The party had long since fallen asleep after sharing several bottles of whatever one of the Taravin guards had spirited away from the carnival in Caemlyn. Most of their group slept on the ground, feeling no need to set up tents against the unlikelihood of malevolent weather. Campfires had been covered with dirt so only embers still glowed faintly against the darkness, barely illuminating the sleeping forms of the men and women gathered around them. The only stirring about the area were night birds, nearly silent as they stalked their prey, and the occasional howl of a wolf – too far off to threaten any danger.
Only Flora Cecil lay awake at this hour. The moon had already passed its zenith, some quarter of the way through its descent, but she lay still of body and restless of mind. Bright green eyes now searched the eternal blackness for answers neither it, nor any but the Wheel possessed. For hours she had closed her eyes against the movement of others settling in for the night but had never found rest. Yes, she too had sat around the fire laughing and drinking, contentedly socializing; for all intents and purposes, she had seemed normal – as if she was adjusting well to her sudden shift of circumstance.
In those moments, it was true that she could handle these changes quaking the ground beneath her feet. She had distractions, a façade to uphold to the rest of the world that convinced them and herself she was fine – that she was coming to terms with her new future. But the truth became a new being in the dark, alone and with no one’s expectations or influence to hold back the anxiety and self-loathing that were now building within her. Muscles strained to hold it back, to keep it from rolling over her like a tsunami. She dug ragged fingernails into the palms of her hands and focused on the sting, digging them in deep enough to reach such a level that its pain could compete with the maelstrom raging within her head.
The father she had idolized, who had adored and worshipped her, had begged Flora to go to the Grey Tower. He had told her all the incredible things she could do as an Aes Sedai, the inconceivable opportunity this provided her. No longer would she be the bard reciting tales of old legends, there would be songs sung about her: Flora Cecil Sedai. She would have the best education, armies at her command, wrap rulers around a finger, and the One Power to protect her. There was more glory, more stability in this path than if she remained a simple troubadour. She would be mad not to reach out for this brass ring dangled before her.
The singer’s brain registered the value of all these facts, but Flora had seen the eyes of her father after Caemlyn… how he had stared at her. In an instant, she had become a stranger to him. When terror took over and she had fled, Jon Cecil had not moved a muscle until long after the Aes Sedai and Taravins had taken control of the situation. When his own daughter had begged him not to let her go, Jon Cecil had firmly insisted she leave. As Keiran had explained to both of them, it might be decades before Flora would see the family – if she ever saw them again.
For other girls going to the Tower, leaving behind the only life they had ever known might not have been so terrifying. Maybe another girl would jump at the chance to be defined by power and influence – to be renowned. Yet, Flora had no desire to escape the circumstances she had been born into; her path had not been a monotonous, dead-end existence in some backwoods farm where the most she could have hoped for was to marry a moderately interesting man and raise and gaggle of obnoxious children. Flora had already wrapped an identity and raison d’être around her singing. She had already formed a direction for her life and had been steadily moving towards a vaguely formed desideratum.
Caemlyn had been meant to further that goal, to gain independence and ownership of this dream that had begun as her father’s. It had been Jon that had first put her on stage and pushed her to sing better, play better. There had been a time several years ago when she had resented his forcefulness – and music by association. However, as she had improved and begun to perform without him, the less singing had to do with her father. Little by little Flora had poured her own passion and interpretation into each piece. It became a relief to release anger and emotion with her voice. The more she poured of herself into each performance, the greater the crowd’s reaction had become. With each ovation, her voice had become hers alone – not the instrument of her father. In hindsight, this was the reason she had ignored Jon and instead sang “Midean’s Ford” that fateful day; it was supposed to be her shining moment alone and the point at which she was no longer “the daughter of Jon Cecil” but a performer in her own right.
It was not just that her sense of self had suddenly been ripped away. The Cecil family had never known a home long before Flora was born. They had travelled from place to place, never staying more than a few months. There were few nations where gleemen were not welcome guests, so Flora had already seen most of the world from the Kinslayer’s Dagger to the Mountains of Mist before her twelfth name day. She had grown up without ever making attachments outside her own family – they were the only people in her world that truly meant something to her. Now, she was horribly alone and if the family had already left Caemlyn, they could be anywhere West of the Dragonspine in a matter of weeks.
