Manetheren's Child

by chamomile_t

Summary:

He’d feel it all when he was safe, he’d always assured himself. Yet, Mat had a sneaking suspicion that the day where he was safe enough to exist as more than a hair-trigger soldier was never going to arrive.

OR: The warriors of old have been protecting Mat since before he could talk. He may not have blown the Horn of Valere yet, but they know their own, and they will not leave him to fall before he has the chance to fly. This changes some things and leaves others entirely untouched.

OR, OR: The Heroes of the Horn behave akin to dissociative identity states, because Season 3 is doing things to me.

Chapter 1

Notes:

Trigger warnings for violence, death, and child neglect.

Mat had never been to war. He’d never held a blade beyond the dagger that Laila had given him. He’d never commanded an army, or dodged blasts beneath the cover of darkness to carry a message back to his command. Still, as he danced through the debris of the slaughter, he was filled with the steel of familiarity. His body knew how to move to minimize the injuries he took. His heart beat a soft and steady rhythm, as though he wasn’t running for his life in search of the two little girls that he’d raised like they were his own children.

He found them beneath a chicken coop, faces streaked with dirt but not tears. (The Cauthon children had long since learned not to cry.) The two had dragged a piece of wood in front of the opening, and Bode clutched Eldrin’s hand like her life depended on it. Their too-thin bodies trembled with every crash in the distance.

“Hey.” Mat would have wept from the relief, but he could barely feel it. “You’re alright. I’ve got you.” He took them into his arms with a desperation that was entirely his own. He wanted to crawl right under the rickety structure with them and be just as small and scared as they were. Instead, he braced himself against the blessed numbness that was wrapped around his shoulders like a blanket. He took them to the old oak tree in the forest, shepherded them up into the branches, and stood with his back to the bark and his hand on Laila’s dagger.

Mat knew, rationally, that he was terrified. All logic suggested that fear was the only possible response to the events of the night—fear and grief for the people who wouldn’t make it out of this alive. He felt nothing but a distant flare of anger at his parents’ cowardice. 

He’d feel it all when he was safe, he’d always assured himself. Yet, Mat had a sneaking suspicion that the day where he was safe enough to exist as more than a hair-trigger soldier was never going to arrive.

 

***

 

Amera was furious.

The Cauthons had acted with greater dishonor than any deserter she’d ever encountered—and, given her background, she’d encountered quite a few. 

She usually understood it: war took everything that a person thought they knew about themself and twisted it until it was unrecognizable. Children became wizened in days as they fought for their homes, and even old, hardened soldiers could snap after seeing just one cruelty too many. Amera may have shamed any deserter she encountered, but she would never blame a person for losing their nerve.

Abell and Natti Cauthon, though, never had any nerve to begin with. 

The fierce care that had driven Matrim to steal, bleed, and love for his sisters was entirely absent in those who had given all three of them life. Their children were their pleasures and burdens, alternatively, but never their family. 

Amera would have laughed, but she didn’t dare to make a sound. 

She held the dagger with the hand of a gambler and the grasp of a warrior. In her periphery, the lanterns on the river swirled and bled until they looked just like the weaves of the Pattern itself. Cursed and violent though the night had become, Amera loved Beltine with an ache in her soul. 

She knew what it was to follow the lights home.

(Eighteen years ago, Manetheren had called her, and she had come.)

 

***

 

Mat let his mother take her little girls into her arms as though she’d been the one to keep them safe the night before. She needed them, and he couldn’t begrudge her that, no matter how much he had needed her. Besides, if there was a chance that his sisters could have the mother that he’d always wanted, he would do anything to make it happen. Maybe nearly losing her little girls would bring her to her senses. 

Mat raised his eyes to meet his father’s gaze, and found himself trapped within the scornful perspective for a moment too long. He would’ve stayed there, too, but a familiar silhouette behind the old, broken man had his head snapping away like a compass freed to face north. “Perrin!” He’d registered Rand and Egwene when he’d arrived in the square, but a cursory glance had shown him that they were well enough, if not in the prime of health. The same couldn't be said for the fourth of their little group.

Perrin looked as dead as Laila’s stiff body in his arms. 

Light, Mat wanted to curse every devious hand that had woven this horrible tangle into their lives. 

“Perrin!” He reached his friend just as Perrin laid Laila down on a wooden palette and knelt beside her. Mat didn’t say a word, but he grasped Perrin’s shoulder with his own cold fingers and wished that he could summon up some warmth for both of them. He refused to leave Perrin's side. He would keep watch. He would be the steadiness to fall back on, when the light of Perrin’s fury broke through the clouds in his mind—or when those clouds turned to rain, and the tears that so few of them recalled the taste of began to fall. 

He would stay, when they placed the apple seed in Laila’s hand and lowered her into the earth.

Perrin had stayed at Mat’s side through years of cold winters, destructive choices, and half-hearted attempts to make things better. Mat refused to leave his friend now. 

He refused, and even the conniving woman who’d arrived to steal them all away from the only home they’d ever known wouldn’t break his resolve. “We’re not going with you,” Mat told her. His voice was as firm as the grasp he held on Perrin’s shoulder.

“I fear you don’t have a choice. I am sorry to be the one to lay this on your shoulders, but you have a duty, all of you.”

“Exactly.” Mat wasn’t sure where the words that fell from his lips were coming from, but he was as powerless to stop them as he was to resist the rivers. “We have a duty. Our duty is to the place and people that raised us, however shabby and worthless you might think it is. We have dead to bury, people to heal, and children to care for.”

Perrin choked a bit, as Mat said the word ‘bury.’ Mat gripped his shoulder so tightly that he thought either his or Perrin’s bones were sure to break.

“Mat,” Egwene murmured. She’d spent enough time around the Wisdom’s hut to know exactly where the panic in his voice came from. She knew that if he left, his sisters would be all alone. And still, she said, “Who’s to say that more people won’t come after us? The Two Rivers can’t take another assault. We’ve already lost too many to this one. We can barely heal the ones that are left!”

“You’re just saying that because you think you’re destined for something better than this place. You think you’re fucking special, Egwene, but you’re not. You’re just a kid from the Two Rivers. None of us are the bloody Dragon Reborn.” It wasn’t fair. Mat knew that it wasn’t fair. Most people in the Two Rivers spent their lives wishing for something more, and Egwene’s hopes weren’t half as selfish as Mat’s own dreams of leaving and finding a place where he could be happy on his own.

“I know better than to stick around here and be a poison to the place and people I love!”

Mat flinched so violently that Perrin startled out of his stupor to glance worriedly at him. 

“You want to follow her because she reminds you of Nynaeve." Mat was on a roll, now, and he couldn't bring himself to shut his Light-damned mouth. "Well, Nynaeve’s not coming back, Egwene! I know she believed in you—we all fucking believe in you because you’re bloody brilliant—but reaching for the next person to treat you like you’re special does nothing but dishonor her memory.”

“Fuck you, Mat.” Egwene stepped towards Rand and turned her face towards his broad chest to hide her tears. Rand stared Mat down, eyes alight with anger, betrayal, and, most damningly—worry.

Mat ached. He opened his mouth to apologize, but a roar in the distance cut him off.

Fuck. Fuck. Egwene was right. Their only chance now rested in hoping that they were tasty enough prey to draw the Trollocs in the other direction. 

“We need to leave. Now.” The blue-cloaked woman wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer, and the warrior beside her looked ready to take them by force. There was certainly an interesting dynamic there, Mat thought distantly. Perhaps Bode and Eldrin would laugh with him about it when he came back home.

Perhaps they wouldn’t have starved to death by the time he got back.

Impossibly, this time, it was Egwene who slowed the woman’s progress. “We’ll come with you, but not until we’ve said goodbye.” She looked towards him, barely a glance, but Mat saw in her eyes the ice that shattered when the rivers began flowing again each spring. “Mat’s right. We all have a duty to the people of this place.”

“Make it quick,” the woman said. Her warrior prickled beside her.

Yep, there was definitely something strange going on there.

With only seconds to impart every lesson that he’d hoped to teach his sisters in the ruins of his mother’s cruelty, Mat found himself mute. He stumbled towards where his father scowled, his mother stood staring at nothing, and his sisters clutched each other like they had nothing else in the world. (Once he was gone, they wouldn’t.) He tried to reach towards them, but something stopped him in his tracks.

Behind him, Perrin hadn’t moved. His deep brown eyes were fixed on Laila’s body. His lips swelled and stiffened around a silent prayer. A quick glance around the square revealed that his parents were nowhere to be seen.

Perrin, Mat realized like a punch to the gut, didn’t have anyone here to say goodbye to.

And so, as he’d trained himself to do since he was barely old enough to move, Mat made himself what he needed to be. He met Perrin’s eyes, let his own fill with the anxiety that existed somewhere in his soul, and whispered “I don’t know what to say.”

Perrin had a hand on his back and was steering him towards the little cluster of broken people before Mat could blink. 

“Hey there, Bodewhin, Eldrin. Your brother and I have to go on a little trip today, alright? We might be gone for a while, but you aren’t to worry an ounce about us. We’ll be home as soon as we can.”

“And we’ll miss you every day,” Mat managed to gasp out. “You ridiculous, beautiful little creatures. Come here.” Eldrin looked towards her mother for permission, but Bode flung herself onto Mat without hesitating. When their mother nodded, Eldrin followed her sister, as swift as a summer storm. 

“Why do you have to go?” she whispered into Mat’s hair.

He felt as though he was going to die right there on the cold ground. He wanted to spin some fantastical story, make them laugh so that he could etch their smiles into his memory one last time, to permanently banish any ounce of guilt they might ever feel over his disappearance. They were as sharp as arrowheads, though. They would know if he was lying. Mat cleared his throat, and told them the closest thing he could to the truth.

“The world isn’t safe or beautiful right now. I’m going to find a way to make it into the most wonderful place that you could ever imagine, so that I can come get you and we can all live in it and be happy together. Does that make sense?”

“You never make sense,” Bode sobbed, and burrowed deeper into his chest.

Mat clutched them against his ribs and quaked. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

He was glad, in the end, that he’d asked Perrin to come with him. The blacksmith was the only one among them who would have been strong enough to pull Mat from his sisters and lead him away. He kept Mat’s feet on course, even as Mat looked over his shoulder again and again, only to see his sisters weeping and clinging to each other, with his parents having already turned their backs.

Had they always been so small? Was it just the distance?

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Perrin held him in a vice-like grip until they mounted the horses and were forced to let go of each other. Mat watched as Rand and Egwene were torn apart, just as reluctant. He tried to look back one last time as they rode up and out of the valley, but a heavy fog had descended over the Two Rivers as though the air itself was exhaused. 

So, as he had done since the Wheel had been spinning, Mat Cauthon turned his head away from Manetheren and rode on towards what his bones already knew would be the battle of a lifetime.

(Somewhere, Amera began to sharpen her spear.)

Notes:

Please leave a kudos or a comment for your validation-craving author!

Also:
*goes to research the plotline for the first chapter* *gets jumpscared by Season 1 Mat*

And a quick note on that point: in this household we respect and appreciate Mat's original actor for the work he did with this wonderful character AND for making the choice that was healthiest for himself and stepping away when he needed to. We are also super grateful to Dónal Finn for taking over and doing a brilliant job of it!

Chapter 2

Summary:

The adventure begins - and goes about as well as one might imagine.

Notes:

Trigger warnings for death (human and animal), implied/referenced child abuse, and Mat being Mat. Also, a bit of the dialogue here is taken from 1x02, but I did my best to make it my own everywhere that I could!

You guys, I am absolutely in awe of the response to the first chapter of this fic. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who has interacted with this story so far.

I'm off to do a very annoying physics lab, please enjoy your serotonin while I'm gone!!

His head was filled with cotton wool. The ground was just as insubstantial. Mat stared at nothing as the ferry crumpled beneath the force of Moiraine’s weave, taking its master—a man who’d wanted nothing more than to protect his son—along with it. He shuddered and swayed away from the inky water as though it could reach out and drag him beneath its surface. Maybe it could, if Moiraine had a hand in it. 

Mat swallowed back the bitter resentment that rose suddenly and violently in his throat. He kept swallowing, coughing on water that he hadn’t drowned in, a discordance that he would forget by morning, and secrets that weren’t his own. He tried to gag, but he hadn’t eaten anything since the day before and the resulting retch was as dry as it was painful.

Egwene was crying out about helping the man, but Mat knew before Perrin spoke that there was nothing they could do. There might have been something, perhaps, but the woman who’d killed him was the only one who had the Power to save his life. She wouldn’t waste it on someone who didn’t matter to her cause when she was already weakened.

Mat hated how readily he understood that cold, clinical mind. 

The choice to not reason with the man, though, to not spend a single instant attempting to soothe his fear, was something that he would never agree with. There had been less cowardly ways to solve their problem than drowning the ferryman along with his boat, and more effective ones, at that. Sure, the Aes Sedai couldn’t use the One Power to kill except in defense of themselves or their kin, but Mat knew how many lies one could tell without uttering a single word that wasn’t true. 

Discordance, indeed. Mat didn’t know where they’d come from, but the Aes Sedai’s three oaths whirled through his mind like a song. He tried to recall whether he’d read them in one of the storybooks that Mistress al’Vere had given him for the girls, but he hit an impassable wall on his journey to that particular set of memories. He tried again, distantly aware of his body moving to mount the horse once more, but his mind refused to summon up even a sketch.

A headache pounded in his temples. Mat rubbed a hand over his face and gave the recollection up as a lost cause.

His awareness of his body drifted slowly back as they raced on through the night, until before long, he was aware of the roiling mass of guilt in his stomach. Why couldn’t he have just stayed numb for the whole journey? 

Light damn it, he’d been a bastard to Egwene. He hadn’t meant it—he’d been hurting, too, and she’d told him to leave his sisters despite everything she’d known about them—she should’ve been more sympathetic—he should’ve been kinder. They were all grieving, and his resentment of Egwene’s ability to make the right choice even when it broke her wasn’t an excuse. He could dig holes into his spiraling thoughts all he wanted, but he knew the truth: he needed to take his words back, the first chance he got. 

That chance came sooner rather than later, for Lan finally came galloping back to the head of their group and murmured to Moiraine that the Fade seemed to have lost their trail for the moment. They were safe.

***

Mat lowered his aching body onto a log in front of their tiny campfire; Moiraine refused to risk a bigger one lest the Trollocs scented the smoke and tracked them down. It offered barely a breath of warmth. More than used to the cold, he simply huffed a forced laugh. “Just imagine if Nynaeve was here.” 

Egwene flinched slightly at the sound of the older woman’s name. They’d been like sisters, those two. 

“She’d spend every waking minute arguing with the Aes Sedai. Make Moiraine’s life an utter misery.” (She’d know what to do. She’d know how to keep them safe, and she’d be brave enough to protest Moiraine’s callous view of casualties. She’d be everything that Mat couldn’t bring himself to.)

“I saw it,” Egwene whispered. Mat didn’t lean forward lest he startle her into silence, but he held himself in the present by sheer force of will. He would listen. That, he could do. “Nynaeve got taken. One of those things just picked her up and tossed her away like she was nothing.”

Perrin told her that Nynaeve likely hadn’t suffered, but Mat knew that the blacksmith meant the assurance more for himself. He’d seen the wound on Laila’s stomach. An injury like that… her death wouldn’t have been pretty, or painless, in the least. 

“Nynaeve wasn’t nothing, Egwene.” He forced himself to meet her teary eyes even as the shame curdled in his stomach. “Even if those monsters didn’t care an ounce for the lives that were cut short last night, we all know how much each one of them matters. I’m sorry I implied that you didn’t. You were right. As idiotic as the Trollocs are to believe that one of us could be the Dragon Reborn-” Mat gesticulated wildly to show exactly how insane he thought that idea was, “-they followed us. You weren’t selfish; you were smart. Your logic probably saved my sisters, too.”

Egwene swallowed thickly. “You saved them yourself last night, you damned fool.” And a hundred times before, she didn’t say. They both heard it anyway.

Mat laughed. It was bitter, but it wasn’t forced this time, and the ache in his gut had eased.

 

***

 

Dreams were as finicky as they were dangerous. Mat was closest to them when he slept, but Birgitte knew from bitter experience that he was also the farthest from their attempts to protect him. The cruelties of his sleeping mind were too volatile for her to touch. 

The presence she sensed that night, though, didn’t belong in the boy’s dreaming hours any more than she would let it near him in his waking ones. Alien, impossible, forged of darkness and grief: Birgitte now knew without a doubt that the Aes Sedai had been telling the truth. If Ishamael was creeping through the children’s slumber, then this truly was the turn of the Wheel that they’d all been waiting for.

