Coming to a Resolution

[Natalie Grey]

  

Mishael & Nythadri

Caemlyn, Vanditera Estate

She hadn’t thought this was what freedom would feel like.

Certainly, returning here would never have been a choice made freely. The small garden looked much as she remembered it. Memory slid from the frozen shield of her expression. She did not want to slip into reminiscence.

But it was impossible not to wonder, even for a scant moment, how much might have happened differently if Tashir had not died.

“Aes Sedai.”

She turned at the familiar voice. By the look on her father’s face, recovered quickly into stillness, he had not been warned who waited. Petty to feel some satisfaction. He’d petitioned an Accepted, and would have been expecting the return of a letter. Or perhaps silence, as was her more usual proclivity when it came to familial correspondence. He’d intimated a favour was owed, one she’d been prepared to let languish a while before she decided how to deal with it. Circumstance conspired, though. Perhaps it was ultimately better to make the cut clean and simple.

“Foolish to attempt leverage on a ward of the Tower, even when that woman is your daughter,” she said.

“Foolish not to lean on every asset,” he replied eventually. His pale eyes did not waver from hers, even as she felt like flinching from the insult. He had been likewise curt in Tar Valon, but not quite so unfeeling. Their relationship had never recovered from the ways she had abused it in her youth, yet he had never truly understood the wild daughter he raised. Now it seemed he saw no daughter at all. The ring felt heavy on her finger, a reminder that it was exactly as it should be, but it did not disguise the sting. His hands clasped behind his back. “I presume you are still not going to tell me exactly what happened.”

“I think you know enough,” she said simply. “I would prefer you knew less.” She had sent Tash’s pendant to Caemlyn before knowing from where – and whom – it had come in the first place, desperate to be relieved of the sharp memories before they had the chance to puncture her heart anew. Unbeknownst to her, at the same time the Vanditeras had also been in receipt of a sizable donation to their coffers – twenty thousand gold crowns worth, to be precise. Taken in stride with Winther’s arrest, accusations landed against the Black Tower, and Nythadri’s unqualified decision to remove the coin from the Kojima’s keeping, and Mishael had plenty of fodder for burning his fingers on too much of the truth.

He made a noise of resigned irritation, but did not pause. “Very well. Then I shall press right to the point. You will release the funds to me now, Nythadri. It is needed for your sister’s future. You would not deny her that, surely.”

“You know I would not. Just as you know why the coin is held in my name. What has changed?” Light, he made her sound like a gatekeeper. In belligerence she warmed to the part, a little venom in her tone before she thought better of it. Until the scandal died down had always been the only parameter to her rule; a protection, not a denial to what Mishael clearly felt he was owed. If he’d asked plain in his letter she would have capitulated. She offered refuge, not control. Why must he cast her as an enemy? She tamped down the injured flare of her temper, wondering if this had actually been an even poorer idea than allowing herself to be manhandled through Talin’s gate. But she needed the alibi.

“A dowry, of course,” he answered. “A betrothal has been agreed between Oshara and Pathor Winther.”

If he expected a reaction – a visible one, at least – he would be disappointed. She watched him without expression, quiet in her scrutiny. It was not the first time he had attempted such sutures to the wound of their House’s fortunes. The politics now did not interest her, beyond ensuring Jai’s interference did not cascade unwanted consequences. She was not surprised Mishael worked so quickly in order to position himself strongly.

But Winther? Light.

She could see the neatness of it of course. Matias Winther would share in the spoils of Ellis’s fortune, and make an ally of a loose and potentially dangerous thread in the process. No one would question the Vanditera’s return to grandeur if it were tied to a marriage. Undoubtedly Mishael leveraged advantage for himself in the arrangement. She understood that he would have inferred he knew more than he did of the mystery surrounding Winther’s arrest and subsequent pardon by the Crown. A little weight pressured in the right place, a gentle reminder that his own blood trained amongst the Tower’s women. Light what a dangerous farce – and her father did not even know how dangerous. It was like peering into the hazy reflection of a mirror; she knew well the game he played, and how he played it. Yet from the outside in it made her feel cold to the stomach. Did he know how Zakar Kojima moved the strings? Did he truly realise how much he could lose? It was not like she could ask bluntly. If this delicate house of cards tumbled down, she would tumble down with it.

She blinked away. The calculation took but a moment, and she already knew it was not a battle she could spare the time to fight. Mishael Vanditera would not understand her recalcitrance without her needing to explain too much, and light knew Oshara was as stubborn as her blood. Nythadri recalled her cool glare over the notary’s desk in Tar Valon, an insult she did not understand inflicting at the time. If she was actually willing to the match, something so untenable as a sister’s forbidding of it would only inspire her to incendiary stupidity. Nythadri knew, because she would have done the same thing. Had done the same thing, for all that it had burned her.

In the moment she turned away she realised that maybe it was not truly that which bothered her though. She had given up her family the moment she donned white. Before that, truthfully, when her father had forced her to attend Elayne’s gala before it was too late. That had been the final cut to absolve any remnant of familial duty. Training severed what was little was left of the tie, supposedly at least, and the ring and shawl replaced it. Nythadri had turned her back on them once, and despite Jai’s interference frothing up all this banished pain, she could do it again. She was not here seeking closure, and yet confronted now she realised that it might really be her last chance. Coldness, apathy and distance she wielded with ease, but actually letting go? Light she’d never been good at it. Ignorance was an easy armour, but it did little good for wounds already left to fester.

