thought,” Nile said, rubbing her wrists, “but I’m guessing you must be.”

The woman who’d rescued her threw back her head and laughed, a short amused bark. “Not any more than you are. This way.”

Nile followed, because she didn’t have any interest in trying to persuade the Whitecloaks she couldn’t channel. What they were even doing here, on the edges of a stupid little border raid by stupid cattle-stealing Murandians into Andor, she didn’t know; certainly Queen Morgase didn’t have any fondness for Whitecloaks. But just as soon as she figured out where the rest of her troop was, she was leaving this woman behind her. She didn’t wear any badge of any House or country Nile knew, and there was something about her that was – old, even though her face wasn’t. That was why Nile was sure she had to be Aes Sedai. But she’d denied it, so she couldn’t be. Hadn’t she?

She tried another tack. “Then where is she?”

“Where’s who?”

“The Aes Sedai who brought me back,” Nile insisted. “That’s what happened, right? There’s one somewhere around here, and she Healed me, and the Whitecloaks saw –”

“Not even the Aes Sedai before the Breaking could raise the dead,” the woman said, striding confidently across the snowy winter landscape. “Trust me. I know.”

“Well, I wasn’t dead!”

“You were,” the woman said, then stopped. Nile almost ran into her, and had to side-step. “Oh, forget it. Let’s settle this now.”

Nile had been a soldier for nearly a decade now, and her instincts were good enough to know something was coming; it wasn’t what she thought, though, and the crack of the handle of the woman’s axe against her temple reverberated into her brain.

She came to on her back in the snow, something warm running down her cheek. She could feel parts of her head…moving. She reached up and snatched her hand away again, blinking the blood out of her eyes, choking in lungfuls of sharp winter air.

“I forget how long it takes, the first few times.” The woman was kneeling over her. “There we go. Your skull’s in one piece again.”

Nile sat up, dizzy and sick, and steeled herself to touch her temple again. Her hand came away bloody and with – she didn’t even want to think about what else – but the skin was whole.

“You are Aes Sedai!”

“Listen,” the woman said, the edges of her patience obviously fraying. “I am not Aes Sedai. I can’t channel the One Power. Neither can you. And neither can any of the men you’re about to meet, to get ahead of you losing your mind over that. All that happened is I killed you, and you got better.”

“Oh, that’s all. That’s all.” Nile pushed herself to her feet.

The woman shrugged. “That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s not the One Power. I don’t know what it is. I just know that it is, and that we have to stick together, because nobody else ever believes us. Book’s managed to get himself arrested by Red sisters four separate times, and they never can decide what to do with him once they work out he’s not channeling.”

Nile could see where she’d been lying in the snow, see the halo of blood and brain around the place the wound in her head that didn’t exist anymore had lain against it.

“If it’s not the One Power –” she began, hating the words she was about to say. She had no time for Whitecloaks either, whether or not they were trying to kidnap her as a witch, but she knew the powers that existed in the world; if this wasn’t the One Power, it had to be –

“It’s not the Dark One’s work either,” the woman said, impatient. “I can see you thinking. Trust me, once you’ve seen that, you’ll never mistake anything else for it.”

Nile swallowed everything she wanted to ask, and tried something else again. “Enough of all of that, for a second. What’s your name?”

The woman grinned. “Finally, a good question. My name is Andromache. Andy.”

“Andy.” It wasn’t a name Nile could place; it wasn’t an accent she could place, either. She’d grown up in Caemlyn, not the shining bit on the hill, but down in the streets where you could find men and women who hailed from Fal Dara to Illian; she knew accents. “I’m Nile. Since you didn’t ask.”

“I was getting around to it.”

“You just had to kill me first, huh?”

“It’s getting on for nightfall,” Andy said, putting her hands on her hips. “It’s cold, the Whitecloaks are probably looking for both of us, and I’d pick freezing to death over burning but I’d rather not do either – and we don’t have to, if we get a move on. So I thought I’d get the big questions over with first.”

“What are you?” Nile tried one last time, not really expecting an answer.

“We.” Andy started walking again. “It’s we. And I’ve been wondering that since before the Breaking, and never got an answer.”

Before the Breaking, Nile mouthed silently, which meant Andy was mad, surely. Mad as the men who’d broken the world.

But she touched her head again, the blood that was flaking and freezing over smooth skin, and knew that, more terrifyingly, she wasn’t.