It was hard to sense emotion in eyes that were made of fire, but Birgitte could tell that Ishamael recognized her as clearly as she recognized him. She stood behind Mat’s right shoulder, arrow nocked and arms tensed, even as she knew that to release the taught string would be to risk Mat’s psyche. 

Ishamael must have known the same. 

He stared down the point of Birgitte’s arrow as Mat watched a dozen bats break their necks in midair. 

 

***

 

Mat returned to the land of the waking with a scream on his lips. He bolted upright, then swayed as a wave of dizziness overtook him. He would’ve hit the ground were it not for Egwene flinging herself onto him. She held him up even as she clutched onto him as though she were drowning and he was the only raft.

“I killed them,” she babbled. “I killed them. They drank my blood and died from it.”

“They died taking what wasn’t theirs to have. That isn’t on you,” Mat breathed. His vision roiled with dark spots; he didn't know what he was saying, but he knew that he needed to comfort her. The walls of the cave wavered and spun. He blinked as he tried to steady his vision. When he finally was able to see through the bright entryway to the world beyond, though, Mat felt a wave of cold wash over him.

Achingly slow and gentle, he brought his hand up and covered Egwene’s face like she was one of his sisters. “Are you hurt?”

“What’s going on? Mat?”

“Just tell me if you’re hurt first, okay? You said they bit you. Are you alright now?” If Egwene saw what littered the ground outside, she would likely forget any wounds that she'd sustained until it was entirely too late to stave off an infection.

“I’m fine. It was just a dream, Mat.”

Mat lowered his hand.

Egwene screamed.

Outside, he heard Rand startle awake with a cry.

Perrin watched them from the opposite wall of the cave, his eyes sparkling with grief. Mat reached for the man and placed a hand on his back even as he clutched Egwene’s arm. They emerged into the dawn together. Rand crossed the clearing in an instant the second he saw them, but he didn’t join them as Mat expected him to—instead he practically lunged towards Moiraine. 

“Did you do this?” 

Lan stepped in front of Moiraine. Before Mat realized he was moving, he’d extricated himself from his friends’ grasp and moved to stand in front of Rand. There and gone in an instant, a surprised smirk danced across Lan’s cracked lips.

Behind the warrior, Moiraine’s brow furrowed with worry. Feigned or not, it wasn’t a comforting expression to see on the most powerful woman Mat had ever met. “You dreamed this, all of you? What did you see?”

“Bats.” Mat tried to blink his eyes into focus, to meet Moiraine’s gaze, but he felt hollowed out. “Their necks just snapped in midair, like someone was holding them. I could feel the crack.”

Tension as brittle as glass between them, not a single person looked at the ground, but they all knew what was there. Beneath their feet, a hundred tiny, furry bodies were splayed across the leaf litter. 

“Did you see anyone in your dream? Did anyone speak to you?”

Perrin answered. Mat drifted. He’d seen the man with eyes like embers, the same as everyone else, but improbably, impossibly, he didn’t think that the man had cared to see him. He’d been looking at someone—at someone… Mat’s head was beginning to throb again.

“And then what?”

Mat startled from his stupor at Rand’s shout and stumbled sideways. A quick glance of the clearing showed that Moiraine and Lan had moved to tack up the horses, but Rand, fury burning in him like fire, was refusing to follow.

“What in the Light is there for us at the White Tower? Egwene, perhaps, could find a place there, but for the rest of us: nothing."

In his periphery, Mat noticed Lan scowling slightly at the implication that his ‘place’ in the Tower wasn’t worth anything. Rand was right, though. There was little for them in Tar Valon, and even less, if- “And what if one of us is what you think we are?”

There was a beat before chaos erupted. 

“What, you believe her now, too?” Rand asked, voice dripping with condescension, even as Moiraine whirled, half in a panic, and said, “Are you?”

“Me? Not for all the bloody world. I’ve got a different place in all of this.” Mat shivered. “But if all things are equal, among the group of us it’s more likely to be a man than a woman. What will you do to him, if he has the power you seek? Will you gentle him? Will you use him for your own ends? Will you bind my friend as your servant? Will you let the madness take him just for a chance at your own power? You cannot kill people except in defense, Aes Sedai, but you can make them as good as gone. What happens if you decide that one of us isn’t worth the risk?”

In the echo of his outburst, Mat realized that the clearing had gone silent. The birds hadn’t been singing before, perhaps frightened off by the death in the air, but now no one was breathing, either.

What had he said?

“You know much, for a farm boy."

“I read,” Mat snarked. 

“Do you?” Moiraine frowned, then mounted her horse in a single fluid movement. “Go where you will. We are out of time, and I am out of patience.”

She left the clearing with Lan following; Mat felt as though he could breathe for the first time since she’d arrived in their home. “Well. I got a reaction out of her?”

Egwene rolled her eyes fondly and went to grab her saddle. Rand tensed. 

“What did she tell you last night, Egwene? I saw her lead you away. Did she say that you’re special, that you’re the one? What did she do to make you so infatuated that you’d follow at her heels like a dog?”

“Rand,” Mat hissed.

“What? You said it too.”

“Yeah, and I was an ass. We’ve already been over this. Get your saddle, and let’s get going.”

“Come on—do you really think she’s any better than what’s chasing us?”

“Of course we do!” Egwene yelled. Mat would appreciate not being included in that ‘we,’ thank you very much. As far as he was concerned, Moiraine was just as likely to damn them as she was to save them, but at least she was only one threat while the Trollocs were a hundred fold. “She’s been helping us at the expense of her own strength, even as you’ve been nothing but a cruel bastard to her! She didn’t kill Nynaeve, or Laila. She’s the reason we have half of a home left to return to, when this is all over.”

“Ha! Like you ever want to go back.”

“Rand,” Mat murmured. The world was swaying. 

“Rand al’Thor, you are the rudest, most ignorant, selfish son of a bitch that ever lived. Are you so stuck on being a lone wolf that you have to meet every kindness with anger?”

“Egwene, please.” He felt smaller than he’d ever felt before.

“At least I know better than to eat from a hand that would just as willingly poison me when she sees how useless I really am!” Rand hissed. The lines were blurring, now, and Mat had a feeling that neither Egwene nor Rand knew if they were talking about themselves or each other. 

“Well if that’s how you feel, then-”

“Silence!” 

By this point, Mat was so used to unexpectedly saying things that he licked his lips, trying to catch the aftertaste of the words. To his surprise and horror, he found salt there, instead. His throat ached, though not from screaming. He could barely breathe.

“Stop talking, both of you.” Perrin, steady as an oak, approached Mat with his hands held so that they were easily visible but not poised to strike. Mat’s limbs stuttered around a flinch. Was he really losing control of himself after only having been away from the Two Rivers for a day? Had he always been this close to breaking? 

“Are you alright, Mat?”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he breathed. 

“I hear you.” Perrin offered his hands. Mat clutched them in a white-knuckled grip. “We’re here. Try to take some deep breaths, okay?”

Mat did as he was told, even as he burned with shame. His lungs ached. He choked on an inhale and coughed as though he could clear the anguish from his heart with that action alone. “Fuck.”

“Easy,” Perrin told him. “Try again.”

Mat did.

They continued like this for several minutes, Mat failing at the simple task more often than not. Finally, though, he got himself back under control and was able to fix Perrin with a grateful, if wry, grin. “Thanks.”

“Always.”

Mat winced and glanced at Egwene and Rand, who were both looking at him as though he would break with a single touch. He hated this more than he’d ever hated anything in his life. “As I was going to say before you had your little lovers' spat, it doesn’t matter whether Moiraine is our best choice in the long run. I’m sure she’ll kill us as soon as we’ve exceeded our usefulness, but she’s the only option that we have right now . 

“So long as we don’t all bloody well turn against each other, that should be enough. Besides, I’d rather not go the way of the ferryman by disobeying her now.” Light, his voice was cracking as though he’d been the one shouting instead of Rand and Egwene. What must they think of him now?

Egwene reached a thin hand towards him, then let it fall. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” Mat hoisted his saddle up even though his arms were as weak as saplings. He refused to let them see that he was still shaken.

“We stick together, then,” Rand said. He sounded like agreeing was akin to having all of his teeth pulled, but he did agree. “Mat’s right. It's better than facing this shit alone, and if that means we have to follow Moiraine, then so be it.”

Neither he nor Egwene would admit their wrong for quite some time, Mat knew, but eventually it would come out that one of them regretted their words, and the other would apologize in recompense, they would be back to their ridiculously sappy version of normal. Everything was going to be fine. It had to be, didn’t it?

 

***

 

“Whitecloaks.”

Everything was most decidedly not going to be fine.

Mat was painfully glad for his place in the back of their group as Moiraine handed her ring to Lan and instructed them all to say as little as they could. He didn’t want to be noticed, not with how raw he was feeling. All that he wanted was to blend in. He barely heard the order to dismount, but when he saw the others all sliding to the ground he followed them, his movements a mere echo.

He catalogued each of Moiraine’s half-truths like they were moths; the fragile wings of each were nevertheless substantial enough to survive the test of time—at least without too much poking and prodding. The Aes Sedai were wily: though they were bound by the oaths, they were not crippled. It must have been a strange line to walk, but if that line kept them from crossing others, it would do.

Their Warders were not quite so restricted. Mat found himself having to stifle a grin as Lan threatened the Questioner in every type of subtext known to man. Mat had no love for Aes Sedai, but he had even less for men who were so afraid of women gaining power that they would kill them for it. 

His heart stuttered in his chest as the Questioner reached for Moiraine’s hand. The tangle of rings on his belt made his purpose painfully obvious, and Mat was sure that a line of dirt, or pale skin, would give them away. Mat held himself as stiff as a statue lest his body betray him by moving to protect Egwene. (There was no battle here, not yet. It was best not to start one.)

The Whitecloak released Moiriane’s hand. Mat still didn’t allow himself to breathe.

By the time they were freed to go on their way once more, his vision was filled with spots. He swung himself back onto his horse and rested his shaking hands in the gentle beast’s mane. By the Light, he wanted a bloody drink.

 

***

 

His people were tiring. 

Shoulders slumped, biting their lips against cries and words of anger—he knew the signs.

The Aes Sedai winced in pain every few seconds. Her Warder was pale merely from feeling it.

The children she’d stolen from their homes looked half dead.

This wouldn’t do at all.

Artur Hawkwing opened his mouth, and began to sing the song of Manetheren.

Soon, they were all singing. Through the maudlin light of the overcast afternoon, Manetheren’s sons and daughter were crying out her song, voices mournful in a way that their hearts couldn’t bear to be. They timed the words to the rhythm of the horses’ hooves, the way that they used to punctuate them when cutting wheat in the fields. There had been another song, once—but the one that now danced from their lips was right for the time when they were giving voice to it. This was not an age of peace, no matter how Artur had dreamed that he could make it so.

When they finished, the Aes Sedai sighed. Artur tried not to let it rankle him. 

“It is good to remember Manetheren,” she agreed. 

 

***

 

Mat laughed. “It’s just a song. I don’t even know who Manetheren is.” (Never mind that the name brought a strange echo of nostalgia curling through his chest. He’d long since learned to ignore the feeling.)

“Manetheren is your home.”

As usual, Moiraine seemed invigorated by knowing more than they did. 

“Your Two Rivers were once named for the mountains that they flowed through. In the old tongue, ‘Mountain Home’ is given by Manetheren . The site of a beautiful city—as small and fierce as a fox. As much of a nuisance, too, as far as the Dark One was concerned. He sent every force in his command to wipe them from the map, but Manetheren would not be forgotten even then. They fought for three days and three nights, having been promised aid if they could hold until that fourth dawn-”

Mat knew where the story was going before she finished speaking. It had been bred and burned into him: in the Two Rivers, you had to help your own, for no one else was going to help you.

“They battled on, there at the shallowest curve of the river, and not a Trolloc crossed their lines though the water ran red.”

Mat had passed that very spot a dozen times in his youth.

“On the tenth day, Queen Eldrene sent the children from her city to hide in the mountains, and though many slipped away to join their people on the front lines, those that hid survived the carnage of the battle—and what came after. For, upon feeling her husband die three days hence, the Queen reached out for the One Power, and it held her even as she grabbed ahold of it and wielded it against the Dark One’s army. Not a single Trolloc escaped the flames, and neither did a tree, or a leaf, or a creature. That is why we weep—for Manetheren, for her army, for the Queen who burned herself alive. Weep for Manetheren.”

Sometimes, on autumn nights, the earth of the Two Rivers smelled like ash.

“But the children and their minders, hidden high in the mountains, lived on. They returned to the barren land that had once been their home. They made it green again, found the soil and the seeds that lingered beneath the char and rot, and coaxed them into flourishing. Those things that hadn’t survived, the birds carried back in their bellies. That, you see, that is why we remember .

“The old blood flows within your veins. Do not forget that—you’ll need it in the days to come.”

If the Wheel had turned them all out differently, Mat thought, Moiraine would have made quite the Gleeman.

 

***

 

The fire was warmer that night. Warmer, and brighter, perhaps because Lan was too worried about Moiraine’s failing health to follow her orders and keep the flames low. Mat was grateful up until he startled awake to the keening of a Fade. 

“Get up!” Lan bellowed. “Get up, they’ve found us!”

“Yeah, no shit,” Mat muttered even as he swung himself into the saddle.

They plunged headlong through the forest. Perrin held Moiraine’s unconscious body in front of him; Lan took up the rear. Mat’s heart pounded in his throat. He tasted blood in the air. “Faster, faster,” he urged the steed beneath him, but she was running for her own life as well as his. There was no fraction of her speed that she wasn’t using. 

Like a flash of lightning, she froze and rose onto her hind legs. Egwene’s mount did the same in his periphery. 

At that moment, Mat accepted the fact that he was going to die. They hadn’t had a second to waste, and they’d already wasted several. He pressed his face into the horse’s neck and prepared for claws to meet his flesh.

The pain didn’t come.

He waited, and waited, but the pain didn't come. 

“Why have they stopped?” Perrin asked. 

Mat raised his head to a sight more terrifying than any he’d faced before: the Trollocs stood frozen as they had on the bank of the river, but there was no water now. There was only Mat, his friends, and the shadow that loomed behind them.

“The fallen city of Shadar Logoth. Come,” Lan urged, “we’ll be safe within the walls.”

Mat would’ve preferred to stay outside of the city that frightened even Trollocs, but when had he ever gotten what he wanted? He followed the others inside.

“It’s so still,” Perrin whispered. “No birds. No bugs. What happened here?”

“It is said that evil spread from the heart of the city and swallowed all that lived here. They built their walls up while the world burned and bled outside, and lived their rich, beautiful lives until that decadence became their undoing. These were the people who were meant to come to Manetheren’s aid.”

“Delightful,” Mat said, for lack of a better way to break the silence. 

Lan scowled at him, then moved to take Moiraine from Perrin’s arms. Clearly, the man had never heard a joke in his life. “When the war ended, survivors came to this city in search of aid, and found nothing. Since then, no one has dared to step foot in this place—not even Trollocs.”

Well then. Delightful, indeed.

“That’s more words than you’ve said all day—probably ever,” Mat snarked. Then, “Why would you bring us here?”

“Touch nothing. Eat only the food you brought.”

“And he’s back to normal.” Mat frowned but contented himself with digging through his pack for his waterskin and something to eat. His hands trembled, and their supplies slid between his numb fingers. He gasped when something sharp bit into his palm.

The tired smile bloomed on his lips as though it was an apple blossom. 

Dagger in hand, he approached Perrin. The man was sitting with his back to one of the columns. Mat lowered himself inelegantly to the ground at his friend’s side, even as Perrin failed to look towards him, lost in memories as beautiful as they were painful. “You should have this.”

He turned the thing over in his hands, polishing the blade with a piece of cloth one last time. “Laila made it. She always said that she didn’t make weapons, she made tools. That I’d probably use it a thousand times for chopping apples, whittling wood, before I ever need it to defend myself. But…” Mat offered the dagger to Perrin. “To keep it sharp, ready.” He realized a second too late that he hadn’t actually released the blade, and forced his fingers to uncurl. That last bit of home, that last promise of safety, it didn’t belong to him anymore.

They both pretended not to see the tear tracing its way down Perrin’s cheek.

“A tool though, still. To save my life, or the life of someone that I- loved. She thought that’d probably be you. That if you ever got into any trouble, it’d be my fault.”

