Room 99, Frozen Prior to Ch. 30

[we_bring_hell]

The room is spartan; sufficient to her needs. There is a single painting on the wall, painstakingly straight. It seems to be a mounted jigsaw puzzle of a tower at sunset. There is the faintest smell; some kind of organic ash, mixed with the oil of a mechanism. It's not unpleasant.

Her robe has somehow transitioned to the closet, and there's a skeleton on a stand in the corner; she recognizes the ribs. It grins at her familiarly. In the closet there are rows of long-sleeved shirts much like her usual habit, and some other shirts she frowns at. In a drawer there are trousers and spare niqabs and gloves and socks. Her journal is here on the desk.

This is all burying the lede: perpendicular to the white, crisp bed is a second one. There is also a set of free weights in one corner for some reason.

On the table by the bed is a device she only vaguely recognizes the function of, but it seems to be active. She presses the universal glyph for play. After listening to the strange yet familiar apocalyptic hymn, she lets the songs keep playing, but only the second one holds her interest.

She finds another CD in the drawer and puts it in; the first words send prickles up her spine; it's about running away and checking into a spartan room to hide from loss.

Half the words she hears mean nothing to her, but the other half pierce her through.

I write down good reasons to freeze to death
In my spiral ring notebook
But in the long tresses of your hair
I am a babbling brook

She plays it all the way through, and then again, and then again, and then again, and then she listens to the seventh song until she knows it word-perfect, even the words that are gibberish to her.

---

A new Milliways day finds Harrowhark at a table in the bar, studying her notes, black trousers and shirt and niqab. The key to room 99 is on the table before her, and she sings tunelessly under her breath, when that day is coming who can say, who can say. In Canaan House, time is frozen.

Comments

[blue_ajah]

"You would not be the first."

Moiraine knows this room. The look Harrow gets as she opens the wards is sharply considering.

"I myself have used Milliways as a place of study and preparation, as it happens."

The Aes Sedai glides through the open wards, the open door, and into the middle of the room. Her gaze falls on the image of the tower in its field, and a faint, almost rueful smile curves her lips.

[we_bring_hell]

"Please sit." There are exactly two chairs; Harrow is not prepared for a dinner party.

She sets her journal down on the writing desk (it is massive, scrolltopped, and nothing like a raven). She smooths her gloved hands over her trousers.

Behind the veil, Harrow bites her lip. "It has not been long since I saw you, but the days were eventful," she begins. As an opener, she immediately regrets it.

[blue_ajah]

"You were greatly distressed when last we spoke," she says.

It is an understatement, to be sure, and she is certain that they both know it. It is also an invitation to explain, if Harrow wishes.

In case she does not, however, Moiraine offers an alternative by saying,

"And Gideon? Has she recovered as expected?"

[we_bring_hell]

She stares past Moiraine, at the untouched bed at the foot of her own. "In body. She..."

"I was childish," she says. "When we spoke last. I felt the weight of the secrets I bear as the heir of the Ninth House. I feel them more keenly now. If I was distressed when I was here last, Moiraine Sedai, in truth I have no word for how I feel now."

"I am," she swallows, "compromised. And I must not return until I know I can set at least some little right."

[blue_ajah]

"I see," she says, not unkindly.

"If there is aught that you would tell me, I would listen, and offer what advice I may."

[we_bring_hell]

She exhales. "I would rather not, in fact. But I am the Reverend Daughter. To whom can I give confession?"

She could consecrate her own makeup. She is the Reverend Daughter. But that ordination seems a hideous joke right now.

"I am meant to be smart. This is not," she swallows, "arrogance. I was born for a purpose, to be the adept and genius who would restore the Ninth. It is what I am for. It is the only excuse for... the crime of me."

She recounts the sins that lie between her and the object of her devotion:

"I have made grievous errors. People are dead because of my jealousy and stupidity. I have squandered Griddle's faith and her loyalty hangs by a thread. I have come to the grave of the universe to mourn and to hide from my mistakes."