Silent tears escaped eyes valiantly screwed shut to hold them back; threatening to alert someone else to her consciousness, Flora rubbed them away angrily. Hard as she fought, the singer could no longer hold back her sorrow. She buried her face into the cloak serving as a pillow and wept against it, sobs shaking her shoulders. Much as she would have liked, Flora dared not slam clenched fists against the ground in her exhausted rage. It seemed the only point at which she could currently surrender to sleep was after bawling out her pathetic misery.
As the fit passed, tension slowly seeped from Flora’s body and she lay drained beneath the blankets as tears dried on her cheeks. The pressure of her despair had been released but still sleep was elusive. She rolled over, staring into the night that mocked her with its tranquillity. The chaos of her thoughts juxtaposed against the quiescence engulfing their camp served only to further antagonize Flora’s want of sympathy from her environs.
She rose, nervous energy fuelled by the indifference of her surroundings compelled the young women to her feet. Before the singer could understand her motive, she was slipping past shrouded forms on soundless feet towards a piled cart, covered by canvas. Flora barely risked breathing, slinking through the clearing; every moment seemed an hour as she prayed her movement would not wake any of the dreaming strangers gathered in clusters all around. Despite resenting the uncaring stillness, she had no desire to share the agitation plaguing her with another animate being.
Tiptoeing to the cart, she painstakingly lifted the tarpaulin moving only a fraction of an inch at a time. Eyes searched hazy darkness, desperately seeking the familiar form of her quarry. Flora had supervised the loading of her only prized possession onto this very wagon, but where was it? She fumbled blindly, hands rummaging carefully for the leather case though they became more urgent the longer Flora could not find it. What if it had been stolen? What if the Aes Sedai had decided she could not take it to the Grey Tower?
At last, fingertips brushed against the familiar casement, tucked carefully into a corner of the wagon. Noiselessly, Flora lifted her harp from the cart and stole away into the woods on bare feet, chill in night air. Despite the instrument’s bulk, she carried its familiar weight easily and it did not hamper her stealthy tread. As Flora slipped past outlying slumbering forms, the tension in her shoulders eased – not so her painfully knotted stomach but that release awaited solitary time to shed her anxieties on the instrument to which she now clung.
Having walked some ten minutes since leaving the camp behind, Flora found a recently toppled tree not far from the road and gently unwrapped her harp. Softly, she ran her fingers along its strings, tinkering away at the tuning before stiff digits traced familiar scales from the instrument’s deep bass to its tinny soprano. Still Flora adjusted the pitch of strings, lowering the thirds and sevenths until she had arranged the melancholic mode for which her mood had been searching. Fingers worked to nimbleness walked again and again through scales in octaves while her left hand searched the bass for their chords.
An hour she fiddled away at the harp, trying out this and that motif and fitting them together with various harmonies. The singer shifted her ictus, ever avoiding derivative four-beat patterns – that simplicity could not communicate the vision slowly taking form and spilling out in fragments to her hands. Her bow furrowed, knit together not only with concentration but from the uneasy timbre that gradually became more cohesive. Flora had long since forgotten the numbness of her bottom and thighs, seated as they were uncomfortably on the fallen tree; everything but her restless composing has long since faded away. This angst was her oxymoronic form of peace.
Finally her left hand found the rhythm, an asymmetrical five-beat pattern that began with only bass notes. Her right hand settled into a simple melody to which she formed first one response and then another. The singer repeated her theme, inverted it, reversed it, and then transposed it up and down; she fractured it, elongated it, and altered the rhythm. As she became intimately acquainted with the eight-note motif, her hands played it in counterpoint and she wandered further from its simple origin into polyphony. The music became more and more complex so that any other thought could only exist on the outskirts of her mind preoccupied as it was with this composition. Thought became notes on her harp and flowed out as easily as a conversation.
In ignorance of everything around her, blissfully forgetting the anxiety that had chased away sleep, Flora began to fit words to her music. She had spent long hours walking in the last few days obsessing over the poetry but had not yet found its rhythm. Now however, it fit perfectly to her motif and the singer shifted word order so the correct syllable fell on its natural iambic emphasis. She repeated the words under her breath a hundred times, fumbling at the harp to work out each note.