She urged herself not to look back on the past, but it fell on deaf senses.

The ruin of their finances back then had been serious; serious enough that Mishael had tried to arrange a match with the youngest son of his largest debtor: that being the House Winther, and the very same son Mishael spoke of now. Nythadri’s refusal – albeit for reasons she had considered justified at the time – sped the path to unforeseen tragedy, and after Tashir’s death the relation between the Houses inevitably soured. In the end Mishael was forced to call off the murder inquiry, and it was ruled an accidental killing. So it remained until a chance confession on a Domani beach years later, and after a matter of hours the whole bloody thing unravelled.

She ought to let it rest, finally.

She ought to.

“They took a son from you, will you so readily give them a daughter?”

Mishael’s lips thinned, mistaking her hurt for refusal once more. She saw it in the tight flex of his jaw, and regretted speaking almost immediately. Light this was foolish, even by her standards. Viciousness would soothe nothing in her soul. There was no remedy to be found here. Her arms folded, and she would no longer meet his eye.

“Oshara is amenable to the match. As you should have been, back then.”

It cut as deeply as she imagined it was meant to. As she had known it would, the moment she crossed the threshold from Aes Sedai to daughter.

It had always been her fault.

She’d picked the selfish folly of a heart over duty to House and lineage, and her brother had paid the forfeit when the toll came unexpectedly due. Had she accepted the suit the first time it had been offered, like the good and pliable eldest daughter she should have been, the debt would have been paid, the ledgers balanced (until the next time at least), and none of the rest would have transpired: Tashir would have been alive.

Her eyes burned, and the voracity of it surprised her. Such an old ghost: one lived twice in fact, when she’d proven her loyalty to the Tower by leaving him to die again in another world. Though since earning the Ring her reasons had burned to ash in her hands, and maybe that touched guilt upon her now. The Farm had tempered how she might have otherwise dealt with her broken heart, but it did not absolve her from the understanding of how everything had in the end been so meaningless.

“You’ve mellowed. I don’t remember amenability being important back then.”

“Time was a delicate issue, as I recall.”

Surprised pain flared; for the low blow of the words, or for the cold way he spoke them, she was unsure. Maybe both. She glanced at him, expression stripped bare. He’d never spoken it so plainly, not even in private, and she had not anticipated he’d ever ruminate so openly on her disgrace – least of all when she faced him not as a woman at all. In a moment the cut of her eyes turned glacial, and the unexpected wound was retrieved safely from sight. After Karina Sedai had solved that delicate issue with the Tower’s claim, absolving him of the thorny problem entirely, her father had never enquired as far as she knew. The letters burned in her hearth had been few, and they had stopped long before he could have known how things turned out.

In the Arches that child had been born.

Nythadri shut down.

The coin, the engagement; it would all sanction her time here. But she was ready to leave.

“You were a savage daughter, Nythadri,” he said. If her father reacted to the brief glimpse of her pain at all, it was only to strip bare the veil from his own. It was an angry demon that snarled back. “Can you fathom what it is like, to head an ailing house, to work so hard and yet to be thwarted at every turn. It would have been a small sacrifice. You took the son from me.”

“If this alliance fails; if it is ever exposed for what it truly is, I will not be able to protect you,” she said, tone inflectionless. The words no longer stung; she did not let them. The truth flayed, but there was precious little left to share of the torment. The blood between them burned; there was nothing left to salvage. She imagined he would accept the words in threat, though it was not the way she meant them. But if all he saw when he looked at her was loss, she supposed it did not matter.

Of the ways she was inevitably tangled there was little point elucidating, for if Zakar’s fraud came to light, it would undoubtedly drag her down too. As far as she knew her name was still on his list; the trail of money was in her name; her family benefited exponentially. On paper the complicity was damning. But in Zakar’s eyes the betrayal would require an exacting recompense – even if she somehow managed to silver-tongued her way out of the worst of it, he would not allow himself to fall alone. The most she might be able to do would be to shove Jai from the line of fire. His own brother already readily believed her the cruel seductress. Light even Lythia believed her to have instigated. It was a part she could play, if she had to.

Assuming any of this even mattered. Given her actual reasons for being in Caemlyn, the contemplation of future sins rather paled in comparison.

“My silence is the last favour I can give you.” She sounded inhuman, even to her own ears, as she walked past him. Best he knew he could not rely on her for protection. Not any longer. As to her reasons, she imagined he would choose what suited him. Nythadri resolved not to care, but it was a poor lie.

His own expression tidied neatly away, like the vitriol had never been spewed. Calculation returned to his pale eyes. He nodded, half inclined his head.

“I presume you will not be expecting an invitation to the wedding, Aes Sedai.”

*

It was with relief Nythadri returned to the bustle of the inner city. The dwell of emotion was frozen somewhere deep; somewhere even Eleanore could not be aware of. She did not have time for the ways she made herself bleed. The ring twisted on her finger.

She checked the height of the sun. Most of the morning had already passed.

Three days, she had promised. And she was not yet finished in the city.