“You were always the troublemaker,” Perrin agreed roughly.

“Maybe.” Mat ran a hand over his face. “Though to be perfectly honest, I can’t see how anyone would rightly blame me for this mess.”

“Thank you, Mat.”

Mat looked away.

“The girls are gonna be fine,” Perrin said, apropos of nothing. He’d been worrying too, then, or at least he knew that Mat had. “My parents will be over at yours, checking on them. Rand’s and Egwene’s too.”

“I know,” Mat agreed. (He was lying. The fact was that they’d checked on him when he was young, too—and no one had ever seen a thing.)

 

***

 

Fys had been the first. She’d arrived months before Amera, even, though she featured less prominently in their day-to-day life now. She had heard the boy stop crying when months of hunger, illness and pain became one agony too many, and the energy that it took to call for help no longer equaled the chance that someone would come.

That silence had drawn her to his side more quickly than her own baby’s cries ever had, though the instinct was much the same. Children of that age were not supposed to grow quiet.

She’d been slain in battle before her daughter’s fifth birthday. She’d never gotten to raise her child, but she knew how to soothe an infant’s anguish—even from within its own mind. Those years before the end, Fys had been able to get their daughter down on the nights when neither her wife’s lullabies nor her husband’s rocking could do the trick. Regardless of meaning, or purpose, or fate, she would do the same for the boy whose life she’d found herself suddenly and inexplicably tied to. 

(Fys was a warrior, and a good one, but there was more heroism in a modicum of her care than she’d ever displayed in battle. She loved like the ocean.)

Hands as cool as the river that rushed through the darkness outside, she wrapped the boy’s arms around himself and held on tight. He still burned with fever and ached with pain in turn, but by the time dawn came, he slept.

 

***

 

She did not know what good she could do for them now. 

Pain greater than any she had ever felt, and pleasure, too: the blade burned but the body wouldn’t let it go. It had offered them the comfort she hadn’t been able to; they’d reached for it like a child for a stuffed toy. 

They’d sought what she was meant to offer in the most dangerous place in the world. She’d failed them.

Though they shouldn’t have been able to move for the pain they were in, Fys dragged the body’s aching feet to the safest place she could think of. She followed the sound of their family’s voices through the thunderous heartbeat in her ears. One hand still clutching the decadent, stolen blade, she reached the other towards Perrin and clung on. Egwene grasped her elbow, and Rand put one hand on her back and gripped his bow with the other. 

The darkness slid forward like a snake, slashing at the ground between their feet. When the Two Rivers’ youth ran, though, they ran together. 

Somewhere between the city and the land on the opposite shore, Fys faded again. She fought it, at first, but she knew she was only causing them more pain by doing so. Finally, she let herself go.

She’d done what she could: her boy would not be alone, no matter what happened. 

Notes:

Please leave a kudos or a comment for your validation-craving author!

Folks I never expected a TV show to take me OUT, but the spinny graphics in 3x04 made me so dizzy that I had to stop watching until the world wasn't turning itself inside out anymore. We survived, though! Also, please no spoilers for 3x05 when it comes out - I might not be able to watch that one for a little while because of ✨fun life circumstances✨.

Don't mind me on my "there's more to heroism than valor in battle" soapbox...

Chapter 3

Summary:

A lot of walking, a lot of angst, and a little bit of comfort.

Notes:

Trigger warnings for implied/referenced child abuse.

So uh. College attempted to murder me, but I got my two big papers in today (we're not talking about next week's exams) so let's celebrate with some fanfic! I am so sorry to have fallen off of the face of the earth for two weeks. The promise that I can make you is that once we get to mid-May, I'll have hours of time every day to work on this. I'll try to post once every two weeks until then!

The cold bit into Mat’s face like blades of ice, but the air was as parched as brittle paper. Their clothes dried before cold sickness could set in. Egwene still shivered even beneath her many layers, though. She'd been sensitive to the cold ever since a fever had nearly stolen her away when they were young. Mat shrugged off his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders, tucking the dagger quickly into his vest before it could glint in the dingy light.

The four bedraggled wanderers stood at the edge of desolation. For miles upon miles, an expanse of pale sand and thorny brush stretched across the land, as though whatever artist had drawn up the lush forests of their home lost inspiration by the time they arrived here. Mat’s toes were numb; his legs were not far behind. They would warm up as they walked, yet not one of them wanted to take the first step.

They couldn’t go home. Mat knew it just as well as the others did. Unsurprisingly, he was just as reluctant to voice it. They would betray their loved ones by moving forward as effectively as they would by turning back, and the weight of that decision rested heavily on each pair of shoulders. 

“Don’t make me say it.” Finally, between the gray sky and grayer earth, Egwene broke the silence with a plea.

Rand scowled at the horizon. 

“There’s a bunch of shit out here that no one back home is ready for. We won’t do them any good by bringing it down on their heads when they’re already hurting,” Mat said. He reached towards Rand as he spoke, but the red-haired man flinched away. Comfort rejected, he brushed his fingers over the steady weight that rested above his heart before returning his hand to his side. 

“They followed us,” Perrin agreed. “They’re still following us. We’re safer as a…” He shook his head to dispel some unwanted thought.

“I’ll kill them if they hurt any of you.” The sentence wasn’t one that anyone would have expected from humble, shy farm boy Rand al’Thor. It seemed that these past few days had changed them all. “Fine. Fine . We go to the White Tower. But if they try to take even one of you from me, that’s it. The four of us are perfectly capable of facing this together without the help of the damned Aes Sedai.”

They were being molded into what they were meant to be without ever having a say in the process. (Mat tried to feel something beyond the begrudging acceptance that had pervaded his soul since that bloody dream, but the strings of his own self were as impossible to grasp as those of the Pattern.) “If one of us asks to leave,” he agreed, “we leave. I’m not losing any of you.”

“We’re decided, then?” Egwene whispered.

“Well we can’t bloody stand here until we grow roots, can we? Let’s go. Maybe they’ll have something good to drink in Tar Valon.”

 

***

 

Amera knew that throttling the boy she’d sworn to protect was counterintuitive. She was still considering it. 

Mat had been a fool. Mat had always been a fool—that was one of the things Amera loved most about him, even if it made Birgitte scream in frustration and Artur tear his hair out, for she knew that intelligent fools were the only people capable of taking the right risks—but this was one step too far. He was going to get them all killed before they even had a chance to find something better than the emptiness he’d grown up in. 

She didn’t understand. He’d done what they’d always worried he wouldn’t: he’d gotten out. He’d survived more than any child should’ve had to, but when he finally had the chance to escape, he’d flung himself back into the darkness like it was a mother’s embrace.

Amera didn’t understand. 

Someone else did.

 

***

 

The sand was so pretty! 

With each step they took, Gema dug the toes of their boots into it and kicked it up into the air. As it fell back to the ground, it glittered like snow. Gema liked snow. Most of them hated the cold, but even Mat—as big and grumpy as he was now—would watch the winter’s first snowfall with sparkling eyes.

(Gema was that sparkle.)

It was winter here, too, though it wasn’t snowing. Gema didn’t have a coat. Fys would probably scold them about that later, but for now they relished in that small act of disobedience as well, and hummed as they danced their way through the shimmering land. Notes of ballads, dirges, and shanties spun forth from their lungs as though they were nursery rhymes.

At first Perrin frowned at them like they were being ridiculous, but he was soon smiling along. Gema smiled back. They loved Perrin—and Egwene and Rand and Nynaeve and—they missed a step upon listing the Wisdom, but they managed to stay on their feet. They loved these people. They were so happy to get to walk with them!

“How’s it going back there, Mat?” Egwene asked with an incredulous half-smile.

Gema’s name wasn’t Mat, but that was a secret , so they grinned back. “The sand moves like snow! Do you see? It’s like it’s dancing!”

Egwene laughed. “I was beginning to think we were going to have to listen to you being maudlin all the way to Tar Valon.”

“Maudlin’s boring. I don’t know what the heck is going to happen to us tomorrow, so I’m not gonna waste today.” Gema hummed again and rubbed their face instead of putting their fingers in their mouth. Was Egwene suspicious because they weren’t sad anymore? Should they not have been so happy?

They scrunched their nose and watched the ground move beneath their feet. They still hummed and kicked the dust up into the air, but they didn’t smile anymore. They didn’t think they’d been wrong, though. There was something here that needed their joy the same way Mat’s mother had, even if Gema couldn’t quite tell where that yearning was coming from. They kept their face steady, but fed their heart with every bit of lightness that their young hands could grasp. 

A smile grew there, in their chest. It grew teeth, too, that sharpened, and sharpened, and sharpened—but Gema just kept feeding it. The skin burned above that grinning face, something heavy throbbing out of rhythm from the organ’s beating, but to Gema it was barely a curiosity. Whatever the presence was, it was hungry. That was all that mattered. They knew how to be food.

Gema was a well that never ran dry. Fierce, courageous, and impossibly creative—they could be whatever was needed. At some point too long ago for any of them to remember, it was decided that in this turn of the Wheel, what they needed to be was young . They alone had the strength to protect the childhood that Mat wouldn’t get to have. 

Gema led the body through a dance that only they could perform: a whirlwind of joy and appeasement, wrapped up in broken glass.

 

***

 

Mat knew he was acting like a bloody idiot, but it was quite a while before he was able to rein his limbs in and walk steadily along with the other three. What in the Light was he doing? Rand and Egwene had already been worried when they’d seen him nearly break down—now he was laughing and dancing like a lunatic. If he didn’t get himself under control soon, they were going to decide that he was too much to fucking handle and leave him to rot out here until he was the same color as the land.

He was unmoored. He felt like he was strung to the Wheel itself, but instead of weaving him into something whole, it was spinning him faster and faster until he flew apart in every direction. He brought his hand up to his vest again, just to run his thumb over the hilt of the dagger. The pressure grounded him. For an instant, he could keep the earth beneath him and the sky above. 

Concealed somewhere within the rocky hills behind them, a wolf howled a single, piercing note. 

The nausea flooded back in and Mat was cut loose yet again.

“Hurry.” Perrin glanced over his shoulder and ushered them all forward with a frantic gesture. Though Mat’s neck prickled, he didn’t look behind them. Perhaps it was better not to know what was coming.

The cold crept in along his fingertips, now, and he missed his coat bitterly. They didn’t run—running would make them look like prey, and the wolves would treat them as such—but Mat’s heart beat as though they were.

A tangle of barren wood that might once have been a stand of saplings loomed up ahead. It was as dead and brittle as the rest of the desert, but it would have to do.

Another howl echoed through the emptiness. All too soon that note became a chorus, the chorus became a symphony, and Perrin grasped Mat’s arm in a desperate panic when they finally rounded the skeletal forest to the only amount of shelter that they could glean in such a cold and foreign land. 

Mat, reaching out with equal fervor, saw what had prompted his friend’s alarm. The wolves that had been singing hadn’t been the ones stalking. Barely ten paces away, several gray shapes peered past the branches to where their prey huddled in a frightened flock. Egwene and Rand kicked a few pieces of broken-off timber into a pile, their gazes never leaving the danger that was creeping toward them. Rand struck flint against steel again and again, but the spark wouldn’t come. Fury rose in his eyes, and if fury was enough to light a flame, then they’d be safe, but fury was nothing in the face of teeth and claws. 

“Egwene,” Mat hissed. Power, on the other hand, was something. “Might be time to try some of that hand-wavy stuff Moiraine was doing.”

“It’s called channeling,” Egwene hissed back. She would be contrary even on death’s doorstep; it was one of the qualities that Mat had always admired about her. He could see her reaching for something that none of them would ever have the sense for—reaching, and falling short. “I can’t do it. I can’t focus. It’s slipping out of my fingers-”

“What do you need?”

“I don’t know! Moiraine had this, this necklace—she used it to ground me, to focus my energy, but all I can see out here is desolation and there’s nothing to hold onto.”

And finally, t his , Mat could help with. “Pair of dice. Left inner pocket on the chest.”

He watched her trembling hands unfasten the top button of the coat she'd borrowed from him and scrabble around inside. She emerged with a wooden die that she nearly fumbled and dropped into the tinder below. She inhaled sharply, though, caught herself even when she couldn’t grasp the Power, and managed to press it into her opposite palm and hold fast.  Mat moved fluidly so that his back was to hers and readied himself to draw the dagger from his vest if she needed protection.

Beside him, Perrin’s hands spasmed over Laila’s knife. Mat closed his eyes, fixed his senses on the world around him, and begged the Wheel itself that his friend wouldn’t have to use it. Perrin was kindness, loyalty, and all of the green growing things of the world. Since they were young, he’d hated violence with a passion, and Mat and Rand had been required to relocate every spider that they’d ever found instead of squishing them.

 Mat would never forgive the Pattern if it forced his friend to kill. 

The fire hissed and popped behind them. Mat’s eyes flew open; he swayed in relief upon seeing that the wolves had retreated several paces. The few small branches that they’d haphazardly piled together would be quick to burn out, so they all fell to breaking off what limbs they could and gathering splinters and scrub grass from the ground. Finally, when the flames hummed contentedly instead of roaring or sputtering, Mat collapsed back against the wooden mass and pretended that certain death wasn’t just behind him.

“Good bloody job, Egwene,” he laughed appreciatively. 

Egwene shifted on her feet. “Rand’s flint and steel were what really did the trick. I just… helped.”

“Helping is good,” Perrin reassured her. “We’re together.”

Mat shivered, though the heat had begun to creep slowly from his thawing fingertips towards his chest. He felt worn thin, wrung out. The deep breath that he tried to take rattled discomfitingly in his lungs. It was then that Rand decided to break from where he’d been staring at the fire with a look of uncanny confusion in his eyes and return to his most annoying form, in Mat’s mind: the mother hen. 

“You alright there?” He lowered himself to one knee in front of Mat and reached for his shoulder. Though his fingers barely made contact before Mat flinched back, he hissed as though he’d been burned. “Light, you’re freezing. You’re going to get yourself sick if you keep going like this. Stop trying to tough it out-”

“You sound like Nynaeve,” Mat groused, but when Egwene handed him his coat he took it back without complaint. It was warm from her body heat, and he sank into it like it was one of the shallow, sun-warmed streams that split off from the rivers and meandered through the valley. It felt almost like an embrace: a pair of arms wrapping gently around his shoulders and a warm weight against his back. He clenched his jaw when his teeth tried to start chattering.

“You should’ve told me that you needed it,” Egwene scolded. “I would have been fine.”

“Can’t have you getting sick. Besides, the dice came in handy, didn’t they?” Mat patted the pocket, only to find that it was missing one familiar object. He raised an incredulous eyebrow at her. “You’d steal from a man on the verge of freezing to death?”

Egwene’s eyes twinkled as she produced the die from her pocket. “Looking for this?” She might have gotten on his case about responsibility and morals, but there were aspects of her that Mat saw himself in and adored. Egwene loved a good joke. Even if Mat was most often the butt of the ones she found funniest, he would always laugh along.

“Give it here.”

“Only if you promise me something first.”

Mat scrubbed a hand over his face. “Did I say that Rand sounded like Nynaeve? I take it back—I think she’s bloody well possessing you. Steal my shit and then make me pay a price if I want it again: that has her written all over it.”

“Just tell me that you won’t try to be an idiot and try to protect the rest of us at your own expense.”

Mat rolled his eyes and held his hand out, palm up. Egwene could try as she might to get him to promise foolish things, but Mat knew something that she never would. Nynaeve had tried to play this same game with him several times when she first became a Wisdom, and Mat alone, out of everyone in the village, had ever gotten her to break first. 

Egwene placed the die in his hand with a look of resignation. Mat slipped it into his pocket again, and let his hand linger a second too long over the steely weight of the dagger that rested on the other side. 

He couldn’t make a promise he’d already broken. He would do anything to keep them safe, even if it meant burning himself to ash in the process.

 

***

 

At some indeterminate point between sunset and dawn, the wolves gave up. Mat didn’t hear them leave, but between one heartbeat and the next they weren’t howling anymore. Good bloody riddance, if you asked him. He rolled onto his side so that he could watch Rand staring at the fire through his sleep-faded sight. 

A muscle jumped in Rand’s jaw. He ran a cloth over the sword in his hands as his eyes glittered with something fierce and unnamed. Mat should have been afraid, maybe, but for all he’d been trained to dread anger, Rand’s would never scare him.

He wanted to rise, to comfort his friend, but this wasn’t the shattering, aching rage that touch or kind words could soothe. Rand was peaceful, for all that he was clearly grappling with something bigger than any of them.