[blue_ajah]

Moiraine listens in silence as she speaks, then considers her for a few moments afterward before she replies.

"It can be very, very difficult for the exceptionally talented when they make mistakes. Especially when the results are fatal."

A beat of silence.

"Perhaps you might consider that you have come here not to hide, but to learn."

[we_bring_hell]

"I would like to believe that," she says, with a humility that would drop Gideon Nav's jaw.

[blue_ajah]

"Then you can make it true," the Aes Sedai tells her.

[we_bring_hell]

"I thought at first I would stay only a day or two," she says. "To regain my equilibrium."

She reaches up to touch the veil. "If I am going to stay longer I should retrieve my paints," she adds ruefully.





This is gibberish. Time marking. Her lightless eyes meet Moiraine's. "The adept of the Fourth House and his cav were fourteen and had only just passed up joining the Cohort to come to Canaan House. The Fourth are famously reckless, at the front line of every battle."

"Yet Isaac Tettares was a thoughtful young man, for someone with an unfinished pre-frontal cortex. His cavalier idolized Gideon. After the Fifth died their only thought was of vengeance; they had abandoned the trials entirely."

"They wear navy and white. They are the Sword of the Emperor, and His Hope." Harrowhark Nonagesimus has presided at a lot of funerals, but never for anyone so young. Those were all over by the time she was decanted.

[blue_ajah]

She does not miss the shifting tenses in the way that Harrow refers to the Fourth's adept and cavalier.

People are dead, she had said.

"To be driven by vengeance can be dangerous," she murmurs. "Those who are can be reckless, among other things."

[we_bring_hell]

"They were not to blame," she says heavily. "They were with Gideon searching for Protosilaus the Seventh."

"I knew they would not find him, obviously. Yet I thought a confrontation with Septimus and perhaps Palamedes was imminent. I thought they would be safer elsewhere."

"They were not," she concludes, with a near-hysterical edge.

[blue_ajah]

"May they shelter in the palm of the Creator's hand," Moiraine murmurs.

"Lady Ninth. Am I to understand that you knowingly sent them on a false trail in order to have this confrontation?"

There is no overt accusation in her clear, calm tone - merely an inquiry.

[we_bring_hell]

She flinches anyway.

"Yes. I was responsible. Lady Septimus was ill, the Eighth had already robbed her, and the question was who would remain with her and who would search for her cavalier. But it was a false question. I knew what had happened to him. I had happened to him, and before that a sword."

[blue_ajah]

"You told me before that you had probed the magics surrounding him, and that he had collapsed. Given that you mention searching for him, I presume now that you somehow hid this collapse, and that insofar as others were concerned, he had disappeared," she summarizes.

"What was the reason for the confrontation?"

[we_bring_hell]

"I did not hide it," she says, aware she is doing a very bad job explaining this. "I left the body. Someone incinerated it, and the Fourth found the ashes."

"At first, everyone thought it was him, since he was the only missing person, but we are necromancers. The ashes were clearly of a corpse that had been dead for some time. Only I knew that that indeed did describe Protosilaus, and I... allowed confusion to reign."

"There were the ashes of a second body mixed with the first, and the identity of that one I still do not know," she says wearily.

"As for a confrontation--there was no explicit reason to expect one. It just seemed that... the situation was tipping over. It had reached the point of open violence over the keys. Palamedes suggested splitting us up, and I did not want Gideon to be left alone with that woman and the children."

"I thought if I reversed the arrangement... perhaps she would be thwarted, or at worst I might have to face Palamedes and Septimus together. I never dreamed..." She closes her eyes.

[blue_ajah]

Moiraine sighs.

"I see."

After a long, long moment, she says, very quietly,

"Finish it. Tell me the rest."

[we_bring_hell]

"It was a bone construct," she says. "Gri--Gideon described it, and it sounds horrific, but if it's a skeleton I can take it apart. It's what I do. But I don't know who is controlling it. Someone has to be."

