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The cakes are fresh when they arrive, delivered by a young rider on horseback. Apparently this is the kind of service people demand and others provide, now that the world is no longer burning and people's creeping fear of the Dark has given way to the still strange quiet of peace. Sending such things - paying someone to carry anything to the humble, woven door - is such an utter, ridiculous frivolity that Siuan can only laugh at the same time as she baulks at it. Surely only Alanna, she thinks before even opening the accompanying note to check. Even in all of her years as Amyrlin with its unavoidable pomp and ceremony, its ‘luxurious’ (scratchy, uncomfortable) fabrics, and the constant surroundings of needless material riches, she never dreamed of such excess.
These made me almost giddy, Alanna's elegant scrawl says. I still think people simply need HELP if they claim food can be better than sex - but these cakes are maybe right up there alongside!!!So I couldn't not share with you beautiful people - especially not when I know Lan is visiting!!!!!!!!!!
Siuan has to smile at the warmth that underlies each word; at the glow of love and friendship they ignite in her chest. She decides to leave the box closed for now - to save them for later in the afternoon when Moiraine has returned from a gentle ride alone and Lan arrives back from wherever it is he goes to happily brood and meditate these days. Definitely a treat to be shared.
Siuan never gets more than two bites in though. And Lan, hand outstretched, doesn't even get one of the small, inelegantly formed cakes as far as his mouth. When they come to sit down together in the glow of a late summer sun easing its way down towards the horizon, Moiraine gets to the little cakes first and takes a tentative nibble. The utter joy that blossoms across her face in response is a sight to behold.
‘I have never tasted anything so good.’ Her smile is wide and beautiful as she tilts her head gently towards her wife in a gesture that Siuan understands immediately as an important correction: I have never tasted food so good. When she grins back, Moiraine's cheeks have turned that exact shade of pink the other woman knows and adores; the one imprinted on her mind since the very first time they were caught, mid-prank, as novices.
Siuan's heart feels so light, just looking at her, and when she catches Lan’s eye, she sees every one of her emotions echoed right back at her: fondness and love and relief so profound it makes her almost want to sob. Because in the time before, that none of them may ever fully heal from, everything about this moment would have been unthinkable. Even with their powers combined, simply encouraging (or helping or, on occasion, all but forcing) Moiraine to nourish her own body - to consider it a priority or necessity of any kind - was a daily struggle they both still bear the scars of. Lan, as always, seems to hide them better but they're not gone. Siuan sees them - mirrors of her own - on her wife's increasingly infrequent bad days. When she will barely even look at food, or let herself be held. When she pushes them both away, never telling Lan before masking their bond and convincing herself she's unworthy of Siuan's love even as she revisits the pain of her most tender, wounded parts
‘What?’ Moiraine says now, glancing at them, a crumb at the edge of her lips and a tiny bit of cream gracing her chin. It makes Siuan want to giggle and scream and spin her in her arms. If nothing else, her wife must be able - surely - to sense Lan’s happiness through the bond. Perhaps it’s indistinguishable from her own cake-based delight. Perhaps the sugar and delicate spices have short-circuited her brain. Siuan snorts quietly to herself at the thought.
‘They’re all yours,’ she says, at the same time Lan subtly places the untouched cake in his hand back down without a sound.
‘I’ll go and make some fresh tea then,’ he says.