Mat would let him have this.

Rand, however, had heard him moving. He quickly sheathed the sword and turned to fix Mat with the most brittle, false smile he’d ever seen—and Mat had looked in the mirror quite often in his childhood. He levered himself up and moved to sit beside his friend. 

Rand didn’t speak, so Mat just hummed contentedly and began tossing one of the dice into the air and catching it again. Six, five, one, four, five…

 

***

 

…three, six, two… Fys could be patient. She rested her chin on Mat’s head. He couldn’t feel the pressure and she could barely sense the ghosting of his hair against her neck, but it was touch nevertheless, and it was warm. Mat watched the little wooden cube with steady eyes, and, in their periphery, Fys watched Rand. 

It did not take long for the anger in that lanky frame to tumble from the shepherd’s mouth.

“How do you do it?” The words were harsh, biting. Mat didn’t flinch. Fys reigned in her protective instincts, barely. No one snapped at her boy like that.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mat mumbled, voice dull with exhaustion. “I don’t do anything except cause trouble, and you know how to do that quite well enough on your own.”

“Don’t lie to me—you can see it just as well as I can!”

Fys felt a ripple of tension run through the body and found herself suddenly and aggressively restraining Amera in their mind. Rand wasn’t going to hurt them. He needed help, and this time, they’d chosen to offer it. No one was forcing them. This wasn’t Amera’s territory.

“I can’t see myself from the outside,” she said softly in Mat’s voice. “You’re going to have to give me more than that.”

Rand crossed his arms like a petulant toddler. Through sheer force of will, Fys managed not to laugh.

“You’re handling this like you’ve been doing it for your whole life, but I know you haven’t. It makes me look like such an idiot. You know how to protect the others. I saw you step to watch Egwene and my backs today—you’re a natural. You kept us together when I wanted to be a fucking idiot and break us apart! I already feel stupid but you seem to know everything and I feel like nothing in comparison!”

For the first time in their lives, Fys was just as stunned into silence as Mat was. Their lips stuttered around an explanation, but there was none that they could give. Mat didn’t know, and Fys couldn’t say. Almost absently, she felt a stab of pain lance through Mat’s forehead. “Rand, I-” she whispered. Mat shook his head. “I-” A hand ran across their face. Whose hand? Whose face? The world was spinning. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t know who she was. She missed her partners and child like a blade through her chest.

Fys would’ve screamed if she could have. Instead, she tumbled into the back of their head as rapidly as though she was falling from a cliff.

 

***

 

Mat plunged his face into his hands. His head pounded. A sudden anguish swelled and waned in his chest like the waves of the ocean he’d never seen. Still, he laughed bitterly. If there was one thing Mat knew how to do, it was laugh. “You think I bloody know?”

“What?” Rand, who had half-risen from his spot in concern, hovered with his hand outstretched. The anger was gone as soon as it had come, and Mat knew that he’d been right not to fear the other man. Rand would never hurt them. ( Them? )

Mat raised his face though it took the strength of a hundred men to do so. “I have no clue what’s going on half the time. I protect you guys because I’ve been protecting my sisters since they were born. That part makes sense. But the things I know? The ways I move? I’m just as lost as you are. I’m doing my best to keep us alive even though I feel like I’m sleepwalking half the time.” He laughed again. “I think I’m going mad.”

“You’re not going mad.” Rand moved away from the fire to sit at Mat’s side. “Your brain is reacting to the pain of all of this in the only way it can. You’re doing fine. You’re doing better than I am.”

“No. No.” Mat shook his head. “Can I touch you?”

Rand agreed. Mat lifted his hands to clasp his friend’s shoulders. “We don’t compare. We don’t do that. This is shit for all of us. It bloody sucks. You’re doing just fine. You’re doing better than fine. You’re alive and you’re still going—that’s bloody brilliant.”

“We’re alive,” Rand echoed with a desperate breath. “We’re alive. We’re here. We’re fine.” He pressed their foreheads together, and each rested against the other as though that pressure could still the turbulence within.

“We’re fine,” Mat returned.

There, in the middle of desolation, the two frightened boys clung to each other like the children they had been only months ago. They breathed together. Perhaps, in their togetherness, they could someday find a force to match that distant tide.

Finally, at that darkest part of the night just before the sky began to turn pink again, they each slipped back onto their own bedrolls.

“Mat?” Rand whispered through the dark.

Mat blinked in an effort to hold onto consciousness, but it was a losing battle. “Hm?”

“I think I might be going mad, too.”

Notes:

Please leave a kudos or a comment for your sleep-deprived author!

Alrighty y’all listen up. We all know my endgame relationship for this fic; I’ve stated it in the tags. H O W E V E R. The scene with Rand and Mat here comes from my “men deserve to show platonic care to each other” argument, not my “Rand and Mat belong together” argument. The “Rand and Mat belong together” time will come, but Rand is currently with Egwene and cheating isn’t something I vibe with. Capisce?

In other news, editing this chapter utterly broke me because I'd forgotten most of what I'd written. Thoughts on Gema?

(Please no spoilers beyond 3x04 in the comments!)

Chapter 4

Summary:

The Two Rivers' group meets the Tuatha'an. Mat and Birgitte get to experience one (1) happiness.

Chapter trigger warnings for disordered eating and implied/referenced child abuse.

Notes:

*waves sheepishly* heeeeeey so you know how I said college was attempting to kill me? Yeah, it's still doing that. Things are hopefully starting to ease up now! Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all of you who are being so immensely patient with this story. More chapters and very exciting things to come!

Before Mat had even opened his eyes the next morning, he found himself face to face with the fact that today was going to be complete, utter, and absolute shit. At some point during the three-or-so hours of sleep that he’d gotten, his body had curled itself into the tightest ball imaginable. His limbs were as taut as bowstrings, each crawling like vines toward the steely weight against his ribcage. Pain pulsed through his muscles as he began to unfurl himself into something resembling repose.

Light, he felt as though he’d drunk himself blind—with none of the delightful memories of music and laughter that often came along with that sensation. His head throbbed; his lungs felt as though they were full of ash. He hoped against all hope that the universe hadn’t decided to spite him by giving him a fever on top of everything else. 

He didn’t let himself consider that he shouldn’t have taken the dagger from the fallen city. Every time his thoughts strayed too near that possibility they blurred and doubled like sight in teary eyes, and he needed a clear head if he was to keep the others alive in the face of what was coming. Sure, he’d ignored Lan’s order to not touch anything, but why should he have listened to a man who refused to give a straight answer? How was Mat supposed to fend off the darkness chasing them if he didn’t meet it with a power akin to its own? 

Lost in these desperate ruminations, Mat was woken fully and unceremoniously by an ice-cold hand pressed against his forehead. 

Letting out a shout that would likely draw any nearby predators or darkfriends to their location, Mat launched himself up and away from Egwene. She frowned at him with a somewhat disgruntled expression of concern, hand still outstretched.

“Your hands are bloody cold, ” he hissed like a wet cat.

"I was checking to see if you had a fever. You sweat through your shirt, and you never sleep this late—not even when you’re drunk," Egwene said, nonplussed.

At times like this, Mat loathed being known so well. (It was the only thing keeping him going.) “I’m fine.” Now that he was mostly upright and the world had stopped spinning, there seemed to be nothing for it but to lever himself to his feet and go on with his day. This he did, with no small amount of struggle. Egwene watched him all the while with a little wrinkle of worry between her sloping eyebrows.

“We’ll go slowly today,” Perrin said. 

Oh. Fuck. They were all looking at him like that. Blood and bloody ashes, Mat didn’t have the energy to deal with this today. “I don’t think the Last Battle is going to wait for me to get over a little cold, you lot. Let’s get going.” He snatched his bedroll from the ground a little too brashly and swayed on his feet.

Rand moved to stand beside him and placed an arm around Mat’s waist, a mooring post in a storm. Both of them pretended that Mat wasn’t leaning half of his weight on the other.

“We have to keep going,” Egwene agreed. “Even if you are sick, there’s almost nothing I can do for you out here.”

“A cheery prognosis, my dear baby-Wisdom,” Mat snarked. “Let’s go, you lot. Stop looking at me like I’m about to keel over. I’ve just got a bit of a cold.” 

Mat had the wherewithal to acknowledge, at least to himself, that this was a lie. He might be sick—he was almost always sick in the winter—but this didn’t feel like any normal fever he’d faced before. There was something aching inside him, a hunger that never quite ebbed. It felt familiar, but he couldn’t recall from where. He moved along like a sleepwalker, only staying on course because of Rand’s steady presence beside him. The man was like a magnet, always drawing him in with a quiet sort of light that never waned. Even when he was at his worst, Rand was hopeful. It was bloody ridiculous, if you asked Mat, but no one ever did.

“Look!” Egwene cried around mid-morning, with some strange cocktail of worry and delight mingling in her voice. “Those tracks are fresh.” She broke away from their group and jogged towards the wavering lines in the distance that would supposedly resolve themselves into wheel ruts when they got closer. They weren’t alone in this horrible, empty place anymore. Mat’s skin prickled.

“What do you think the chances are that whoever’s at the end of those tracks wants us dead?” He saw the quip flail as Rand and Perrin’s expressions soured slightly. 

“Far from zero,” Perrin admitted. 

"They're probably Whitecloaks, or Darkfriends, or something so much worse that Moiraine couldn't even bring herself to tell us about it."

"Lovely odds," Mat snarked. He'd meant to make them laugh, not send the conversation spiraling into something so maudlin. "Who knows, maybe it's Moiraine and Lan themselves and we're going to get a stern talking to once we catch up." He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, though none of them were quite sure what he was suggesting.

"It's probably Whitecloaks, knowing our luck," Rand repeated.

“Well, I've always liked to play long odds." This time, the other two chuckled, though they somehow made the sound into something skeptical and uncertain.

Mat shrugged off Rand’s gentle hold and strode towards where Egwene stood rocking on her heels, the picture of impatience. Out of all of the Two Rivers’ folk, he and Egwene had always been the ones to dream of something beyond their little home. They would’ve done well enough there—Egwene was responsibility incarnate, and Mat was whatever he needed to be—but they were both suited to the wider world. 

He met her uncertain, hopeful smile with a quiet one of his own. 

 

***

 

Evening hadn’t quite fallen by the time they caught up to the brightly colored caravan, but the shadows had begun to stretch and the sun was dipped in amber. Scraps of colorful cloth fluttered like butterflies in the evening light; they caught the wind and dipped this way and that in a dance Mat could almost believe was familiar. Brightly clad figures milled about the parked wagons, looking as though they themselves were dancing, too.

The smell of woodsmoke drifted across the desert expanse. Mat shuddered. He’d never been able to make sense of why he so desperately hated winter; the scent was as uncanny as it was comforting. 

“They don’t look like Whitecloaks,” Perrin said. Still, he shifted into a more stable stance, his body placed slightly in front of Mat and Egwene, as a small group of people split off from the caravan and began to walk towards them. Mat wondered rather uncharitably what Perrin expected to do for them if the blacksmith refused to even touch his weapon. Mat stepped up beside him and rested his own hand on the stolen blade tucked within his coat.

Egwene and Rand fell back a few steps. With Rand’s bow and Egwene’s imperfect but still powerful channeling, they were better as distance fighters. Besides, if everything went to shit and Egwene was injured, they would have lost their only healer. (Rand’s ‘field healing,’ which had been imparted to the man in an ongoing and continuously tedious battle on the part of one Tam al’Thor, would not do much against the marks left by a blade.)

And yet, there were no weapons here. Sure, the large staffs that the people carried could pack quite the punch, and if the three large dogs turned their teeth against Mat’s friends then all was lost, but Mat knew with an unimaginable certainty that these folk wouldn’t do them harm. As though his fingers were made of brittle iron that would snap at too harsh of a treatment, he pried them slowly from the dagger and lowered his hand to his side. 

“What do you want?” Egwene called sharply as soon as the group came within hearing distance. Mat’s heart ached at the fear in her voice. “Who are you? What do you want from us?” 

The old woman at the head of the little band didn’t seem to care much for shouting. She continued moving forward, much to Egwene’s alarm and Mat’s minor frustration. Really, was the entire world out to scare their wits from them? Mat reached a hand behind him, attempting to gesture for Egwene to be quiet, and was only a little surprised when she latched onto him with a cold, tight grasp. 

If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself back in the grey-boarded walls of his home, with Bode clinging to him as he faced their father down. 

“Do you know the song?” the woman asked, her shrewd eyes scanning each of them. Her face folded in on itself for just a second as she caught sight of Rand and the weapons strapped to his back, but by the time she finished her question, her posture was as open as theirs were cautious.

Mat swallowed back the urge to say something equally ridiculous and poetic in response. The woman would likely take his words as a mockery, however right they felt to him, and then where would they be?

“Do you know the song?” she asked again. 

Mat would’ve kept his mouth shut, he really would’ve. Yet, he could feel Egwene’s fingers trembling almost imperceptibly against his own, and there was a weary stubbornness in the woman’s voice that he couldn’t help but respect.

Respect could go a long way, out here in the cold. “Your welcome warms our spirits, as your fires warm the flesh, but we do not know the song,” Mat answered with a weight that wasn’t his own. 

Just over the woman’s left shoulder, a young man with short locs and a brown striped shawl raised an eyebrow. He looked almost… impressed. Something warm and light fluttered inside Mat’s chest. He squeezed Egwene’s hand quickly, and she echoed his words, as did Perrin and Rand (with varying levels of eloquence).

“He may not know the song, but he knows the response—that’s more than you can say for most we’ve met. You’re scaring them,” the young man added in a dramatic whisper. The old woman gave him the most deadpan stare Mat had ever seen.

“Then we seek still. As it was, so shall it be, if we but remember—seek, and find.” Then, making the transition from priestly ritual to genuine kindness look almost elegant, she smiled a wrinkled smile. “I’m Ila. This is Raen,” she gestured to a man behind her who looked to be about her age. “You all look awful.”

Mat couldn’t even find it in him to be needled by the comment. The group before them opened and furled out like new leaves in spring, welcoming them into their folds. 

“And she says I’m the rude one,” the young man murmured to Mat as he, along with the rest of his people, shepherded them all towards the first warm meal they’d had in days. “I’m Aram.”

“Mat.” The heat in his face had nothing to do with the fever still burning in his bones.

 

***

 

“Who are you?” With thick, warm blankets wrapped around their shoulders and bowls of food in their laps, the wariness seemed to ease from the four travelers. When Egwene took up her ever-voracious questioning once more, her tone was almost pleasant.

“I thought our reputation preceded us.” Aram winked at Mat. “Your friend here certainly seems to know of us.” Mat shifted uncomfortably. Having those pretty, earthen-brown eyes on him was all well and good, but he’d rather not have to explain where his words had come from, thank you very much.

“Reputation is based on very little, and even less that is true or kind,” Ila cut in. “We are the Tuatha’an, the Traveling People.”

Egwene exchanged glances with Rand and Perrin, still looking confused. Mat barely resisted rolling his eyes. Strange words and unfamiliar voices aside, his friends must have at least read a few storybooks during their lives. He’d literally gotten several of the girls’ favorites from Mistress Al’vere, which meant that at least Egwene should have known better. Still, the three of them shook their heads.

“Surely you’ve heard of the Tinkers,” Aram offered with a half-laugh. “We steal your gold, your babies, your wives?”

Rand’s brows furrowed in alarm. Perrin shifted, back straightening, hackles rising. Mat pinched the bridge of his nose.

“We do no such thing. We follow the Way of the Leaf, seeking an end to war and needless pain through a path that will be made by our own footsteps. We have sworn off of violence,” Ila corrected Aram in a tone that implied that she was about to swear back onto violence if her grandchild didn’t shut his mouth. “The stories about us are often not told by those who we would have tell them, but our fires are open to you—no matter which ones you’ve heard.”

Mat turned his spoon over and over between his fingers and watched the red light of the setting sun glint off of it. Beneath it, a bed of yellow rice and a piece of flatbread came into and out of focus. Something in him was hungry, but Mat found himself entirely divorced from the feeling.

 

***

 

Birgitte should have felt ill at ease amongst those who would shun her for everything she represented, but her hands and heart were steady. She was an archer. She’d felt the sting of snapped bowstrings, and drawn splinters and blood from her flesh on the few but memorable occasions when her longbow had broken. She held more respect than she could ever express for those that could bend without breaking.

