The First Age

The touch at his waist pulled him near. The aroma of Nythadri’s soap and the cool touch of still-damp hair promised a reason to forget about Bandar Eban, Tar Valon, and the whole bloody continent between the two cities. Resolve kept him from curling his arms around her and tucking them in for the rest of his life, though. He found himself peering toward the north as if he could see the responsibility on the edge of the horizon. People needed help in Tar Valon, and for once, he might be able to lend actual aid. He hadn’t contemplated the notion of visiting home — people who did not need his help — but with Arikan’s resurrection, the plots of Forsaken, and the fall of the Tower, there was the sense of a calm before battle. One that Nythadri would sense wrap itself around his heart as sure as if the horizon was full of Shadowspawn and nothing else. He truly was calm, and perhaps the bond had something to do with it, but perhaps it was because of the rekindled sense of purpose.

“I don’t see a reason why we’d run into them,” he replied as he brought his focus back to her and they resumed their walk. Soon, they were back in the privacy of sleeping quarters, and the remnants of earlier stole a few moments of appreciation while he listened. The tousled blankets… darkfriends…. watery footprints… Elsae as a key, but to what?  Discarded robes… Eleanore, that’s right, Nythadri holds another bond.

“Well,” he breathed in resolve, “If she is with Eleanore and she’s somewhere safe, I say the world can spare us the chance to sleep.” He tugged her hand and did not release until she was nestled in his arms in bed. The last thing she would see was half a smile and a whispered promise to let her sleep.. at least a little.

Nythadri said no more of his family, though the consideration lingered. He felt calm inside, and she wanted to be the steady foundation upon which he could build his strength, but this was the sort of concern she felt conflicted about laying aside. Greater challenges loomed, though – and they were all ones that would not wait. If they stumbled across the Kojimas in the city, it would have to be something they negotiated at the time. She could not spare the thought, no more than she could spare it for the thorn of Oshara’s betrothal to Pathor Winther. At least she would be at Jai’s side for whatever happened.

In their room she reset the protections before letting some of the tension unravel her shoulders, but Jai must have felt her stillness inside – the solid, sharp kind that was the sort of thinking she did between a rock and a hard place. Even Elsae had eased from her thoughts, and really she ought to be considering what in the Light she was going to say to justify ushering an Accepted into such danger as a dreadlord’s attentions. But it was the Tower that cut her deepest: the shape of an accusation her thoughts had already raced towards, no matter how she refrained from naming it plain. The pain in her chest when she considered it spoke truer than any excuse her mind could conjure, for the pieces fit too neatly, even as it made her feel sick to consider. Maybe it was why her ring remained by the basin, and why she still did not retrieve it. Talin’s offer had not been forgotten, either. Because Lythia was the only woman in the Tower Nythadri had truly, unequivocally trusted.

She wouldn’t keep the concern from Jai, and certainly not when it would affect him too – though it would test him to realise from how close the betrayal might have actually come, and she would not soon forget her first witness of his madness. It made her fears difficult to balance. So she was thinking how to say it, realising as she did that she had no way of disguising the rawness of her own pain at the thought, not without shutting him out – something she had no desire or intention to do. And that was as much for her as for him. Could she just be wrong? She still held onto the possibility, yet compulsion left no room for deviation, and Jai had paused of his own volition to ask if she’d moved the money like she’d promised. Whoever set the instruction left room for it, when even his proclivity for counting was smothered.

She was headed towards the desk when his hand caught and tugged hers, loosening her from the mires of her own mind, where little else might have disturbed her for all her snide advice to Arikan about resting. Jai’s share of strength still gently suffused her, and she had no doubt she could spend the entire night in planning and worry, but he eroded the desire to carry that entire weight on her own shoulders. There was no golden sand underfoot, no showy gateway invitation to a moment’s respite, but he was ever the escape that called welcome to her soul. She felt it profoundly when she looked at him, like that second soft kiss in the cradle of the ocean. No more words were spoken, but he’d feel the soft yield of acknowledgement inside. Not that she didn’t test with a tease of resistance, rooting herself long enough to lift his hand between them. Her touch skated across the tender skin of his knuckles like an admonishment, but it was only a kiss she pressed there. A smirk flashed beneath pale eyes; the only comment she would give on his punching Arikan in the face. Then she finally acquiesced to the sense he spoke and didn't allow her shirk, settling into his arms, and allowing herself to rest.