"It killed Baron Tattares in the basement laboratory. Gideon dragged Sir Chatur away, and they took refuge in one of the studies. Gideon held the only key." She sounds... not mournful, or weary, now, but angry. Angry at mysteries.

"They rested for a moment. A moment." She shakes her head. "It could have killed Gideon. As easily as it killed the little girl, it could have--or perhaps it couldn't. Perhaps Gideon Nav really is that hard to kill. When she brought us the body she was incoherent. And Septimus never even woke up until then."

Her eyes are beginning to sting.

"I thought Gideon would blame me, but it's worse. She blames herself. She just hates me. She asked to be released to protect Lady Septimus until it comes for them. As if we're all already dead and we should just pick who we want to be beside when we go."

She presses her fingertips to the fine ridge of her brow, pressing as if it will put her brain back in. "I told her no. And I said a lot of hateful nonsense beside, because she hurt me and I wanted to hurt her. But she is still who I want beside me when it comes, and she obeys me. For now."

"I am meant to be smart. I thought I was smart, and fearless, and ruthless, and unsentimental. I want to be that person I thought I was. I don't want to die. I cost too much." She presses her hands in again, fingertips to her brow, heels of her hands to her cheekbones, and wills her tears away.

[blue_ajah]

She remembers Lan Gaidin telling her, You are the hardest woman I know. And her own response: I am as hard as I have to be.

"What would have happened, do you think, if the Fourth and Gideon had been the ones left behind with Dulcinea Septimus instead of you and Palamedes?"

[we_bring_hell]

"I don't know," she says. "I truly don't know anymore. Perhaps she would've attacked them as I feared. Or maybe she's just a dying woman who somehow did something impossible with a meat puppet and means us no harm."

"Everyone else seems to trust her. Even when the Eighth stole her keys, he did it in the guise of protecting her from being harassed over them."

It's not as if she even has anything to stand on in mistrusting her puppet--she's been dancing her parents around Drearburh for years. Dulcinea Septimus is just better at it--mysteriously, suspiciously better at it, but that's all.

[blue_ajah]

"If you had it to do over, what would you do differently?"

[we_bring_hell]

Instantly: "I would tell Gideon what I knew. What I was thinking and what I feared. If I had told her from the start about Protosilaus there would be no question of jealousy."

[blue_ajah]

"Then it would seem you have learned," Moiraine says.

"I have said before that there are few secrets between Warder and Aes Sedai. It may be best for you to adopt a similar approach with your cavalier."

Her tone is calm and steady, but not unkind.

"Declining to release her from her service was not poorly done. Speaking hatefully to her ... well, I suspect you are well aware now of the damage an uncontrolled temper can do. Maintaining composure under all circumstances is part of training in the White Tower for good reason."

Dark eyes hold hers.

"They might have died anyway, Lady Ninth. Sometimes there are no good choices, or only hard ones. As smart as you are, you are not proof against mistakes. No one is."

Including herself, although she does not say that.

[we_bring_hell]

She exhales shudderingly. For a long moment she can only sit and try to catch her breath; she feels like she just climbed to the pinnacle of Drearburh.

"I thank you," she says, and then tries again.

"I know that you have asked me not to speak of debt," she says. "But no one has ever--I have been alone with a great burden, Moiraine Sedai. I was born to protect the Locked Tomb, and not even my parents truly understood what we were protecting. And they have been dead for. A long time."

Another secret gone. "I have been very alone. And I know now I had a companion at hand, if I had but seen it. But you are not the only other orphan of a dying planet." She smiles tremulously behind her veil.

"You have no reason to help me. You have no stake in my world. And for that reason I can trust you to see clearly. The Ninth House has no friends in the Empire. I had to leave the Empire to find one."

[blue_ajah]

"I shall hope that you will find others, as well," Moiraine tells her, and this time her voice is kind.

"I may have no stake in your world, but I have reason enough. You are not alone."