She blinked heavily in an attempt to steady her blurring vision, hoping that the others would think that they were just clearing the smoke from their eyes. As slow as the mountains and as quickly as the snap of a flycatcher’s bill, she realized three things simultaneously. Firstly, the blade tucked into Mat’s vest was trying to fight her for control of the boy’s mind. Delightful. Secondly, her hand had stilled on the spoon for entirely too long not to be noticeable, and neither she nor Mat had yet taken a bite of their dinner. Thirdly, and this one sent a strange thrill of fear through her, Ila was watching them as though she knew .

“You should eat something. You’re as scrawny as a stick,” the woman told them.

Birgitte shifted uncomfortably beneath that gaze. Light, she wished Fys had stepped in instead of her, but Fys had been… distraught, needless to say, after she and Mat had nearly collapsed into chaos over their mutual existence the night before. Fys deserved a rest, and Birgitte could handle this well enough. 

“I’m not very hungry,” Mat mumbled. Birgitte resisted the urge to smack him upside the head. She understood, really, she did, but he couldn’t turn down freely offered food. There was no guaranteeing when they’d next get to eat. But, “Here, Perrin, you take some more,” Mat continued on. He got as far as attempting to shovel some of his rice into Perrin’s bowl before his friend pressed a hand against his chest to stop him.

Once, that touch had been trusted. A palm splayed over the ribcage, a way of protecting the heart beneath, though finger bones could do little against a blade. A steady, grounding presence. Today, Perrin’s littlest finger brushed against the hard metal of the dagger through the fabric, and Birgitte dropped the bowl and scrambled to her feet. 

Perrin’s mouth opened and closed around a silent apology. Birgitte felt as though she were being burned alive. Protect, protect, protect , screamed every instinct in their shattered mind, but there were no threats here, only bright, smiling faces that were slowly growing dull in their worry. 

“I’m not that hungry,” Birgitte echoed. “I’ll just…” In this unfamiliar place, there were few to no excuses that she could offer for stumbling away so abruptly, so she left her sentence hanging and walked with all the gravitas of a general and all the strength of an infant towards the shadowed part of the caravan, away from the sunburned horizon.

Between one blink and the next, she found herself tucked half beneath one of the carts, with the fingers of one hand gripping metal wheel spokes and the other pressing hard against the dagger and Mat’s racing heart beneath. She wanted to grasp the thing and throw it away. She wanted to let it rust in the sand until it was no more consequential than ash. She wanted to cling on like they’d clung to Natti Cauthon’s skirts when she’d headed for the door on those first cold winter nights after Bode was born. 

“You’re meant to be strong,” she cursed herself in Mat’s voice. “You’re meant to protect them. That’s why you’re here. Stop being such a bloody coward .” 

“Is there really so much wrong with cowardice?” 

Birgitte squeaked and scrambled up. At least, she tried to scramble up, but having forgotten where she was sitting, she clocked her head rather smartly on the wooden boards above her instead. Blinking away spots and the darkness that had encroached on the landscape without her noticing, her vision resolved to a picture that neither she nor Mat would ever forget as long as they were alive. Illuminated by distant firelight and framed by the silver clouds behind him, Aram looked down at her with his lips tilting up at the corners like a crescent moon. 

Birgitte rubbed her head and shifted so that she wasn’t quite cowering beneath the wagon anymore. Aram sat on his heels a few paces from her. In one of his hands, steam drifted languidly from a wooden bowl of rice. “You’re not the only one who’s lived through lean times, you know,” he said conversationally. “A diet made entirely of plant matter doesn’t lend itself well to keeping meat on your bones during the winter. Still, we seem to have a different approach to the ebb and flow of this world from most people I’ve met.”

“Do you meet a lot of people during your travels?” Birgitte asked. 

Aram snorted. “Some. Most of them aren’t nearly as interesting as you. All of you, I mean.” 

Birgitte knew that his correction was meant to include Mat’s friends in the comment, but for just a second, she let herself indulge in the fiction that Aram knew there was more than one person looking back at him from Mat’s eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself and clung on.

“For a lot of people, what you have is yours to keep—even if it spoils in keeping before you can use it. That’s not how it works for the Tuatha’an.” For the first time, Birgitte could hear honest pride in his voice when he spoke of his people. “If we have little, everyone gets less. If we have plenty, though…”

He held out the bowl, and Birgitte snaked one arm out through the spokes of the wheel to take it. 

“If we have plenty, we all share in it. One person taking more doesn’t mean that another has to take less.”

Birgitte stirred the rice slowly. First to the right, then to the left, then to the right again. She had the strangest feeling that the steel pressed against their skin would sap all the flavor from the dish and leave it tasting like blood. 

“My Ma told me that when she was little, she and Ila were traveling through a forest, and they found a patch of berries. The caravan was smaller back then, but there still weren’t enough berries to go around if everyone wanted to eat their fill and leave enough for the birds and bears to do the same.”

The first bite of a rice, barely a few grains balanced on the tip of the tin spoon, tasted as rich as summer in the Age of Legends. 

“Now, my Ma thought she was very smart. She probably was—though not as smart as Ila. I think the proportion of brains declines with every generation of my family. She thought she knew how to convince the others that they could take all of the berries and it wouldn’t be wrong. She’d been studying, you see. She was sure she knew all the legends and teachings of our people, and she’d figured out how to turn them on their heads.”

As she ate, a warmth began to spread through Birgitte’s core that even Shadar Logoth’s parasitic cruelty couldn’t sap.

“So my Ma, all big-eyed and fuzzy-haired, looks up at Ila and says, ‘We aren’t meant to cling to time as though it is certain.’

“Ila, thinking that her daughter has finally started to understand the Tuatha’an way, nods very sagely. She tells my Ma, ‘You are completely correct, my dear. We must embrace uncertainty if we are to bend and not break in the winds of time and change.’

“‘So since it isn’t certain that any other creatures are going to come eat these berries,’ my Ma says, 'shouldn't we have them all now? We shouldn't waste the gifts that this world has given us.'”

Birgitte lifted her hand to cover her mouth as she laughed, and only then realized that she'd managed to eat more than half of the rice. When she looked up, Aram was smiling softly at her, and the knowing in his gaze was much more familiar than that in Ila’s had been. Perhaps it had been too long since Ila had been young enough that a single bite of rice seemed capable of changing the world. “Your Ma sounds as sharp as a whip—if you don’t mind my using such a violent metaphor.”

Aram grinned. “I think she would’ve found it perfect. She certainly mastered the art of tongue-lashing, since she couldn’t use her hands to do it. She knew that peace was strength, but she always thought that peace was useless without knowledge.”

The past tense brushed against Birgitte like a feather instead of hitting her like a blow. Logically, the polite thing to do would be to apologize for Aram’s loss. It had been a dozen turns of the Wheel since Birgitte had known her own mother’s kindness, though, and Mat’s mother was far from a pleasant example. She couldn’t bring herself to apologize for the fact that Aram had gotten a mother who he’d loved enough to miss.

“Well, you certainly seem to know quite a bit,” Birgitte teased.

“So do you.”

In the circle of firelight behind her, someone had started slapping their hands against their knees, and someone else was humming a tune. She crawled out from beneath the wagon. Aram held out his hand. He wasn’t demanding, or even requesting—just offering. Birgitte and Mat together placed theirs in his calloused palm and let him pull them towards the dance. They discarded their nearly empty bowl along the way and didn't even hear it hit the ground.

For whatever Song the Tuatha’an thought they were missing, they could already make music beautiful enough to sweep Birgitte off her feet. She spun through the night alongside Aram in a whirlwind of moonlight and fire. She could feel Fys behind her, Amera and Artur at her sides, and Gema weaving between all of them and catching each of their hands in turn. Mat, most miraculously of all, laughed and whooped until the ache in his lungs was no more.

That night beneath the stars, for the first time since Mat was born, they could all exist joyfully without caring where one of them ended and the next began. 

Notes:

Please leave a kudos or a comment for your very sleepy author!

So I know I put my endgame relationships for this fic in the tags, but as I was plotting this chapter, the idea of Mat and Aram having a tiny, adorable, caring flirtation with the general understanding that it's going to end once the Two Rivers' folks travel on just grabbed ahold of me and refused to let go.

Birgitte also decided that she was going to be involved, and who am I to say no to a Hero of the Horn?

Chapter 5

Summary:

The calm before the storm.

Notes:

I am freeeeeee! I passed all of my classes and now I get to chill, write, and enjoy my summer job.

Trigger Warnings: Blink-and-you-miss-it reference to past non-con (it's mainly the way Mat views touch), consensual and not very explicit kissing, and depressive thoughts.

Despite the wintery chill in the air, the canvas roofs on the wagons trapped so much heat that Mat almost felt warm when perched on the back of one of them. His coat hung loosely about his shoulders, and while he still felt achy and unsteady, he no longer had to fight to hold himself together. The fever had broken, probably, or eating two meals in a row had given him the strength to weather it more effectively. He barely even slumped as the cart rolled across the bumpy ground.

“Mat,” hissed a sharp voice, and Mat nearly ruined all of his progress by tumbling off of the wagon into the dust.

“Blood and ashes, Rand, what?” He ran a shaky hand over his face. 

Rand peered stealthily out from the shadows beside the caravan. Upon seeing that Mat was alone in the wagon, he scrambled up and gestured for Mat to budge over. Mat did, and obligingly only rolled his eyes once.

“I don’t think these people like me,” Rand whispered as if confessing a terrible secret. He darted a surreptitious glance at the wagon behind them. At its head, Aram grinned cheekily back. “Except for Aram, maybe,” Rand admitted. “But the rest of them, I can see them watching me when they think I’m not looking, and they always seem so scornful. It makes my skin crawl.”

“Might it have something to do with the fact that you’re carrying multiple weapons out in the open? I don’t think the Tuatha’an appreciate sharp pointy things.”

Rand nudged him in the side, an annoyed laugh bubbling up from his chest. The laugh turned into a gasp when Mat came even closer to tipping off of the wagon this time; Rand caught him under the arms and dragged him back until Mat’s spine was flush with his chest. Aram smirked at them. Mat scowled.

“You’ll be okay,” Mat said, once his heart had stopped attempting to leap out of his throat. “You’ve got the rest of us here with you; we’ll keep an eye on it. Besides, I don’t care what they think. You’re our Rand al’Thor, and that’s what matters. They don’t even know you.” The words were a bit too protective for the situation at hand, but they’d been building within Mat throughout the years of quiet, odd looks that the other Two Rivers folk liked to throw at Rand.

Rand shook his head, chin ruffling Mat’s hair. “I can’t help but feel as though they know something I don’t.”

“What would they know about you after a day that you don’t know after twenty years?” 

Rand laughed. Mat felt his own face fold into an expression of concern and saw Aram turn his head away to give them more privacy. Great. Good to know that his emotions were that visible, he supposed. 

“I’m starting to think everyone knows more than I do.”

By virtue of some miraculous upwelling of willpower, Mat managed not to say, “This, again?” It was a near thing, though, so much so that he almost missed Rand’s next words.

“My Da thought he was going to die.”

“He’ll be alright, Rand, I promise.” Mat half turned, but Rand squeezed his shoulder, stilling him.

“Don’t look at me. I can’t say this while you're looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Mat.”

“Rand.”

“He said things that night. Strange, fantastical things; the sort that you’d read in one of the stories that your sisters love so much. I want to believe that he was just delirious from pain, but I know he wasn’t. I know that he wasn’t, because everyone here looks at me the way that he said he looked at me when he first found me.”

“Found you,” Mat said slowly, almost sounding out the words. 

“‘As warm as an ember in the snow.’ He said I was screaming so loud that he was surprised both of the Light damned armies didn’t come down on him, but the battle was already a slaughter on both sides by the time I came into being. There wasn’t anyone else left to hear.”

Mat supposed that he should have said something wise. He should have told Rand that Tam al’Thor was still his father and loved him just as much, no matter where he came from. He should have said that he didn’t give a shit about Rand's blood, whether he was Aiel or something else entirely. He should have joked that maybe this mystery heritage was why Rand was grumpy all the time. “Sometimes I think I’m the most unlucky man alive,” he admitted finally, "and even then the Wheel conspires to prove me wrong.”

Rand snorted. “If this is you calling me unlucky, then I think I really am doomed.”

“No, no.” Mat wriggled and shifted until he could look at Rand’s face without losing any of the contact between their bodies. (He was finally getting warm, dammit.) “What I’m saying is—that’s luck. A million rolls of the dice and Tam found you, brought you home, and I got to have you as a best friend. That’s-” he gestured widely, “luck.”

For a while, Rand just stared at the dust clouds as they drifted aimlessly across the road. Little fragments of stone, battered by time until they were as inconstant as the wind itself, each falling where it pleased. Chance after chance, piece after piece. “Is it just me, or did the world get a whole lot bigger in the past few days?”

Mat wasn’t sure, but he knew that he felt quite a bit smaller within it. “Everything’s more to scale now. The things that we thought were larger than life…”

For just a second, Rand’s eyes darted to meet Mat’s. There was something in his gaze, as firm as stone and as wild as sand—gray resolve tinged blue with hope. “I think I need to talk to Egwene.” He rested his hand against the back of Mat’s neck. “You’ll be alright here?”

“‘Course I will.”

“You’re still shivering."

Mat waved him off. “I’m all good. If I get too starved for company, I’ll throw a pebble at Aram.”

“You do that.” Rand glanced back towards the man in question. Instead of suspicion, Aram nodded at him with a strange sort of respect. Rand seemed to settle a bit and finally pulled his hand from Mat’s neck. He lept of the wagon, landed with an inelegant thud in the dust, and then grinned back at Mat before he disappeared. 

Mat chuckled. Rand, an Aiel? He’d never heard such nonsense in his entire life. Aiel were meant to be quiet . 

 

***

 

Mat did eventually resort to throwing things at Aram. Pebbles, buttons, and bits of lint glinted across the gap between the wagons. Mat would have rather been on the ground, helping , but Ila had taken one look at his flushed, clammy face that morning and told him that he would be sitting his ass down until he was well enough to do any real work without keeling over. As a result, Mat had been left deeply embarrassed and more than a little bored. He didn’t know the last time that he’d sat still for this long, and aside from Rand’s little interlude, he’d been alone for the entire day. 

Aram snatched yet another button out of the air and winked at Mat. “It’s nice to see someone else suffering under Ila's hounding, for a change. I think this is the first day that I’ve lived without her peering over my shoulder every five minutes. She’s much more concerned about what sorts of trouble you four have gotten yourselves into.”

“Is that why she’s trapped me here? So that I can’t cause any trouble?”

“You’re not technically trapped,” Aram said conversationally. “It’s just that you aren’t sure whether you can get down from there without collapsing when you hit the ground.”

Mat offered him a rather unsavory gesture in recompense for his unwanted wisdom.

“Hey, it’s all good. You’ll clear the fever in a day or two, and then she’ll be making you break your back alongside the rest of us. You might even miss the chance to sit still!”

“And if I don’t clear it?” Mat snarked back before he could even consider what he was saying.

“Trying to earn yourself a bit more leisure time, are you?” Aram’s laugh, clear as a warbler’s call, tapered off unceremoniously. 

Mat swung one leg off of the back of the wagon and attempted to determine how many times he could kick the spokes of the wheel without his boot getting caught. An earthen-brown hand tapped gently at the scuffed toe. Mat glanced up and found himself staring directly at Aram’s worried frown. 

“For Light’s sake.” Mat swiped a hand across his eyes and looked away. Upon fixing his gaze on the sky, he realized with a jolt that the sun had sunk much closer to the horizon than it should have in the time he thought had elapsed. Someone else had taken Aram’s place at the head of the wagon.

“When we stop for the night, you should talk to Raen. He’s good with herbs and such. I’m sure he can fix you up.”

“If I have to drink one more cup of tea, Aram, I’m not going to be held responsible for my actions. I’m fine. Like you said, I’ll clear it in the next couple of days. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Except you know that there is.”

“And who’s to say that I’d tell you—even if that was true?”

Aram shrugged one shoulder. “Your friends are worried about you, but you haven’t said a thing to them. If you tell Ila or Raen, they’ll probably share your secrets with your friends and think they’re being helpful. If you keep it to yourself, it’ll probably eat you alive.”

Mat flinched at exactly how true that particular statement felt. Since he’d taken the dagger from Shadar Logoth, all that he could feel was the gaping, sinking hole that it seemed to have carved in his core. The emptiness moved and breathed in a rhythm entirely alien to him.

Aram flung his hands out to the sides, “So, that leaves you with me. What’ll it be?”

“My friends can probably tell you that I’m not one for making healthy choices.”