He woke the next morning feeling fresh as rain. It was a bloody unsettling sensation, this lightness in his limbs, the quickness in his step, the sharp edge to his thoughts. Forget the bloody Tower Guard—he should have signed his name to the Warders’ training log the second he sprouted a bit of facial hair if this was what a bond meant.

While Nythadri slept, he poked through her supplies, appraising her food and provisions with idle curiosity. For a woman supposedly locked up in the Tower for most of her adult life, she’d prepared well enough. He shouldn’t have been surprised, really. She had a habit of being three steps ahead, even when he’d thought he was the one leading.

He cleaned his clothes and tended to his weapons, letting the familiar ritual ease his mind. Today, for once, it wasn’t a desperate attempt to scratch an itch under his skin; it was just… nice. Like the quiet before a storm.

Nythadri was a lighter sleeper than he’d expected. Though she appeared calm, he could feel the restlessness simmering beneath her composed exterior, a keen urgency to tackle their many errands. Somehow, though, in the fresh light of morning, those tasks didn’t seem quite so pressing. Perhaps that was the effect of a full night’s sleep—a rare enough occurrence for Jai that he almost didn’t recognize it.

They ate quickly and were ready to leave soon after. While Nythadri finished up her last arrangements, Jai found himself by a window, watching the workers moving about the courtyard below. He glanced idly over the scene until something caught his eye—Arikan, emerging from one of the side doors to speak with a man who, to all appearances, looked like an ordinary laborer.

Jai frowned, watching the interaction. Neither man seemed aware they were being observed, and he couldn’t make out what they were discussing, but it struck him as odd. What business did Arikan have with a common worker? And why so openly, here of all places?

“Nythadri,” he called, his gaze still on the courtyard. “Do you know who that is?” He nodded toward the man with Arikan. There was nothing especially remarkable about the scene—except that it was happening at all. She’d been here longer than he had, after all. Maybe she had some idea what this was about.

Nythadri let the routines of the morning wash over her, content to share them. It was the sort of cohesion she’d always imagined a bond ought to feel like, though she couldn’t say it was just that connection guiding them. It felt deeper, more familiar than it had any right to. There was distraction in her comfort, but she leaned into Jai’s sense of ordered calm; let it soothe the shimmer of her restlessness for the day to come and the choices to soon be made.

When he called, she went to his side to look out the window. He would feel no glimmer of recognition from her, just thoughtfulness framed by something sharper. That Arikan was already risen set a flicker of tight irritation into her jaw, though she could not quite say why, other than that it made her wonder if he had wilfully ignored the advice about resting. His companion wore the rough garb of a labourer, and he had the kind of face she imagined would have caught Elly’s eye, but the gaidar was not here to ask.

“Arikan arrived in the night, and he was apparently alone – Talin’s warder saw him,” she said. They’d only themselves arrived earlier the same evening, and Nythadri had seen barely any of the fort’s occupants before she’d Travelled to Caemlyn the next morning. Arikan had had an entire day left to his own devices, yet she could see no reason for him to bother charming any of the folk in such a backwater. Which only really meant one thing.

“He knows we can see him from here. Like as not he intends us to take note.” Her eyes upturned to watch Jai’s profile, allowing him the space to reach the same conclusions. The dreadlord did not even pretend to respect the Asha’man pin or Aes Sedai ring; he simply would not bother at all with anyone who did not have a use to him. “Arikan won’t walk the Light’s path to do what we need him to. And if he intends to chase the instructions on this plaque, they will need to believe he is still one of them.”

It was both a merciless goad and an invitation into confidence; to reveal the face of a darkfriend to them, knowing they had no choice other than to accept it. But it was useful to know who might still be loyal to the former general. She retreated, running her hand along Jai’s arm to urge him away, though it was only a light touch. Nythadri had drawn them both to this shadowed path, but she’d never force him to walk it with her. It wasn’t what she would have chosen for either of them, but neither would she turn away from it, for all it weighed her heart with consequence.

She was still inside, quiet for a moment as she perched on the edge of the bed and shifted her skirts to lace her boots. Talin’s taste was ostentatious at the best of times, but the clothes she had prepared were for the most part tolerable. Yesterday’s dress lay neatly abandoned – meticulously cleaned, but Nythadri had no desire to wear it again after the memory of Larnair’s soaking blood. Instead her blouse today was as pale as her eyes and pearlescent as moonlight, with floral embroidery on the tight cuffs and looser neckline. Skirts belted at the waist fell in dark blues and indigos. At least the colours were muted. And matched.

