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He never learned to read her without the bond.
Listen. Tomas’ unhelpful instructions ring in Lan’s ears. He doesn’t know how to listen when Moiraine is as hard as stone.
I am as hard as I must be. Words that feel like they come from another lifetime. When Moiraine seemed like a young innocent girl, when she proved to Lan that she was as strong as any warrior he’d ever known.
He’d carried her from the Tower of Ghenjei today. Her eyes had hardened since he saw her last, her face an unreadable mask.
“Dinner?” Lan offers. Moiraine doesn’t respond.
After the Eye of the World, Moiraine’s coldness had been an act, a method to push Lan away, to save him.
She isn’t pushing him away, has not once suggested he should leave as they travel together towards the Field of Merrilor. They ride late into the evening, though Lan suspects her body aches with it after months without practice.
Her face gives nothing away as she sits beside him staring at the fire. Lan tries to look, tries to meet her eyes, to see the truth of the woman he has loved since he was twenty-five years old.
He sees nothing, no emotions, no hint of the humanity he’s always been able to see behind the mask Moiraine wears.
He wonders if it is possible to come back wrong. He wonders if the Finn feasted on her soul as much as her power. Her eyes are hard as she stares through Lan. A chill runs through him. He wonders if a monster has inhabited her body, if Moiraine is still in that Tower and one of those creatures escaped in her place.
She looks through him. Emotionless. Empty.
He longs to take her hand, too afraid she will recoil.
“I know you said you weren’t hungry, but I made you something anyway.”
She looks like she’s going to be sick, stands from the fire and walks away from the plate of roasted rabbit.
Lan follows Moiraine, feels braver than he has the last two nights when he let her go, gave her space. That’s what he told himself, that she needed space, that he was simply doing what Moiraine needed.
In truth he’d been too afraid to look and see that she’s gone. He still wonders if the Finn took her sanity, took her soul, stole everything of the woman that Lan loves.
He’ll ride by her side even if this person is no longer his Moiraine. He’ll bond her again if she’ll let him, even if all he feels is terrible cold.
He wonders if it’s foolish to want to give his life to a shell of a woman, to feel devoted to Moiraine even though he wonders if she’s still human.
“You haven’t eaten anything since you returned.” Lan cringes at his own words. Since she returned. Since he carried her from a prison made of mist, from creatures that took her power, that ate from her mind.
“It reminds me of flesh.” Her voice is without feeling, her back stiff, head held high. “Human flesh.”
Lan stares at her dumbly.
“The taste is hard to forget,” Moiraine explains, her voice still emotionless. Lan thinks he’s going to be sick.
He waits for her to explain. Had that been real or a trick they played on her? He doesn’t ask. Instead, he says, “I’ll make you lentil stew.”
Her eyes shine in the moonlight, and for a terrible instant Lan thinks they look like a fox’s. He walks back to the fire before he looks too closely.
Twenty years of comfortable silence, of sitting beside Moiraine and feeling her, of knowing they didn’t need any words.
Now the silence is excruciating. Lan looks at her, keeps waiting for Moiraine to disappear, to be replaced by one of those creatures. Snake eyes without feeling. Unnaturally long fingers. Screams that Lan still hears as they chased him.
“Does the smell of the air here still remind you of the night we met?” Lan asks. He begs her silently to prove that she’s still the woman he lost. Do the Borderlands still make her think of him? Of the foolish young man who threw an Aes Sedai into a pond.
Her soul had recognized his, Moiraine confessed years later, had been drawn to his. Lan knows he’s spent every turn of the Wheel tied to Moiraine, his soul entwined with hers since the Creator brought this world into existence, tied to hers until the world ends. That time could be any day now, could come before the next new moon. He cannot wait any longer.
“They showed me things,” Moiraine answers, her eyes trained on the flames of the fire in front of them. “My memories, but wrong, different.”
Lan waits for her to continue, but she doesn’t. He thinks he sees sorrow in her eyes, the first hint of emotion, the first glimpse of Moiraine.
“Do you remember the night we met?” Lan asks, his chest heavy with terror. He doesn’t want to hear her answer, but he must.
“I remember it a thousand different ways.”
“May I tell you?” Lan asks, desperate now to reach her, to find his way to her through the fog of torture and memories lost, of truth misplaced. He wonders if Moiraine too is afraid, if she doesn’t know what is real, if she doesn’t believe Lan is real. He smiles at her gently. “May I tell you the story of an Aes Sedai who tried to steal my sword?”
He tells her the tale she recounted a few years ago around a fire. He remembers that night, the way she had looked at him with love after so long, how her iciness melted with genuine love and emotion. Now her face looks like stone, and Lan wonders if Moiraine believes the words he speaks.
“Whatever is in your mind,” Lan finds the bravery to say. “You don’t need to endure it alone.”
“Stop worrying. I’ll be fine.”
The words are so absurd that Lan cannot believe they’ve come from Moiraine’s mouth. And yet, they are so completely her that he stares, sees the first hint of a smile on her lips, the first glimmer of recognition in her eyes.
She’s eating another vegetable stew that he cooked for her. He never asks why she knows the taste of human flesh, never asks what other awful versions of their first meeting are lodged in her mind.
He wants to know. He needs to know.
Last night, as they both lay awake unable to sleep, Lan had understood that the only way for Moiraine to survive would be to bond him again.
He’s wanted the bond back from the instant he saw her again, needed the bond like he needed air. But last night he understood that she needed it even more, that his memories could be hers, his truth could drown out all the false realities in her mind.
His Moiraine was still there, and he would never leave her alone, so lost and confused that Lan wondered if she was human.
“You will be,” Lan promises. “If it takes every moment of our lives, you will be all right again.”
Her smile is sad, and Lan doesn’t know if she thinks she will die or expects him to walk away from her gladly once their mission is complete.
“I want the bond back.”
Moiraine’s laugh is full of too much pain. “You don’t want to feel what I am feeling.”
“Look at me, Moiraine, and tell me you believe that.”
She turns to him, her expression holding the love they’ve shared for so long. He feels like a fool for wondering if she was still human. She’s still his Moiraine, still the woman he would give his life for.
“They took every memory I have and made it wrong. My head is so full of memories of you hurting me. Of me hurting you. Killing you.”
“Let me show you what is real.”
Moiraine turns away again, watches the flames of their fire rise into the night sky. “If it hurts you, I can release the bond.”
“It will hurt me, Moiraine. Feeling your pain always hurts me. I don’t know how I can go on if you do not allow me to share your pain.”
Her smile is impossibly affectionate. “You’ve hardly changed since we met. You’re still the same dramatic man with a fondness for poetry and grand declarations.” Her expression wobbles just for an instant, a glimmer of darkness, of uncertainty.
“I am,” Lan agrees. “Whatever memories they put in your head, I will help you bear them.”
“After all the pain I caused you, do you really want this?”
“I am more certain than I was that day outside Cachin and more certain than I was on a beach outside of Falme.”
Weaves of spirit engulf Lan, the feeling of Moiraine’s weaves unchanged.
“I remain yours,” Lan vows.