Hours had passed and the grey light of dawn began pushing back long, black shadows. Despite her insomnia, Flora was not yet exhausted. The edge of her consciousness registered that she would soon pay and regret avoiding the nightmares plaguing her sleep; however, this thought was fleeting, lost beneath the intensity of her muse. This piece of music she had spent all night creating, it was nearly complete. Yet hours sitting here creating had not released the muscles in her shoulders and neck that ached with tension; nor had it eased the tightness in her chest or the roiling anxiety in her gut. No, all this time the singer had been able to push it away and forget but this wound had not yet been drained of its infection.
The singer shook out her hands, rolled her shoulders, stretched her neck, then shifted on the tree, straightening her back. She breathed deep and let the air out slowly, releasing with it her own identity: Flora Cecil no longer existed. She was but a voice – a narrator. Her left fingers plucked out the tonic, letting its rich tone resonate in her chest before she began to sing. The melody sat comfortable in her mid-register. This thought, however, registered for only a moment before it was swept away by the image she began to paint with her words.
Ominous zephyrs play in green wheat
Dancing like soft flowing silk
While the sky in ancient envy
Mirrors the lustre of its youth
‘Neath a tower of grousing clouds.
World holds silent in foreboding
Oppressed by moist atmosphere
First assault it awaits, anxious
Threatened by the slate column
Deeply voicing long-held angst.
Casting long shadows before him
Steel giant moving close
Bangs together sword and shield
Sparks flash bright amid the dim
Darkening verdant fields of green.
After three stanzas carrying the melody in only voice, she announced her theme in the bass, relished its tension rubbing up against the persistent rumble of the tonic. Meanwhile, her right hand simulated the sound of rain in falling triplets, descending in contrary motion to the melody. Flora closed her eyes, letting practised hands settle into their more complicated accompaniment. Relying on muscle memory to continue the ostinato, she lifted her face to the sky, at last savouring this respite from the turmoil of an overwrought mind.
Moments of true peace passed; she opened green eyes daring to surface momentarily from her ecstasy. In the dim light of pre-dawn Flora could see the storm she had painted in her music, a mass of black clouds against the dark sky discernible only by the light of a fading moon. Already it had blacked out the stars that had burned so brightly hours before above her sleepless observation. The air temperature had dropped, raising gooseflesh on her arms. Where before the night had hummed with the lonesome moaning of nocturnal beasts, it was dead silent save the plucking of her harp.
Still she continued to play, regarding all this as if it only existed in her song. The singer felt divorced from reality; Flora was so firmly immersed in the story she had brought to life that everything else existed only on the outside of her consciousness – as if it were a piece of theatre and she but a spectator. In some deep corner, her mind registered that she had conjured this tempest into being and that to do so she must be channelling the One Power. However, these thoughts felt distant, less real now than the music she played.
So this was the audience, this storm she had created, summoned to bear witness to what could be her last true performance. The thought settled deeply into her consciousness and the singer realized she had spent too long in interlude – her muse was beginning to dissipate. Taking a deep breath, Flora dove back beneath the waters of her catalepsy. Maintaining the tonal centre, she added sevenths above the bass to add dissonance while her right hand continued its imitation of rain. Inhaling slowly to begin the next strophe, booming thunder rolled in response from the manifestation of her discomposure.
Wind exhales releasing tension
Whipping circles in green stalks
Yielding to its will the branches
Seething anger through their leaves
Shameless carries on its fit.
Icy fall the first few fat drops
Bending young grain as they land
Angry black clouds wracked with grieving
Lashing out against the field
Silently the world looks on.
Even in her monomaniacal state, the singer felt cruel wind that snapped ginger hair against the body of her harp. It howled around her, a choir wailing its discordant descant. The singer closed watering eyes against its bite, she did not need sight to play – this paramount sense was to her less important than touch or sound. Freed from the distraction that was seeing, she could sense cold rain dripping pizzicato on the wooden soundboard of her instrument. It became more persistent, beginning to soak into the thin wool dress she wore. Droplets landed on her face, running down her cheeks like tears.