“Come on, Mat. You’ll be doing me a favor. I’m starved for stories around here—even the sad ones.” Aram kept pace with Mat’s wagon, one steady foot after the next, as Mat considered the offer. There would probably be no dissuading him. It wasn't as though Mat had to tell him the whole truth, either.

“I don’t know how to deal with good things and I keep trying to shatter them before they can overwhelm me. I can't stop.” Realizing exactly how honest he'd been, even without mentioning the dagger, he looked past Aram's shoulder and tried to breathe.

Aram blinked. “Let me get this straight. You consider the circumstances that led to you hitching a ride with strangers while running a fever and looking half starved to death to be good ?”

“Best time I’ve had in ages.”

“You’re insane. You’re bloody insane,” Aram laughed. His eyes were as bright as fire, and he didn’t bother to hide the concern in them. It was more bearable, that way. 

“I’m certainly getting there. I can’t even tell what day it is anymore.”

“Hey—neither can I!”

For some reason, Mat found this so impossibly hilarious that he burst out laughing. Aram snorted, and soon they were both cackling and wheezing in the middle of the desert. Mat felt something crack in his lungs, coming free and leaving him breathing easily for the first time all day. Still giggling rather ridiculously, he pushed himself off of the wagon and landed in the dust beside Aram. 

Aram caught him obligingly before he could fall flat on his face, and Mat snickered again.

“I wish I could show you that things can stay good,” Aram murmured. Mat could feel the other man’s breath against his cheek, as gentle as the wings of a butterfly.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think I’m lucky in that respect. Day to day, things aren’t perfect, but they’re good enough. They last. You’re not me, though. I can’t promise you a reality that isn’t yours.”

Mat knew that, but he hated it nevertheless. The past day with the Tuatha’an had felt like a dream. He didn’t want to wake up anytime soon. “Hey Aram,” he said, “do you want to do something stupid?”

Aram flushed and nodded, suddenly almost bashful.

Good things didn’t last as far as Mat was concerned, but he was beginning to realize that they could be real, while he was holding onto them. 

 

***

 

They didn’t go beyond kissing. Privacy didn’t seem to be a thing among the Tuatha’an, and Mat wasn’t that desperate. Even if he was, something slimy flipped over in his stomach at the thought of having to shed the dagger along with his coat. Besides, Aram had asked , which was almost an entirely foreign concept as far as Mat was concerned, and Mat had said that he wasn't interested in anything beyond kissing. (Aram had listened. This day just kept getting stranger and stranger.)

The kissing, though—Mat had kissed people before, sure, but Aram’s lips against his felt like lightning. They had to break off every few minutes to laugh and breathe, and every time, Mat was shocked to realize that he was grinning. 

This was touch in a way that he didn’t realize touch could exist. Gentle, fun, and above all else, welcomed. Perhaps Rand was right after all—the world was so much bigger than either of them had ever known. 

 

***

 

It turned out later that Rand hadn’t been thinking in quite such positive terms. Mat stumbled back to his bedroll in the caravan after another night of drinking, dancing, and music to find Egwene sitting on her heels in the dirt, tear tracks sparkling on her cheeks. Her face was streaked the light that the rivers held when the moon was full. Mat’s heart sank gently in his chest. He wasn’t surprised, or even worried—he was just sorry.

He offered Egwene a hand, and together they climbed into the wagon and lowered the calico scarf over the entrance. Egwene hesitated for a mere second, then flung herself against him and began to cry.

 

***

 

Fys ran her hands through Egwene’s hair, twisting strands together and then letting them fall apart again without a care for how they landed. Egene pressed her head against the body’s sternum so that her sobs shook both of their shoulders. For a second, Fys was all too aware that Egwene’s cheek was less than an inch from the stolen blade, but there were more important matters at hand and she shrugged off the realization as one would shed a heavy, damp cloak. The girl was crying as though her heart was broken, and Fys ached for her—though she doubted that the pain would last very long. Rand had made the right decision, but the kindest choice wasn’t always the one that felt the best.

“He doesn’t love me anymore.”

“Silly girl.” Fys twirled a strand of Egwene’s hair around one finger, then let it fall. “You can cry as much as you want to, but don’t you go lying to yourself. Rand loves you with his entire heart, just not in a way that looks how you’d like it to in the circumstances that you’ve found yourself in.”

“I don’t want to be sensible,” Egwene whined. “I just want to be angry. He broke up with me. I get to be angry.”

Fys didn’t contradict her, but she didn’t voice any agreement, either. Her own love had taught her that holding on sometimes was the best choice, but the things she’d seen through the body’s eyes had long since revealed the nuance in that truth. It would have been healthier for everyone if Natty and Abel Cauthon had let go while they still had the chance.

The wheel wove as the wheel willed, but people often had a better grasp on the threads than they imagined. Fys held on, and thought about the fact that she hadn’t felt lonely all evening, and wondered whether things might turn out alright after all. 

(If the evil of Shadar Logoth had possessed a face, it would have licked its lips.)

Notes:

Comment plz so that I know someone is still reading this?

Also, I'm sorry about the timing on Rand and Egwene's breakup, but:
- It needed to happen for the story, and the way that they're dragging out that relationship in the show isn't healthy for either party.
- For the moment, this story is only in the POVs of Mat and his associated folks, which is already six perspectives to date (I have a document listing all of the beans). Tapping into Rand or Egwene's POV for the breakup was not something I wanted to get into yet; therefore, it had to happen *now* for plot logistic reasons.

Anyway, who's ready for some action in the next chapter? It's time for the larger plot to catch up again!

Chapter 6

Summary:

The storm following the calm. The Whitecloaks return, we meet Thom, and anyone who's been attempting to follow the characters' journey on a map becomes incredibly confused.

Notes:

Chapter Trigger Warnings: A dead body, allusions to (lists a million things) torture, violence, self harm, child abuse, past non-consensual touching (I can't even tell if anyone could perceive it as such because I'm hedging my bets on where I'm going with that part of the story, but I figured I was better off being overly-cautions with these), and execution. If you want to skip the majority of these, control 'f' to where Aram's name first appears in the chapter, as he breaks Mat out of the nightmare sequence where most of these things appear.

OKAY LISTEN UP: Just in case you guys don't read the end notes, I want to say here that even though the TV show is canceled, THIS STORY IS CONTINUING ON!!! Guess I have to read the books now... there go my plans for the summer... /lh

Mat didn’t really sleep that night; he drifted restlessly from one fever-wrought illusion to the next. The canvas-covered slats above him wavered into the peak of a tent, the sail of a ship, the rough-hewn roof of a cabin. Simultaneously in concert with their movement and separate entirely, Mat danced drunkenly through a thousand realities. He could feel every bone in his hands, aching as though they were bursting from the inside out. The pain was the only constant.

His palms became calloused from grasping the pommel of a sword or a training staff; his fingers bled from the bite of a bowstring; his skin softened in a way he barely remembered as he rocked a baby to sleep. 

He felt each word like a burr against the dry flesh of his throat.

“ Bend your back leg—you’re going to break your knee. ”

“Step away from her!”

“ Hush, my darling. Hush, Matrim.”

And his name—her name—their name? Mat reached a hand through the darkness towards where he was certain Egwene’s sleeping form rested, but he couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t reach anything to claw himself awake. Only that dull, aching, impossible pain was his companion in this strange inconstancy. 

Matrim. Birgitte. Amera. Artur. Gema.

Their lungs burned with what must have been a cry, but they couldn’t bring their lips to make a sound. The words weren’t a whisper— Mat himself was a whisper. 

Something flashed in the darkness. Mat rolled away instinctively; rolled, and rolled, and rolled and somewhere in the midst of the empty dark, he must have encountered gravity, for he hit empty space and fell until he crashed into the wooden floor once more. The air smelled of woodsmoke, mildew, and potato skins; Mat retched. 

Blinking his dreary eyes half open, he found himself face to face with Ila. Her gray hair tumbled down her back, and in her left hand, she held a spear. She looked away. “If the sapling bends, it does not break. I am truly sorry,” she said, in an achingly familiar voice that he had never heard before—and certainly had never heard from her. 

The rest occurred in pieces. A figure flashed across the room, all gray shawl and thin hands. His mother laughed her high, innocent laugh. A hand brushed his cheek, and then his neck, and Mat awoke with a blistering scream.

Aram caught his hands before he could claw for the wretched dagger still tucked within his coat. “Easy,” he whispered. “Easy, Mat.”

Mat screamed again.

“I know, I know. Bloody Light do I know, but you can’t hurt yourself. You’re not trapped, but I can’t let your hands go until you calm down. Can you try that for me? Try to calm down?”

“I don’t… who…” Mat rocked back and forth as the wagon rolled over a gnarled root. 

“I’m Aram; I’m a member of the Tuatha’an. You and your friends have been traveling with us for two days now. Do you need me to get them for you?” Aram squeezed his hands—and they really were Mat’s hands, he realized. They still ached something fierce, but he knew them. He’d gambled away every bit of his luck with these same hands. 

Still, he gasped out, “No. No—I know you. Who am I?” He didn’t think he could have asked the question of anyone else. Trust and anonymity twined into the most beautiful combination in front of him: Aram wouldn’t shun him, but he also wouldn’t stick around for long enough to become a problem.

Aram almost laughed. “I’m not sure I get a say in that. But from what I’ve seen, you’re Mat Cauthon—a person who likes dancing, and storytelling, and who loves his friends with an icy fire that’ll burn him up if he isn’t careful. You’re brave, even when you aren’t strong. That’s who you are.”

“Okay,” Mat breathed. He tried to blink away the sticky feeling in his eyes, but he found himself in that horrible place again and forced them to remain open. “Okay.” He tugged one of his hands back and ran it over his face. “Where’s Egwene?”

Aram shifted rather uncomfortably. For the man who was at home anywhere, he seemed rather unsuited to where he was now sitting. “She’s talking with Rand and Perrin.”

Mat winced, Aram echoed the movement with a sympathetic grimace. “She’s talking with them about me, you mean.” Mat hated how effectively he’d been stripped bare in the days he’d spent away from the Two Rivers. It hadn’t even been a week.

Aram seemed to argue with himself for a mere second, and then he nudged Mat’s ankle gently with his foot. “You ought to go tell them your part of it. They can’t do much reasoning without the full picture, now, can they?” He gestured to Mat’s sweat-soaked hair; Mat let him use his fingers to comb it into something resembling order. “Go on, now.”

Mat dragged his shaking, gangly limbs to the edge of the wagon, then paused. “Aram.” He didn’t look back, only kept his gaze on the kaleidoscope of Tuatha’an wagons and the evergreen darkness of the forest around them. “Thank you.”

Then, Mat slipped off of the wagon and let his feet hit the dust, knees bending but not buckling beneath him.

 

***

 

He found the others walking beside Ila and had to suppress a tiny shudder upon seeing her. Her head tilted slightly, but she didn’t turn from where she was deep in conversation with Perrin. “You are strong,” she was saying, “and you need not fear that. Strength does not make you a weapon.”

“Every tool needs strength,” Perrin murmured, “to do what it needs to do.”

“Light, he’s starting to sound like her. Is he going to convert to turnip curry for the rest of his life, too?” Mat took a small amount of pleasure in the fact that Egwene jumped when he spoke. Rand only turned and grasped Mat’s elbow, tugging him to walk between them. Mat wasn’t surprised; he’d rather expected to be used as a buffer between his two headstrong and smarting friends in the days to come. 

“Glad to see you back in the land of the living, Mat,” Egwene teased. She paused to scrutinize him more closely. Mat obligingly slowed his pace to accommodate her. Let her fuss—he was well enough, and he’d tell her as much if she asked. Unfortunately, Egwene was rather predisposed to assumption in the place of genuine curiosity. “We’ll be at the White Tower soon, and I’m sure the healers there will be of much more use to you than I am.”

Mat found that this rubbed him the wrong way for a number of reasons, the most important being that, “You’re of plenty help to me, Egwene. You’re brilliant; you’re just inexperienced. Don’t you go forgetting that.”

Egwene snorted. “Are you going soft on me, Matr-”

Rand held up a hand. It seemed that the very birds stopped singing as he directed them. 

Cursing the wheel and the pattern and the world itself in a way that was quite likely to get him cursed right back in return, Mat peered slowly past Rand’s shoulder. At the head of the caravan, face to face with Ila and only a few feet from kind, heartbroken Perrin, stood the Whitecloaks’ Questioner. 

 

***

 

Amera had the knife in her hand before she knew what she was doing. She knew it wasn’t worth it, that if she spilled blood with it she’d damn them more than Mat ever had, but that monster was inches from their friend. Not only their friend, either. Perrin Aybara was the only person who’d ever had both the strength and the knowledge to protect Mat from his parents (though it hadn’t lasted long). The Questioner was approaching her compatriot . 

Egwene grasped her arm. It was only Amera’s everlasting oath not to harm an innocent that kept her from shoving the girl away. 

“You can’t have them,” Ila was saying. Them. That meant that the Whitecloaks had seen all of them. They’d know that Moiraine’s story had been false; no lies would now do for them. Words were nothing, here. Luckily, words had never been Amera’s strong suit.

“‘Can’t?’ That’s an interesting word to be coming out of a Tinker’s mouth. How exactly do you plan to stop me?”

Amera’s heart nearly splintered right out of her chest as Ila dropped her staff to the ground and linked arms with the other Tuatha’an. No. No . These people would not die for them—not while Amera had a say in it. There wasn’t an oath in the world that could bind her now. 

Amera tucked Mat’s over her mouth and charged.

 

***

 

Mat came to with Rand’s arm around his back, tears in his eyes, and the taste of wool on his tongue. His feet crunched and stumbled their way across the forest floor almost independently of his legs. Rand was holding him as they ran. Even if Mat had possessed all of his faculties about him, he wouldn’t have been able to resist Rand’s grasp enough to turn back. Before, the fact that Rand was stronger than him had never been a worry. Mat had known that his friend wouldn’t misuse that strength.

“We have to go back. Perrin and Egwene-”

“Are strong.” Rand didn’t look at him. Mat burned with shame. He heard the words unsaid: Egwene and Perrin were strong, while he wasn’t. Aram had been wrong. “Mat—hey, Mat. They’ll make it. They’ll be fine. It’s not your fault.”

“I made it worse, didn’t I?”

“No. People like that, they’ll cause all the pain they can regardless of whether it’s prompted. You didn’t cause this. No matter what happens, it’s not on—it’s not on either of us. Now, if you want to do something good, something brave and strong, right now, then bloody run .”

Mat ran. Running, it seemed, was pretty much all that he was good for.

 

***

 

By the time that the two boys reached something resembling civilization, Mat felt as though his feet were bleeding and he was liable to shiver right out of his skin. Judging by the concerned glances that Rand kept casting him—despite the fact that Rand had just as much reason to be concerned over his own state as he did over Mat’s—Mat must have looked about as awful as he felt.

Just beyond the little river town, the rising sun cast a peach blush across the indigo sky. Mat knew without a second glance at the damning color that they’d run in the exact opposite direction of where they’d been headed. The White Tower, like the sun, rose in the East. Not only had they left their friends to the hands of a torturer and murderer, but they’d traveled nearly a day further from the only quarter where they could have sought help.

They’d been bloody idiots, if you asked Mat.

You were afraid , his thoughts scolded. People aren’t rational when they get scared.  

Great, he couldn’t escape the world’s perpetual nagging even in his own head. Carrying on a conversation with himself like a fool—Mat was well and truly losing it, wasn’t he?

He was so abandoned to his litany of self accusations and recriminations that he didn’t realize they’d entered the town until he found himself faced with the graying skin of a corpse. Its bloated fingers dangled before his face; the limb had been reaching from an iron-barred cage, but any fervor in the gesture had long since been lost to rigor mortis. 

Mat bit the inside of his cheek and tried very, very hard not to throw up.

Rand needs to put his hood up, now .

“Right,” Mat muttered. “Rand,” he hissed, then louder, “Rand!” 

Rand hesitated where he’d been limping towards the nearest inn, not even noticing that his companion had fallen behind him. Likely his desire to avoid looking at the poor creature suspended above them had spared him any ounce of information he could’ve gleaned from it. 

“Hood up,” Mat almost ordered.

Rand’s fingers hesitated on the edge of the woolen cloth. Tam al’Thor had carded, felted, and stitched that cloak, Mat knew. Light, he wished one of the others was here. They’d always been better at words and feelings. (They’d always had the privilege of being safe to speak and feel them.)