She considered inwardly for a moment, and did not like the feeling of paranoia buried within, but neither did she deny herself the security of a ward before she spoke next.

“Jai?” She said his name softly, mostly to ensure his attention did not still linger on their more than questionable allies, though her own did not rise from the knot of her laces – which she was pulling at with an almost vicious tightness. “There’s something he doesn’t yet know – and I do not intend to tell him.” This first confession was the easier to share, held back until now only because of last night’s strain. She did not prevaricate. “The Yellow, Talin. She has the oathrod. She offered to release me from the Three Oaths.”

She glanced up, wondering if he’d ask the obvious question – if she had accepted. If the dizzying possibility might suddenly cast suspicion on everything she had said since their reunion. He’d have every right for doubt, and she braced for the possibility as much as she was absorbing his reaction – internal and external. She had not done it, and so far as she knew neither yet had Talin. But it was a tool at their disposal, and one they might need in the future. Aes Sedai could not lie, and everyone knew it. Including Arikan. But she might need to, where they were headed. She wanted to glean what he thought. The prospect sat uncertainly in her, edging around a deeper sense of self-crisis. The serpent ring was not on her finger, still sitting instead by the water basin. The Tower was fractured, and Nythadri hid how deeply it wounded her, knowing Jai’s own injuries clawed far deeper after last night. But that wasn’t the uncertainty which paused her now.

She took a breath, felt the light-forsaken betrayal of its hitch. She’d abandoned the effort with her boots by now, and her hands came to rest on her lap. Her posture was nothing but the perfection of raised nobility, a shield in itself, and there was a knot in her chest. It was pain she tried her best to smother, but she was aware that even absence would speak volumes to him. “I do not think it’s wise for us to risk returning to the Tower. As far as I know I haven’t been implicated in the theft, but… well, I do not know what we would return to either. Elsae should be in the city, somewhere I trust she will be safe. We have no reason to go back. Except one.” Her brows narrowed, her jaw tense, but though she looked intense in that moment, it was despair that battered at the walls.

He spent most of those moments at the window, watching the exchange below, his brow creased in thought. Arikan was making a show of openness with his allies—too much of a show, in Nythadri’s mind. Was it a message? A warning? She was convinced it meant something.
But that assumed Arikan had the subtlety for it.

Jai shook his head, frustrated at the spiral of thoughts chasing themselves in his mind.

He knows we can see him. But does he know that we know he knows?

Light, what was the end of that kind of thinking? Where did it stop?

A shift in Nythadri's mood caught his eye—something in her irritation giving way to a deeper, more complex worry. That worry turned him from the window.

Jai braced himself. Something was coming.

When she spoke—about the Oath Rod, about Talin Sedai’s offer—he froze. Surprise flickered across his face, but only for a heartbeat. Then he was moving.

He crossed the room in three quick strides, took her hands in his, and met her eyes with an intensity that crossed the bond clearly.

“Light, Nythadri. Do it. Don’t wait another bloody minute.”

He felt her hesitation, sharp as a knife between them. But was it the oaths she feared releasing—or the return to Tar Valon?

“I’ll go with you,” he said softly. “Wherever. Even Tar Valon, if that’s what it takes.”

His voice hardened. “But you have to free yourself. We’ve allied with darkfriends. We’re talking about chasing the Forsaken. You need every advantage you can get. And if casting off the restraints-of the oaths gives you even an inch—then bloody do it.”

In three strides Jai had scooped the hands from her lap and held them firm, presumably disturbed by whatever he must have felt roiling inside of her. The intensity of his reaction surprised her, and the porcelain stillness of her expression softened almost immediately. He made it sound simple, and she knew he was thinking only about her survival – whatever cost it came at. Yet she wondered if he realised what it actually asked of her, to renounce the oaths. How final it made their chosen path. There would be no way back afterwards; they must succeed or die trying, and perhaps they would still face punishment come the end, even if they achieved the impossible. Maybe he did know what it could cost them, but more likely he didn’t care. She understood; it was the very same reason she had gone to Arikan for his help, knowing it would damn them, but also knowing there was no other way.

“I know,” she said evenly. “And I agree.”

In that there was a steadiness, and Nythadri met the intensity of his gaze without flinching. He would find no fight, no need to convince her. She was not sure whether it was what she truly wanted, but wants did not matter: it was what was necessary, and Nythadri would do what had to be done regardless of her own internal conflicts. Her thumbs traced where their hands joined, a solidarity words could never fully express. Her loyalties were with him. In a world crumbling to chaos, it was the only thing she was certain about.

