Can you feel the hearts of the children?

Aching for home, for something of their very own

Reaching hands, with nothing to hold on to,

But hope for a better day a better day

 

Crying Jesus, help me

To feel the love again in my own land

But if unknown roads lead away from home,

Give me loving arms, away from harm

(Prayer of the Children)

 

Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Faerthines could almost ignore his still-throbbing brain as he gloried in the first rays of the sun warming his bare chest.  His newly calloused hand gripped around a small ring bearing a crest infamous throughout the world yet intimately unfamiliar to the youth until just a few days ago.  He did not dare take the ring outside of his room, keeping it safely stored between his mattress and mattress frame, but he took the sudden new positive energy he gained from it through the day.

 

The day after the ball, he had shown up to his training still hung-over, much to his mentor’s disappointment.  However, the Domani boy had thrown himself into his work-outs that day with fervour previously unknown to Yrean.  The next day he was there early, eyes red-rimmed and tight, but smiling and already going through his morning stretches.

 

Now it had been four days since Faerthines had crawled out of the bottom of his bottle.  He still experienced symptoms of withdrawal but they were becoming sporadic and usually only troubled him during the mornings and evenings.  Over the course of a half-incoherent hour or so, a young alcoholic had made a complete turn-around.  But for what?  To impress a substitute for the less-than-satisfactory woman he was forced to call mother?  How could he even attempt to impress this new Mother?  Why bother?  Look at who she was!

 

Nevertheless, Faerthines found himself in the bathhouse the afternoon following a shortened day of training.  He left the Yards with his hair neatly tied back at the nape of his neck, wearing fresh clothes and gripping the small ring in his hand as if the amount of pressure it endured from his hand increased the vitality of this new positive lifestyle.

 

Butterflies waged war in his stomach returning him to a similar day a year back, on a similar path, on a similar mission.  His hopes were again in the sky and he somehow expected some sort of prodigal’s son return.  At the same time, though, he wasn’t so naïve as to expect her to fulfil the impossible archetype he had created for mothers in general.

 

By the time he reached her door, luckily and unluckily so much farther from the grand entrance than his mother’s own detestable chambers, he had tried to turn back three times but the ring in his hand held his course.  It took Faerthines perhaps a minute to manage knocking and an extra few minutes to open the door in answer to the Keeper’s call for him to enter.

Oh dear Light, this was it, she had finally lost her mind.

 

Not content with recruiting a private army, engaging in a kind of cold war with the Black Ajah, engaging in a much hotter war with the Shadow in general, sending off half the Tower’s troops to Kandor to fight a northern campaign, letting a pack of deranged Darkfriends run loose across Tar Valon because she either liked them or feared the consequences of killing them, cutting her daughter off and, incidentally, trying to save the world … she had also, for reasons she could not remember but for which alcohol really ought to have been an excuse, decided to adopt her pet traitor’s son.

 

If only she had had more than that one symbolic sip at the White Tower Ball she could have called it a drunken mistake and forgiven herself. But no, she distinctly remembered being stone cold sober when she slipped out of the light and heat of the ballroom and -- yes, Light help her, the details were coming back -- found the Talcontar boy on the ground amid the stink of drink and the glitter of broken glass, and somehow stupidly, miraculously needing her … She couldn’t let this madness persist into the cold light of day. He did not need her, nobody did, she had lost her little children and she would never get them back, nobody would ever turn to her as to a mother. And yet she had knelt, and held out her hand, and he had taken it. She remembered that quite distinctly. She closed her hand now, replacing the memory of his fingers with the reality of her own, and told herself not to be so appallingly stupid.

 

Only then she remembered the ring. She lifted a hand to her throat, found no chain beneath her fingertips and, yes, she hadn’t dreamed it, she genuinely had given Faerthines Talcontar her House Damodred signet ring. How hugely insane one person would have to be to give their ring, not only costly but of considerable sentimental value, to a drunk child she did not know. Had she really believed that … she didn’t even know what she might have really believed, couldn’t quite put into words what she needed, how intensely she craved a chance to make everything right with her children.