“I don’t care who you are,” Mat assured him quickly. “Wait, no—I care that you’re Rand, okay? I care who you are in there.” He tapped Rand’s chest. “But these people here seem to care about a hell of a lot more than that. I mean-”

He wasn’t even veiled.

“Blood and ashes, he wasn’t even attacking anyone. He wasn’t veiled. They just saw what he looked like and-” Mat broke off, gesturing pointlessly.

Rand took pity on his inarticulate friend and pulled his hood over his fiery hair. 

Calm but not contented, Mat hung close to Rand’s side as they approached the glowing doorway of an inn. The grating sound of a Gleeman’s voice tumbled into the street like a stream over rough rocks, and Mat shivered again. 

“It’ll be warmer inside,” Rand assured him, as observant as ever and just as imperceptive. “Egwene had most of our coin, but we’ve enough to get something hot to eat and a place to bed down. You’ll feel better then.”

Mat groaned. “What I really need is a drink. Light, what I wouldn’t give to forget all of this shit for a night.” 

Rand chuckled as though Mat had made a joke, then took his elbow with a hand that felt like fire and steered Mat through the open door of the inn. Mat nearly stumbled right back out again as a myriad of sights and sounds assaulted him: candlelight, spices, strong ale, and the ever-haunting melody that the Gleeman carried with some measure of eloquence. Rand clung onto his arm, though. Some far-distant part of Mat’s brain realized that Rand was just as afraid to lose sight of him in this place as he was to lose Rand.

Mat stuck by Rand’s side despite the inconvenience this created in such a crowded space. He nearly smacked bodily into a hooded man walking the other way, but he escaped with a knock to the shoulder and a slimy feeling crawling across his skin. 

“We’d like something to eat, if you please,” Rand said to the barmaid before Mat could request a drink and leave them stuck paying for it.

“And-” Mat began anyways.

“We don’t have coin for anything else,” Rand reminded him. “A meal, and maybe the night in someone’s stable if we’re lucky.”

“At this hour?” The barmaid scoffed, though she sounded more incredulous than unkind. “You gents would have better luck roughing it in the forest. Folk aren’t too keen on visitors around here. Only new blood we’ve had in a while is the Gleeman, and he’s just tolerated because he livens the place up.”

Behind them, the Gleeman plucked another mournful chord. The barmaid wrinkled her nose. 

“That’s not counting the poor sap outside, eh?” Mat muttered. Rand elbowed him sharply.

“We’re willing to work for it,” Rand said quickly, “and we’ve got a bit of coin.” He offered his meager purse, and Mat went to search for his own in hopes of supplementing the small sum, but found his hand concerningly empty. Casting off the momentary suspicion that Shadar Logoth’s evil had somehow swallowed up his money the way that it had swallowed the city’s people, he began to search his other pockets.

Mat wasn’t one to behave frantically in a place where there were so many hunting for the scent of blood, but some of his alarm must have shown in his motions. Just as Rand caught on and cast him a worried glance, a calloused, weathered hand dropped a few coins on the bar. “It seems the boy has lost his purse already, Dana. Your fine establishment must be on top of its game tonight.”

Rand’s eyes widened in alarm; Mat’s closed in exasperation. 

Turning on his heel, he found himself chest to chest with the Gleeman, who held Mat’s own coin purse just out of his reach. He lunged for it without a word, but the man danced back and held it higher still. Light, Mat wasn’t used to being the short one. He reached for it again, but they were drawing the eyes of the crowd. Mat couldn’t handle the feeling of so many gazes crawling across his back, and Rand’s meager disguise wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny. He lowered his hand.

The man smirked, though it seemed to give him little pleasure. “You ought to keep a better eye on your riches here, lad.” He cast the barest glance towards Rand, so slight that he must have thought only Mat would perceive it—but the barmaid straightened her stance slightly. Mat drew closer to Rand, burning from the attention that the Gleeman’s presence had brought them. 

“Not much to keep an eye on if you won’t give my purse back,” Mat grumbled.

“Consider it my compensation for the life lesson.”

“Bloody expensive lesson.”

The man shrugged expressively, then, in that way Gleemen and gamblers alike had, he headed for the door before his actions could bring trouble down on his own head. Mat frowned. There was little chance of their affording accommodations without his purse, and he knew that the stranger wouldn’t go far. Leaving Rand in the barmaid’s—Dana’s, as the Gleeman had called her—capable hands, he followed the man out into the night. Dana had seen all they had to hide, Mat could tell, and she hadn’t called an angry mob down on them. Rand could hold his own, and Mat had other business to attend to.

Gleemen, like gamblers, never fully walked away.

Notes:

1. I live for your comments, so please let me know if you're still vibing with this!

2. chamomile_t Rant Time: I'm so immensely sad that they canceled the show. I know that my long-term existence in this fandom has resulted in my fics walking the line between show-viewers and book-readers, but the show first introduced me to these wonderful characters at an incredibly difficult time in my life. I will forever be grateful to it and to the wonderful cast of actors who brought the story to life. Moving forward, many of my characterizations will remain akin to the show and akin to how they are already in this fic. I recently learned that Mat's parents were not initially assholes in the book, and that's truly wonderful for Book Mat, but to be completely honest this story doesn't work without them being that way and I really like how that background set up his TV version's arc. So, for the moment we are bidding adieu to Book Natti and Abell (how did I spell both of their names wrong last chapter?), and continuing as we have been.

3. I guess I have to read the books now? I want to take us through most of the series and explore a lot more of Mat et. al's experiences. I've been lurking in this fandom for a few years now, so I *do* know some of the shit that goes down, but if anyone has trigger warnings or advice for me as I start my journey through the books then that would be beloved!

4. The universe seems to have something against me posting a chapter of this more than every two weeks, but I have a bit more time in my life now, so maybe that will improve!

Chapter 7

Summary:

Mat pickpockets a dead body and gains a singular trustworthy authority figure. (Thom would like to protest that he's not an authority figure - he's just there.)

Notes:

Chapter Trigger Warnings for violence, mildly graphic death (not of a character we like, don't worry), peril, dead bodies, and difficult relationships with touch.

*throws chapter at you* *runs away* I am. So sorry. It has been a full month. Goodness gracious.

After the oppressive heat and clamor of the pub, the cool night air felt like a balm against Mat’s face. He remembered the lotions Nynaeve had brewed up for the sunburns that himself and Rand were constantly acquiring in their youth; they smelled of mint and river water and Mat had squirmed away from her touch more times than not. Light, he missed her like a piece of himself.

Mat was under no illusions that he’d meant all that much to Nynaeve (he’d just been another nuisance for her to spend her days wrangling), but she’d been steady when nothing else was. One of the older kids, at first, and then their Wisdom when the old one had passed on, always running her hands over her braid as if to remind herself of how to hold them all together. She’d been as rough as tree bark and as soft as wool. She’d been strong, and brave, and nearly as much of a dreamer as Mat—though she would have scolded him until she was blue in the face for ever suggesting such a thing.

She’d dreamed of a village where they all looked out for each other and no one had to go hungry. She’d dreamed of people who only loved each other, and never hurt. She’d dreamed of things she’d heard on the wind, Mat knew. Those dreams had grown darker and darker as the winter and the wolves prowled on in the months before she-

Mat pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and fought the tears back. He was out here to find the Gleeman, or some other soul to pass said Gleeman’s favor onto. He and Rand needed the money to get by until they could find the others.

Perhaps it was the thought of Nynaeve, or of Egwene and Perrin at the mercy of the Questioner, but Mat found he didn’t have the stomach to face anyone else head-on tonight. The Gleeman could keep his coin; Mat knew someone who had no reason to mind parting with theirs. Chest a roiling mass of shame, guilt, and grief that left no room at all for air, Mat wandered through the village and tried to pretend that his feet weren’t taking him towards the caged Aielman. 

The people of this place had already acted with such dishonor to a man who meant them no harm. Mat’s own sticky fingers couldn’t tip the scale much further in that direction.

 

***

 

Amera was trying very, very hard not to physically strangle Mat. It was only through a cold understanding of his logic and Artur’s steady restraint that she stilled her hands. The toh he would incur by committing such an act against one already unveiled and beaten—it was incomprehensible to her. She wanted to blame Shadar Logoth’s creeping influence on Mat’s already spinning moral compass, but she knew that there was more to it than the parasite that was even now leaching the warmth from the boy’s heart.

Mat had been raised as a Wetlander. For all intents and purposes, he was a Wetlander. Mat—and Amera, within him—had no claim to the culture that was not of their blood. Amera’s spear was an illusion of memory and air.

 

***

 

Mat studiously didn’t think about the fact that the Aielman was the first person he’d ever seen with hair the same shade as Rand’s. The thick curls fell in sweaty, blood-clotted clumps around the man’s shoulders. His veil, damningly down around his neck instead of covering his mouth as it would’ve been had he meant any harm to the people here, was stiff with spit and bile. He almost radiated cold into the night air, such was the unexpectedness of touching flesh and feeling no warmth at all.

Arrows stuck out of his back and sides like porcupine quills. 

Mat slipped his fingers quickly into the man’s pockets and didn’t think about the bloated torso beneath. 

A silver pendant—that would fetch a good sum, if polished up—a few copper coins, a whittled wooden creature. Mat lifted the thing into the watery moonlight, holding it between himself and the caged man as though they were both exclaiming over it. With a jolt, he recognized the perfect features of a fox staring back at him. 

He remembered the old fox den behind the wisdom’s hut, smelling of musk and ancient things, with tiny bones littering the ground at the base of the hill. He’d played in the dust there when he was younger, studying the remains, turning them this way and that, learning what lay beneath the skin in a mechanical, tactile way. 

He didn’t remember when he’d stopped going back. Perhaps it was after Bode got old enough to wander around and find trouble.

Footsteps crunched across the gravel behind him. Mat grasped the dagger from his coat, noting distantly that his own flesh beneath the fabric was still blessedly warm. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t turn. He couldn’t think, or move, and the world blurred and swayed and spun. 

“Put that knife down, boy, you look ridiculous.”

Mat flinched away from the voice and raised the dagger to point squarely at the Gleeman’s chest. 

“If you’re going to take what little he has left, you might as well give him a bit of his honor back in return. Bury him,” the man clarified when Mat looked at him askance.

“He never lost his honor.” The words came out almost like a question, but they grew firmer as Mat plowed on ahead. “These people hurt him when he wasn’t veiled. He meant them no harm; they killed an innocent. The dishonor is theirs.” 

The Gleeman huffed. “You know more about Aiel ways than I’d expect.”

“I read,” Mat said.

“And I sing. Thom Merrilin.” The Gleeman—Thom—held out his hand. 

Mat didn’t lower his blade. “Don’t touch me.”

The Gleeman did him the kindness of pretending not to hear the shake in his voice, but a strange, unfamiliar look crossed his features. An uncanny mix of suspicion and hope, eyebrows furrowed and lips pressed together just slightly: Mat was certain that he’d seen it somewhere before. He couldn’t remember where. With the river tumbling past through the swelling dawn behind him, gray hair billowing like a cloud of smoke, Thom Merrilin looked at Mat and seemed to recognize something that couldn’t walk away from.

“Alright.” Thom lowered his hand. “No touching. Help me get him down. It’ll be no burial in the way of his people, but it should do.”

Mat shakily tucked the dagger back into an inner pocket. On Thom’s signal, he fisted his hands into the Aielman’s coat and hauled him out of the cage. He fell like a stone, and Mat would have crumpled, but Thom caught the man’s weight easily without ever brushing against Mat. It was the strangest thing, to have his ridiculous, spur-of-the-moment request honored in such a way.

They buried the man in the riverbank. Thom did most of the digging, and Mat was more than happy to stand aside and let the old man break his back over the work if he wanted to. With the slant of the rocky hill that sloped down to the roiling water below, they were able to lay the man to rest so that he was at least facing the sunrise somewhat. It was what they could do, Thom reiterated. 

It seemed to Mat as though it was very little in the face of what had already been done.

Once the grave was dug and the man laid in it, Thom turned towards the blue, blushing sky, where the sun had finally breached the horizon. It seemed they wouldn’t need to stay the night here after all, for it was already over. “Go on, boy,” he offered. “Do what you came here to.”

Somehow, the permission made Mat feel all the worse as he quickly rifled through the last of the man’s pockets. He hadn’t been carrying much, but it would be enough to get them to the White Tower if they slept rough. 

Mat filled in the grave himself. His arms ached so deeply that he felt as though his very bones were being carved into uncanny forms, but he held the shovel in hands that were growing rougher by the day and barely even trembled. He hoped that someone had found enough of Nynaeve to bury. He hoped that if Egwene and Perrin—but no, to even consider that possibility would bring it all too close to being real.

Mat dropped the last shovelful of dirt and tried very hard not to let the tool itself clatter down after it. Thom caught it in midair before it hit the ground; there was that look again. “No reason to hang around here. I’m sure Dana’s cooked up something for breakfast, even if it tastes like dirt, and your sweetheart will be waiting for you.”

At first, Mat thought that Thom was referring to Aram, and his heart leapt at the thought that maybe their friends had reached them after all. Then, the Gleeman’s true meaning broke the surface of his sleep-addled brain. “Blood and bloody ashes, Rand is not my sweetheart. No bloody way,” he insisted. Thom just cackled. 

Mat absolutely did not blush as they made their way back through the village.

Mat was so focused on not blushing, in fact, that when Rand careened into him with a wild look in his blue-gray eyes, he floundered for a long moment before he realized that something was very, very wrong. Rand looked as though he was about to cry. Sure, Rand was the sort of person who cried at all sorts of sweet things like lambs being born or Eldrin making him a flower crown, but Mat had never seen him brought to such an overflowing of emotion by fear of all things. Rand al’Thor was the most fearless person that Mat knew.

“Are you okay?” Mat reached for his friend’s shoulders but Rand grabbed his arm instead without stopping in his headlong sprint. Mat stumbled after him. 

“Dana’s a darkfriend,” Rand hissed. “She locked me in a room, tried to—we need to go. We need to go now, we need to get out of here.”

Like missing a step in the dark, Mat’s thoughts slipped into the empty space holding whatever Dana had ‘tried to’ do and tumbled away as quickly as the river. He gripped Rand’s coat and steered them down one alleyway, and then another, away from the main thoroughfare and any prying eyes. It would buy them a mere few seconds. He didn’t register Thom hurrying after them. The man was not a threat; he had no relevance now. 

 

***

 

No one would touch them. Blade in one hand, Rand’s wrist in the other, Artur drew them through the gnarled city streets towards the promise of relative safety. Dana would be behind them and would know where they had gone; this was a game of speed, not evasion. Maneuvers would do no good if they did not afford them time. 

The woods were in sight. Gray trunks rose like columns above the detritus of the road. One foot and then the next, his legs didn’t buckle because Artur had no sense of the agony shooting through them. He was not afraid; he was not angry. He was the action that he took and nothing more. 

He was not afraid, and yet there was no other explanation for the time he had wasted in getting them out of sight. A split second faster than them, Dana sprung from the mouth of a side street and faced them down.

Artur pressed Rand behind him with limbs like iron—strong, and brittle. He hadn’t thought.

“Not a step closer.” The ruby in the dagger’s handle glinted like blood in the early sunlight.

“You think that pretty thing will stop me?” Dana smiled with all the warmth of a winter famine. “To think how pleased he’ll be when I bring him two of the five that he’s looking for. I’ll be free of this place-” She cut herself off with a wet gurgle, blinked, and dropped like a stone.

“For some definitions of the word, you will be free,” said Thom Merrilin. “Freer than you ever would’ve been under any obligation to the Father of Lies.” He snatched the knife up as he stepped past Dana’s broken body, then turned to scowl mildly at them. Rand had moved to follow already, but Artur held them both fixed in place.

“Come on, lads. We’re wasting daylight. I don’t plan to stick around and see what these folk have in store for us next.”

As quickly as he had risen, Artur fell back.

 

***

 

“Breathe.” Rand thumped his hand ineffectually on Mat’s back as Mat seemingly choked on his own lungs. The adrenaline had faded along with the light in Dana’s eyes, and he was left gasping for breath only twenty paces into the sun dappled edge of the forest. Rand moved in front of him, looking up at Mat with wide eyes. 

Those eyes had been filled with tears minutes before, Mat recalled suddenly. He wheezed and coughed again. “Are you okay?” he managed to gasp out again. “Dana didn’t—hurt—you, did she?”

Rand shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about.” He reached out to brush his hand over Mat’s forehead; Mat dodged away. 