Yet these things could not distract Flora from the intensity of her performance. No, this was the orchestra playing out her concerto. Like a siren, she called the instruments to her, drawing them close in a deafening crescendo. The percussion vibrated in her chest with each crash, winds whistled through her quaking the sinew that would never stop plucking these strings. This was rapture, so much that it burned her soul with exquisite euphoria. She could not maintain this excruciating bliss lest it overwhelm her. The singer breathed and continued her song.
Angry clouds release their tantrum
Torrents pound the Earth below
Lightning splits the sky asunder
Sister thunder groans reply
Now the tempest gains its height.
Finally the tension passes
Winds abate and raindrops slow
The slate mass still moans at distance
Far-off pastures brave its rage
Battered green heads sigh relief.
Soaked and heavy wilted young wheat
Sways morose in pitying breeze
Sun fights through the remnant vapours
Easing sorrow from young grain
Wearied since but yet at peace.
The last notes of her harp rang out amid eerie silence. Flora remained in her trance as moments passed and the last vibrations of her music fell still until they had finally disappeared. When at last the only sound was the muffled drip of beaded droplets falling from soaked leaves, the spell was broken. Her corporal existence came crashing back into awareness. Unsure if they were tears or raindrop, the singer blinked moisture from suddenly heavy eyes and exhaled the last foggy vestiges out of her brain. She sat up on the sodden log, wincing at stiff muscles and took in her surrounding.
Beneath the light of a breaking red dawn, the young woman looked about herself in shock. A forest floor that had been strewn only with the decaying leaves of past autumns was now littered with debris: broken limbs and fallen green leaves lay jettisoned from their timbers. Flora stared in wonder at a split tree, still smoking, struck by lightning without her cognizance mere paces from the log at which she had been playing. Could she have caused all this? Was it arrogance to believe this sort of power was hers? There was no sign of the storm head in the enflamed sky. Overwhelming evidence enveloped the landscape proving that it could not have been only a dream.
Distant shouting muffled by the drenched wood pulled Flora from her wonder at the destruction all around. Had they experienced the gale in the camp as well? Or had all of this been localized around her, like a maelstrom hovering over its creator? Was she even the cause or was this all some strange turning of the Wheel? The singer’s body prickled with power or electricity, uncertain whether she or the lightning was its source. The far-off din from the camp tugged at her conscience; no doubt Keiran and the Aes Sedai were searching for their lost Novice-to-be. Curiosity compelled Flora to investigate whether her – if it were her – tempest had spread so far as the clearing.
The singer rose… or tried; as weight shifted from the tree to her feet, the world swam in her vision. Exhaustion of a level she had never experienced turned her limbs to jelly and she collapsed heavily on the ground. Rough detritus scraped at her skin but she had only a moment to reflect on physical discomfort before waves of nausea crashed over her. Painful convulsions thrashed her weak frame as she retched up the previous evening’s meal and drink. Instants passed in eternity as Flora continued to vomit what seemed like everything she had ever put in her belly. Lacking the strength to even lift her head, she writhed in spew unable to do more than whimper as it invaded her face and nostrils.
When at long last her body ceased twitching, the young woman could barely roll over to escape her own filth. Ice crawled through her veins and she dragged lifeless limbs around herself, shivering. Once-bright green eyes fluttered feebly and Flora coughed painfully, trying pitifully to clear slime from her throat and nose. The singer welcomed the release of oblivion that she felt overtaking her. Jordanna Sedai’s voice crept into her bleary mind, “You need training, fool girl, to use the gifts the Creator decided to dump in your undeserving hands. Which is why you are coming the Grey Tower before Channelling Sickness kills you, despite the relief that would be to me. So stop your idiocy and keep walking!”
As the world faded to darkness, Flora wondered if she really was dying – it certainly felt that way. Had this been worth one last glorious song? That brief euphoric touch of power, was that all she would know before the Creator spun her back into His Pattern? She wondered if the Grey Tower would bother to search for her family to tell them their daughter had passed – not likely. Already her mind was too fuzzy to be concerned or attempt an answer for any of the questions swirling through a rapidly fading brain, ephemeral as might be her existence. The last thought to cross her conscious brain, causing the faintest of smiles, was how powerful an Aes Sedai she could have been.