 

It was stupid. She had a war to run, she couldn’t mother anybody, her son was dead and she hadn’t even been able to hold her children and … it was stupid. She shouldn’t be remembering how she had put her shoulder beneath his and helped him home. Not that she should have done that anyway, what if anybody found out, what if conclusions were jumped to, what if anybody thought the Talcontar boy might be a good way to get at her, so many what ifs. No, it had been a moment of insanity, she would recover her Damodred ring later and in the meantime she ought not to think about it.

 

So she spent that day resolutely not thinking about it. And then the next day. And then the next.

 

On the fourth day, by which time she was beginning to wonder if the aforementioned moment of insanity had resulted in losing her ring for good, she heard in passing that the boy Talcontar had been absolutely sober since the ball and she had to hide a big stupid smile.

 

It did not surprise her, therefore, when that afternoon, as she consulted maps of Tar Valon in a futile effort to plan for any future defence of the city, her Keeper poked her head round the door and informed her that a young man was here to see her. She did not look up from her papers, chewing on the end of her quill in a most improper fashion, and nobody saw her smile as she instructed her Keeper to send the boy in. She did glance up at the boy briefly upon his arrival. He looked not only better -- not difficult when she had last seen him drunk and miserable -- but positively good: clean, smart and generally presentable. The boy had his mother’s prettiness. She hadn’t noticed before.

 

People didn’t even get second chances, she had known that when she killed her son, so why she was looking at somebody else’s lad she didn’t know. She wondered if maybe she should touch him but she didn’t quite know how, she had been busy having a row when the Creator handed out social intuition, so she simply gestured him to a seat with her quill. “Take a seat, boy. I’m afraid you failed Basic Etiquette,” her tone a little dry, “but I trust you’ll not do it again. How have you been?”

 

Sirayn Damodred

Amyrlin Seat

With a certain amount of trepidation, Faerthines followed the Keeper’s finger towards a large door.  Was it his imagination?  The door was positively forbidding; big and dark and closed.  Beyond it sat the unknown, likely sitting at her desk, working on some important project.  Surely she didn’t have time for a sixteen year-old recently reformed alcoholic, in search of someone to be his mother.

 

Would she turn him away?  The sharp sting of Estel’s words “You shouldn’t have come” “You were my biggest mistake” stayed his hand from where it was poised on the door handle.  Could he stand up to another rejection?  Light knew the last had broken him, morphing him into a person half-alive, a slave to the drink he used as a poor substitute for the human affection he craved.  Why was he even opening his heart up for yet another to casually plunge their knife into it for “duty’s sake”?  She was obligated to be his mother, damn it, that was her duty.  Estel had slept with his father, he was the result.  As Aes Sedai, where was her sense of responsibility for that obligation?

 

Opening the door, his thoughts ran wild with doubts and fears.  Sirayn barely looked up from where she was studying a pile of maps from the Borderlands.  Despite meeting her eyes for a fraction of a moment, he found himself weighed and judged from the state of his neatly combed curls to the bit of dust on his otherwise polished boots.  Hard grey eyes, augers piercing his groomed exterior and taking note of every insecurity, gave no indication of their findings.  She did not smile as she directed him towards a seat across the desk.  Faerthines began to prepare himself for the inevitable.

 

“I’m afraid you failed Basic Etiquette, but I trust you’ll not do it again.”

 

Was that humour!  He was so taken aback for a moment, that he forgot to sit.  Embarrassed, he covered his shock by making a formal bow and intoning “Mother.”  By the time he was sitting down, a grin had spread across his face.  “I’m afraid I was rather… distracted,” a flowery way to say he had shown up to the better part of his classes hung over “but I swear I will be more focused next time.

 

"As to how I am, I am excellent.”  He was but there really wasn’t any other proper response, why would the Amyrlin Seat give a damn if a Trainee was neglected by his mother or was suffering from withdrawal.  “Yourself?”  As he awaited her response, he nervously toyed with the ring in his pocket.