“Leave off. You’re as bad as Nynaeve, I swear.” He’d barely avoided saying Egwene’s name, certain that neither of them could bear to consider her fate at that moment. When had the grief of Nynaeve’s passing become so dull that he preferred it to the worry he now felt for Egwene? “We should keep going. The others are waiting for us.”

“Just take a minute,” Rand pleaded. “You don’t look well at all, Mat.”

Mat scoffed. “I’m sure that they’ll forgive me for taking a minute even if it costs them their bloody lives.” Without checking that the other two were following, he stumbled onwards into the forest. He would walk to the White Tower or the end of the earth, whichever came first. 

“Is he-” Thom began to ask behind him. Mat didn’t hear if he finished the question, and he didn’t hear Rand’s answer. 

Notes:

Please comment so that I know I'm not posting this into the void!

Let's play "spot the amount of times that I sneak in little bits of book canon because I've started reading Book One and I love the worldbuilding!"

Chapter 8

Summary:

The pull of Shadar Logoth grows stronger, Gema gets a moment to play, and we enter the arc that first made me care so deeply about Mat Cauthon.

Trigger warnings for implied/referenced child abuse, vomiting, and very mild peril.

Notes:

Hello, hi, yet again so very sorry. It has been quite the summer! Thank you to everyone who has commented! Here you go, and I'll see you soon with the next one. Hopefully. Gosh darn, what a time.

If you asked Mat, staring down the point of a lethal weapon once in a day was already one time too many. Unfortunately, the pattern rarely did ask Mat, and he found himself wondering exactly how much force the young farmer and his daughter could put behind their bowstrings. The points of their arrows were sharpened to shining precision. They didn’t sparkle—sharp things rarely sparkled, contrary to popular belief—but they gleamed. Long story short, Mat was probably dead as a doornail if one of them loosed before Rand could talk them down.

“We weren’t going to steal anything, I promise. Well, maybe some food-”

Why was Rand in charge of talking them down, again? Oh, right, because Mat felt as though his throat would start bleeding if he tried to speak. 

“Listen,” Thom cut in. “We mean no harm to you and yours, and we wouldn’t have hurt you. We were planning to double back and sleep in your barn tonight and be gone before the sun rose. You wouldn’t have even known that we were here, but since you do now, maybe we can work out something more favorable for all of us.”

The farmer cast his gaze over their heads; Mat whirled around. Oh, look, there had been even more sharp things pointed at his back. Bloody brilliant. 

“I suppose we have some wood that needs chopping, stalls that need mucking, the like.” The woman lowered her bow; her husband did the same. The daughter and a boy who seemed to be her older brother also lowered their weapons rather reluctantly. Bloodthirsty little twats, they were—Mat liked them already. 

“Everyone’s come on hard times recently, seems like,” he heard the man whisper to the woman as they all trooped back towards the little farmhouse and the barn where Rand, Thom, and Mat had planned to spend the night. “Something’s shifting, I can tell.”

“Hush; you’ll scare yourself.”

“Isn’t that meant to be ‘you’ll scare the children?’”

“That’s what I said.”

Mat was reminded with a sudden pang of the way that he and Rand had talked when they were wandering back from a long day’s work on Tam’s farm. He felt a strange warmth prickle in his cheeks. Your sweetheart will be waiting for you . Burn him, Mat wasn’t touching that with a ten foot pole.

The sloping farmhouse emerged before them, the thatched roof glowing a dull blue-gray in the cloudy light of early afternoon. At one corner of the roof, a haphazard weathervane pointed ever westwards; at the other, a stone chimney released a trickling stream of smoke. The house was painted white with an olive green door and a brass doorknob. Mat felt something odd and uncanny twinge in his chest, just below the dagger. He hurried to catch up with Rand and the woman, apparently named Kelitte, who was leading them towards the stables. 

Thom hesitated for a moment, almost as though he were watching Mat go, and then followed after them at a steady pace. 

 

***

 

Mat flung down his axe after only a few logs had been split. His chest throbbed with every breath he took; the spindly trees swirled overhead and he found himself stumbling into the side of the barn before he could catch himself. He felt more than saw Rand’s eyes snap towards him in sudden alarm. Light, Mat was bloody sick of Rand always watching over him like a mother hen. He was fine—really, he was. Rand didn’t get to try to take Nynaeve’s place just because she wasn’t there to twit Mat over having forgotten to take care of himself yet again. 

They didn’t need Nynaeve. (Mat missed her like a limb.) They most certainly didn’t need anyone trying to be her. 

He shook himself. Rand was still watching him with the intensity of a forest fire and the patience of one, too. Mat wrapped his arms around his torso. “What happened to hospitality? Why are we to do all this shit? Our friends just went and got themselves bloody killed. We’re due a rest, if you ask me.”

“They didn’t get themselves killed. Don’t—don’t say things like that, you woolhead.” Rand lowered his axe and took a few steps across the clearing before seemingly thinking better of it.

To Thom’s credit, he didn’t stop chopping wood, but he did change his pace so that his blows fell during lulls in their conversation. Fine. Let him listen. If it would stop him from looking at Mat with that wretched, foreign expression, then Mat would suffer any shame necessary. 

“Don’t be an idiot. Whitecloaks don’t take prisoners—not as far as channelers are concerned.”

“Mat,” Rand hissed with a glance towards Thom. Mat couldn’t stop the words any more than he could stem the flow of the rivers themselves.

“Egwene is as good as dead because we were too cowardly to stick around and protect her. Perrin…” Mat swallowed. The words made him nauseous even as he forced them past his lips. “Perrin is too kind for a group of people who abhor everything to do with kindness. I hope they kill him quickly, because if they don’t, we’ll be picking up the remains from now until the Last Battle.”

“Damn you, Mat Cauthon.” Rand made up his mind and crossed the clearing in fewer strides than Mat would’ve thought possible. Distantly, he felt Rand’s fingers fist into his collar, felt his own head turn away even as his mind did the same. He felt Rand freeze at what must have been Mat’s flinch.

“I’m going for a walk,” Mat snapped, and wandered unchecked into the confines of his own mind.

 

***

 

At some point, the light in the cloud-blue clearing waned. Tiny gray creatures tumbled through the growing dusk… or maybe they were just leaves. They raced and spun in little eddies along the deer trails in the scrub at the edge of the farm. Even now, the woods were trying to fill in the little hole that had been hollowed out in the midst of them. Gema felt that way, sometimes. They were the patch in the hull of the ship. They didn’t mind that, but the ocean was cold, sometimes.

Gema blinked seawater from their eyes and kept skipping after the creature-leaves. 

Overhead, little black streaks dipped and whirled in the indigo sky. Gema threw their arms out to the sides and danced with them. They spun like the eddies, the sky-streaks, the thoughts of all the others that whirled in a panicked symphony through their head. 

They ran their hands through their tangled hair. It was getting longer, now. They loved it, but the snarls pulled fiercely and brought tears to their eyes. They tugged and ripped and tugged and finally, finally came free. 

Gema sniffled and rubbed a hand under their nose. They loathed how grimy their skin felt.

There beneath the blackening arcs of tree branches above them, Gema felt a gentle hand on their shoulder. It was the only touch they’d ever felt that didn’t send a flare of delighted panic through their chest. It was the only touch that didn’t make them feel ill. They’d said yes, which probably helped. They’d said yes, and still Birgitte kept asking before she touched them.

“We need to go back now,” she whispered.

Gema didn’t know why she was speaking so quietly. Maybe she didn’t want to wake the creature-leaves from their slumber.

“Something like that, baby. Are you okay to step back?”

“I don’t want to,” Gema murmured. They still didn’t understand why they were whispering, but the words didn’t feel like something that could be said very loudly. “I want to go home. I don’t—I don’t care that going home means getting hurt. I knew how to be, there.”

Birgitte wrapped her arms around her chest. Gema watched her. The creature-leaves slept.

“Time to go inside, baby.”

For once, when Gema fell, it was gentle.

 

***

 

Mat’s dizzy stumble back towards the farm rapidly morphed into a panicked crashing that would have made even the deer envious. Birgitte felt her heart clench and stutter with worry the longer they went without sighting the farmhouse, but a tiny part of her—perhaps one sparked by her momentary blending with Gema—almost wanted to laugh. Light, they must look so ridiculous right now. 

Mat’s stomach swirled with horrible, anxious nausea. He couldn’t catch his bloody breath, and when he stumbled into yet another tree, he found himself collapsing against it with a force that he was sure would bruise his shoulder. He could barely see. He clawed the dagger out from within his coat and clung to it, retching and sobbing with reckless abandon.

Birgitte got them upright again before long. Rand needed them, and they needed Rand. They needed to not be alone in the middle of the bloody woods, but Mat was never very good about staying on the trail—even when he was entirely under his own influence. Birgitte checked herself harshly before she could cast even an ounce of resentment in Gema’s direction. Their feet were on the ground, and they would make it back soon enough.

Recalling a gnarled tree that they had stumbled into earlier, she fisted one hand as she would have around her bow and walked on. The branches creaked and swayed. Birgitte, with some remnant of Gema in her, barely resisted dancing to their music.

Mat tilted like he was on a sailing ship. He felt out of control. He was a whirlwind, a night terror, a falcon diving from a peak with no certainty that he wouldn’t crash into the rocks below. He choked on bile again, just as the farmhouse came into view.

Thank the Light. Blood and ashes, thank the Light.

Hey, I’m the one you should be thanking .

“Burn you,” Mat hissed with no real heat.

He felt hot and cold in turns, and his stomach ached something fierce. He practically ran the rest of the way to the farmhouse. 

Unfortunately, running did little good for the turmoil roiling inside of him. Mat almost made it to the barn, but with a sudden jolt he veered off course and half collapsed against a horse trough. With one white-knuckled hand clutching the silvery metal, Mat retched until he felt as though there was nothing left to get up. The taste of the sludge in his mouth, all oil and char and fish scales, made him so dizzy that he nearly fell fully to his knees. 

So close to the house, with the warm light of lanterns spilling out through the gauzy curtains and the door of the barn, Birgitte could see what she hadn’t in the dark of the forest. The watery sludge on the ground before them was as black as ink. For just an instant, the substance seemed to crawl and bubble like a mass of beetles, and then it was still.

Mat shuddered; fear coursed through him like lightning. 

“Mister?”

Mat whirled so fast that he nearly fell over again. The farmers’ little girl stood before him, a loaf of bread dwarfing her small hands. She had a white and black wool sweater tucked snugly around her, with patterns of little stars and moths on the collar and the edges of the sleeves. Her brown hair was tied back with a scrap of white linen, and in the minute before Mat could recollect himself, he thought that it was Eldrin looking up at him. 

“My mama sent me to give you this and thank you for all your hard work.” She held the bread out, shy and confident all at once. Mat’s heart ached more painfully than his bones ever could. “I’m sorry,” the little girl added when he didn’t move to take the bread. 

“Hey.” Mat squatted down in front of her and gently lifted the bread from her hands. “No, I’m sorry. You only startled me—you look just like someone I know. What’s your name?”

“That’s a secret,” she whispered.

“Is it now? Why’s that?”

“My Mama said you’re strange and told me to give you the bread and her message and come right back.”

“But you didn’t,” he whispered, matching her conspiratorial tone. Strange—yeah, even Mat had to admit that the descriptor fit. 

She shook her head.

Mat smiled. “My sisters never listen either.”

The little girl rocked back and forth on her feet, her purple calico skirt swaying around her boots. “Where are they?”

“Safe at home,” Birgitte said, with all the certainty of knowing that the words ‘safe’ and ‘home’ would never belong together in a sentence as far as Mat or his sisters were concerned. 

“With your mama and papa?”

Mat swayed for a second as her face blurred in and out of focus in front of him. He blinked and looked at the ground. The little girl rocked on her feet again, seeming lost in thought herself, then held out a shabby cloth doll that had clearly seen quite a bit of love. “You can take Birgitte back for them. She protects me when everyone’s asleep.” 

The precious thing, all braided red hair and a little felt quiver like the Birgitte Silverbow of life and legend, stared up at him from a painted wooden face. The care that had been poured into this one object was almost more than Mat could stomach. “I can’t take your doll.” He pushed the beautiful thing back towards her.

“Oh, it’s alright! I have many more. Birgitte’s always wanted to see the world.”

Before he could refuse again, she set the doll on top of the bread in his arms. 

“She can protect you now, and your sisters when you get home!”

“I hope so,” Birgitte croaked around the warm, heartbroken lump in their throat. 

 

***

 

Upon stumbling grandly into the barn, Mat found Rand and Thom there, engaged in quiet, clandestine conversation. Thom’s head was bowed, and Rand’s eyes were wide and gray and filled—yet a-Light-damned-gain—by something resembling tears. “You haven’t been gossiping all this flaming time, have you? The nice lady is letting us stay here for the night; the least we can do is help her around the place. Look at you, just two lazy lumps of sod.” Mat tossed the bread onto the table. Little Birgitte had already found her way into the pocket of his coat furthest from the dagger.

Rand flinched and looked up at him as though he’d been caught stealing apples from one of the orchards back home. Thom, at least, had the decency to sit back slowly as though he hadn’t been doing anything wrong at all. Well, perhaps ‘decency’ was a stretch. 

“Mat.” Rand rose slowly, movements almost as jerky as Mat’s own.

Mat wanted to parrot Rand’s own name back at him, but instead he found himself muttering, “Y’alright?” in a tone that finally made Thom remove his heavy gaze from them. 

Rand shrugged. “Yeah, you?”

Mat scowled at the wall past Rand’s shoulder. “Well enough.” He ran the back of his hand over his mouth in a movement that Rand’s eyes tracked with steely precision. Sometimes, Mat had reason to remember the trick of the flame and the void that Tam had tried to teach both of them and had only succeeded in teaching to Rand. Right now, his best friend was analyzing him with the coldness of the void and the fervor of the flame in a broken harmony.

“May I touch your forehead?” Rand asked, and Mat nearly shattered into a million pieces then and there. To have Rand ask—to want to say yes just as strongly as he wanted to say no—Mat could barely move. He nodded shakily.

Rand pressed his cool wrist against Mat’s temple. Mat nearly shuddered at the stickiness of drying perspiration between Rand’s skin and his own. 

“You’re burning up, Mat. Do you feel sick?”

Mat swallowed thickly. “Not as bad as it’s been before.”

Rand nodded and ushered Mat onto a stool in front of the small wooden table. Mat really did shudder at the loss of contact when his friend stepped back. “Eat something, alright? It’ll settle your stomach and might give you the strength to fight this thing off.”

Thom furrowed his brows at Rand. Rand didn’t look back at him. Mat, caught within their mutual worry and suspicion, focused on the bread and didn’t think about dolls or heroes or how vulnerable he felt being sick around someone who he would do anything for.

“I’m here, you know,” Rand said when Thom had stepped outside for a drink of water. “No matter what happens, I’m here.” Beyond the barn door, a few lonely raindrops began to tumble from the clouds.

Mat kept eating with wooden, mechanical movements, tasting nothing but ash.

 

***

 

He was closest to them all in his dreams, Birgitte knew, closer even than when she peered over his shoulder in their waking lives. The walls that his mind had built to protect him from the impossible made her influence imperceptible to him, no matter how loudly she screamed. Light, he’d spoken to her, but still he would never imagine her to be real.

Mat slept in fits and starts that night, and in those waking instants between the lurching of his imagination, Birgitte heard the whistle of wings on the night wind. 

He was closest to them all in his dreams. To reach him there would be to risk everything they’d sought to preserve, but the thing in the night prowled closer and Birgitte had never had a choice when it came to something like this. She was their protector before she was her own person. 

A sea breeze drifted through the dreamscape and Birgitte found herself face to face with Mat, her hair braided in a way that it hadn’t been for lifetimes. She watched him, standing there, staring at her. “Oh Matrim,” she whispered, for even in sleep his face was twisted with a pain that she bent beneath the mere echo of. 

Hooves clicked on the stone path outside. 

“I accept whatever toh I will incur for this,” said a firm voice behind Mat. Birgitte pressed a hand to her mouth as gratitude surged through her with abandon. 

Mat whirled towards the sound, and Birgitte caught him by the elbows and dragged him back behind his closed eyelids, behind doors that shouldn’t have been opened, and into a warm, dark place that had formed all on its own years before. 

Amera stepped forward. Birgitte just held on. 

Notes:

Please comment so that I know if folks are still enjoying this!

Birgitte and Mat co-fronting has actually become my favorite dynamic to write, which I was really not expecting with this fic. Also, I'm starting a petition to give Gema a hug. See you all next time!