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The night before the Last Battle, a ghost appears in Siuan’s tent.
It looks almost like Moiraine. A reflection of her, as if seen through water, rippled and distorted. The frame too small, white skin pulled tight over protruding bones; eyes the wrong shade, glowing almost amber in the flickering lamplight. It holds itself like it is unused to existing in a body.
Siuan’s breath catches. She is perched on a low stool, hunched over the small table that has been allotted as her desk here at the Fields of Merrilor, and the hand holding her pen stills, dripping ink.
She knows it cannot be Moiraine. Her death has been recounted over and over to Siuan, in painstaking detail. First in hushed rumour from the other Aes Sedai in Salidar, alternating awed and gleeful, then in more detail from her various Eyes and Ears, and finally the most accurate account from Lan—barely himself at the time, and still not quite whole now.
… Tackled Lanfear, the Forsaken, through a ter’angreal from the Stone of Tear… An arched red doorway burning, melting on the docks…
For a moment, Siuan cannot help indulging in fragile hope. She lets herself pretend. Moiraine has found a way home somehow. They’d promised each other that Siuan would be the one doing the finding, this time, but Moiraine has always had an impatient streak. In a second, they will embrace. Moiraine will be soft and warm. She will smell of woods and horse, but Siuan won’t mind; she would happily sleep in a stable for the rest of her life, if it meant Moiraine slept beside her.
The ghost’s lip trembles, its throat working, searching for words. Can it speak?
A part of Siuan would welcome even the imitation of Moiraine’s voice. The low, teasing tones she used in private. Her bell-like laugh.
Siuan swallows. It’s her first time seeing one of these things in person, but they have become increasingly common in the last few months, like the Bubbles of Evil. Some of the Browns think they’re attracted to grief. Nobody has reached a consensus on whether they are dangerous yet.
Go away, she wants to tell it, but also come here.
Pathetically, what comes out instead is, “This is mean.” For the Pattern to toy with her this way, dangling what has been lost. The back of Siuan’s throat hurts.
They stare at each other. If she looks away, will the ghost disappear? She should not want it to stay, but—
It opens and shuts its mouth. The glimpse of a pink tongue, white teeth. Perhaps it is a trick of the light, but the cuspids seem sharper than they should be. She fights the urge to shudder. Those are teeth meant for a predator.
“Siuan,” the ghost says at last. Voice rough and hoarse—from disuse, from screaming? The first time it sounds unsure, but then it repeats with more certainty, “Siuan.” As it speaks it takes a stumbling step closer.
Instinctively, Siuan jerks away. She and the stool are knocked over, thudding to the ground. She is still clutching her pen, and ink sprays across them both in an arc like blood slashed from a wound, wet and sticky.
The ghost flinches and stops. Its hands clench and unclench. The nails are edged with dirt, it could have crawled straight out of its grave—except of course Moiraine had no grave. There was nothing.
For the best, maybe. She had never wanted to be buried in Cairhien.
There is a deep sadness in its eyes. It is blinking wrong, forced and infrequent. But that kind of pain in a face that is almost Moiraine’s still burns. “Sorry,” Siuan says. A ghost cannot help what it is. Only she wishes it had not come here. Moiraine already haunts her enough. “You— surprised me.”
“Siuan,” it says again, like that is all it knows. Beseeching.
What can it want? Has Siuan not paid enough? The both of them.
“I don’t know if I have any grief left to give,” she tells it. There are better feeding grounds outside, among the soldiers.
“Sorry,” the ghost echoes back at her. Moiraine would have said I apologise in that endearing formal way of hers. But she had never apologised easily, she was so proud. Siuan liked that about her.
It has done a better job of dressing as Moiraine than it has at anything else. There is even a kesiera, small blue gem glittering hypnotically. If Siuan unfocuses her eyes the right amount, if she lets the tears spill, maybe the other differences won’t matter.
Slowly, painfully, the ghost says, “I want. I wanted.” Its brows furrow, and there is something so utterly Moiraine in the way its face crumples, voice thickening, that Siuan finds herself crawling closer, reaching out to touch its knee comfortingly. It is so deceptively solid. “I needed to see you one more time.”
Her heart clenches.
But she and Moiraine have already had their one more time. First before Siuan sent her to what had seemed a certain death at the Eye of the World, and then in dream. Already more goodbyes than they ever thought they’d get. Siuan will not waste another on an imposter.
“I will see Moiraine again in the next life,” she says. A promise from Tel’aran’rhiod, reaffirmed to herself. They have always returned to each other before. It could even happen tomorrow.
Water drips down the ghost’s face, drawing a line through layers of road dust. “I am Moiraine.”
“What prank did Moiraine and I pull, the night before we were raised to the shawl?”
She feels its body stiffen, tension drawing tight in the muscles beneath Siuan’s fingers. “Itchweed…” it begins to answer, but then shakes its head, a small frantic movement. “No, trout in the…”
If any small spark of hope remained, it is extinguished. “Mice,” Siuan says gently, “in Elaida’s bed.”
“Oh.”
“What was the name of that ratty little dog who used to follow Moiraine around the Tower?”
More tears fall. One drips onto the top of Siuan’s head. “I had a dog?”
She strokes the side of its calf soothingly. “You called her Jenny.”
A second later she realises her mistake—you—and pulls her hand away sharply. Siuan cannot let herself get sucked in, not so close to the Last Battle. Falling for this distraction would be a betrayal of everything Moiraine stood for.
The ghost makes a lost, aching sound. It sinks to its knees opposite Siuan.
“What else?” it says hungrily. “What else?”
Should she feed it memories? Will that make it stronger—more accurate? Will it take some of her mourning? The weight of all that longing is so heavy. It would be a relief to share the load.
But not long now, and she will see the real Moiraine again, Siuan reminds herself. She can afford to be sentimental only then.
She pushes herself up off the floor. “You should go,” she says, not unkindly, as she rights her stool. She channels to clean some of the spilled ink from her page and the ghost shivers from its spot on the floor. Siuan should stop looking at it, but cannot help herself. It even has a shadow.
“I would like to stay,” the ghost says.
I do not want you here, Siuan does not reply, because she has sworn the Oaths a second time and is not sure if the words would successfully make it past her lips. A shade of a shade of Moiraine is still more than nothing. Letters and drawings incinerated with her deposition as Amyrlin, the wreckage of a bamboo hut picked clean by the elements and refugees.
She sits back down at her desk.
“I will be small,” it promises, “and quiet.”
“Do as you wish,” Siuan says, “as long as you stop pretending to be Her, and leave me alone.” She does not have the strength to wrestle it out of this tent on her own, or to ask Gareth to do so for her.
Would Gareth be able to see it, too? Would it look the same, to him?
The ghost does not reply. When Siuan glances back, it is curled up in her bed. It has made itself a nest of Siuan’s belongings there, the hem of her winter cloak pressed close to its nose like it is breathing in her scent. Its eyes are only half-open, but watchful.
Light, but it is unsettling. She feels the ache of missing her real Moiraine keenly.
She falls asleep while writing her reports. When she wakes, bleary-eyed with a sheet of paper stuck to her cheek, dawn light spilling in through a crack in the tent flaps, the ghost is gone, and a wool blanket has been draped around Siuan’s shoulders. It smells faintly of the woods, and horses.
Somewhere outside, a fox cries.
By the time news reaches her of an Aes Sedai showing up in the command tent the previous day, returning from the dead to negotiate the Dragon’s Peace, it will be too late.