“But I wouldn’t have, not without your agreement first. Not with something so serious as that. I want you to know that.”

She had always scorned promises, and it wasn’t quite the impossible vow of his anything, but neither could she have spoken it had it not been true. He saw the bond of a warder, a duty of protection; but she saw a partnership. In that, she would be indomitably stubborn, even if he chose to brush it off as an unimportant distinction. It was also why she would tell him everything, despite how closely she guarded such secrets. Far easier for her to share her soul than her truest fears though. Nythadri could discuss Black Ajah and Forsaken with clinical impunity, not because she was unafraid, but because it was impersonal. The things that truly stung, though; that pain she hoarded to herself.

“It’s not what I meant, though. About the reason I must return, and why it might be dangerous.”

It would undoubtedly have been easier had she not been aware he could feel everything she felt; all the terrible weaknesses inside that, despite herself, all her instincts were still desperate to hide. But there was nowhere to hide, and the longer she tried to find the right words the tighter the tension would coil in the silence, and the more Jai could misconstrue. He might not understand all of it – the intricacies of Ajah, how dire her suspicions were – but he would understand the cut of betrayal by someone deeply trusted.

The only outward discomfort she showed was the narrowing of her brows then, followed by the soft exhale of breath. It was the only thing she did to steel herself.

“When I found you in the Tower I asked you several questions you would not answer. In fact you told me bluntly that you couldn’t say. That included where in the light you were even going in such a hurry, so I told you I was coming with you. You paused to think about that, and then you asked me a question.

“It was about the money – whether I’d moved it like I promised.

“You weren't even counting steps, Jai. You were focused only on the task ahead. Yet the restrictions of the Compulsion not only allowed you to ask me that, it must have prompted you to consider my safety. What does that tell you?”

The words were calm, controlled. Clearly Nythadri thought she knew who they might lay blame upon. She was utterly still, her features like glass, but by the taut, devastated feeling inside, she was reluctant to voice it outright – was in fact quietly willing herself to be wrong, and light but she hated that he might discern that fragile hope for what it was. But she also wanted to know what Jai thought; if he saw patterns she missed in what he remembered, or explanations that would exonerate her suspicions and place them at another’s feet.

Because what she saw it pointed to was someone who knew too much, not about him, but about them.

The entire Ajah knew of her trip to Arad Doman, of course; it was a point of great amusement, how the wayward Accepted most had presumed would one day be claimed by the Blues unexpectedly had her head turned by a pretty face in an Asha’man’s uniform. Nythadri never defended against the teasing, and at least some of those women must have also known what she’d done to be punished with the Farm several years ago. But whatever Nythadri’s promiscuous reputation, so far as the Tower was concerned she and Jai had never seen each other again. She’d never spoken about him or asked for leave to study at the Black Tower during her Aspirancy, and when they finally gave her the shawl, she never went to Bandar Eban to lay a claim on him.

She supposed the Aes Sedai who oversaw the 100 weave test might know her feelings were more, depending on how much they really saw of a woman’s most personal demons while she was in there. But even that was only the tiniest fraction of the full picture. A hint of something improper, but nothing that could have armed the specificity of the compulsion.

Only one Sister knew both sides. Knew the insane lengths Jai had gone to to avenge her brother in Caemlyn. Knew that Nythadri had chosen her Ajah on the turn of a deal to protect that same man from his own stupidity.

It was too much to explain, or at least too much to share now in the rawness of grief. Shame burrowed alongside the pain, because Nythadri’s trust was a hard won treasure, and yet she’d trusted Lythia fully and implicitly. More than that, she had found faith and future in a woman she discovered herself both respecting and admiring. Nythadri's pledge might have been a purely practical one, but Lythia had been the one to make her believe in it. To let her feel, for the first time since she signed the book and donned the white, that there was actually a place in the Tower she could belong. That she wanted to belong. It didn’t seem possible that Lythia was Black, and yet every gut-felt intuition told her she was the only one who would have thought to give Jai such a directive.

“Do you remember who you saw, Jai? Who told you I was not in the Tower?” She asked the question soft, tired, almost wishing he’d be unable to tell her. It was a cruel and tender hope, and she knew it even as she clung to it. Whether or not he could name the Aes Sedai, Nythadri’s suspicions were too strong to be cast aside entirely. Lythia was Captain-General, and if there was any question as to her allegiances, she could not walk away from the responsibility. Yet neither could they risk tipping her off as to the doubt, not while it remained. That was the danger she spoke of.