Selenessin thanked the Aes Sedai with a quiet voice and nodded, curtsying before she turned to leave.  She walked out of the cloth store with the sunny calico print forgotten in her arms and turned east to leave Four Kings.  Her father and older brother were still at the blacksmith's, having the plow fitted with a new blade.  She'd forgotten entirely about them too, and only walked, slowly and steadily, with her head in a fog.  She didn't see the wisdom smile and wave, and she didn't see the two girls carrying dolls run past her, narrowly missing a collision.  She stepped around a carriage lacquered shiny black, the black horse pulling it snorting at her and tossing his head.  She was clear of the Inns and Taverns and moving along the well-traveled road towards Caemlyn before she managed to give voice to the wondrous fact that the Aes Sedai had just informed her of.

 

"I... can channel."  Saying it out loud made it seem no more real, no less impossible.  She gasped and spun, looking to see who might have heard her speak the words that meant she would be going to the White Tower, and soon, to become Aes Sedai.  She was startled to see no one within a hundred paces, alone on the road from Four Kings.  She didn't remember leaving the town, didn't remember even leaving the shop.  She looked down at the cloth in her arms, unbound by the brown paper that would normally have kept the dust of the road off of the fabric.  She smiled ruefully, brushed some dust off, and then wrapped it in the lightweight cloak she had brought along for when the building storm clouds to the north would sweep down and drench the land.  Spring was a good time for listening to the wind*, the storms were predictable and went where they were supposed to.  She picked up her step again, moving with the long-strided purpose of someone with somewhere to go and a long way to get there.  Mistress Calor would tell her Da that she had left the shop and headed down the road, and he and Jasine would catch up with her somewhere between here and the farm. 

 

"I'm to go to the Tower.  I can channel, and I've been told to go to Tar Valon immediately.  I must become an Aes Sedai.  I will be able to help people."  Her voice trailed off on the last few words.  Selene had always wanted to help people, and she had thought to follow her Aunt Sari's footsteps in becoming a wisdom.  She didn't think it would be too hard to convince her Da, but her Mum might not be too thrilled about her youngest daughter going off to see the world at so young an age.  Da would understand, he'd gone off to fight the Aiel before she had been born, he understood the need to answer a call when it came.  And now was when her call came.

 

She heard the sounds of swift horses coming up the road behind her and moved into the soft spring grass that edged the road and turned to look.  She shaded her eyes with her hand, the bright noon sun making her squint.  Two horses were coming up the road, moving much faster than a pair of animals could be expected to sustain through until Caemlyn.  As she watched, the indistinct figures formed into people, a woman and a man.  The man was a warder, even from this distance she could see the odd cloak whipping behind him. The Aes Sedai made eye contact just before she swept by, a tense smile and a brief nod of her head, encouraging the girl to make the only choice she really had.  And then they were past her, the horses legs eating up the ground in smooth strides, barely even breathing hard.  As she watched, Selene wondered if there was some sort of bond between an Aes Sedai and her mount.  She certainly could use a hand with getting Rao to settle down beneath her.  She tightened her lips as they disappeared into a hollow as the road dipped down to follow the gentle curves of the land.  She continued walking, thinking about channeling and going off to see the world and her half-trained filly.

 

By the time she was halfway down the road that led away from the Caemlyn road, she had regained her usual good spirits.  She was sure that she could convince her mom that this was what must be done, and what would be done.  Determination was never something in short supply in the Al'Thorin line, and Selenessin wasn't about to be the first to tarnish that good name.  She was startled out of her thinking by a sudden smattering of fat, cold raindrops.  She ducked her head and huddled protectively around the cloaked fabric in her arms and broke into a less than graceful run.  The clouds that had been amassing to the North had rolled in and were just overtaking the bright sunshine, casting the land into a world of muted shades of grey.

 

She arrived home just as her Mum was going back through the front door, a basket of damp wash balanced on one hip, taken down off the line before the rain could undo the morning's sun-drying.  Selene saw her Mum look over the girl's head, searching for the wagon.  Flashing a bright smile to let the older woman know there was nothing wrong, she trotted up the stairs onto the porch, shaking her wet hair behind her.

 

"You'll catch your death, 'Ene.  Running around in the rain like some fool tot.  Is that my calico?"  Kairyn Al'Thorin set the basket down and held the door open for her daughter.  At Selene's nod she took the fabric inside, hanging up the cloak by the door to dry.  Selene looked back behind her and without the faintest show of her Da and brother showing, she skinned the dress down off of her and hung it up beside the cloak, her boots left on the porch below them.  She stepped inside in her stockings and shift, fetching a towel from the mostly-dried basket of laundry.

 

Selene handed her mom the small satchel of gold that the Aes Sedai gave her and took a deep breath.  As her mom eyed her, carefully weighing the stance Selene had taken, she sighed.  Selene spoke softly, but with conviction. "I can channel, Mum.  An Aes Sedai gave that to me, to pay my way to Tar Valon.  She said if I wasn't there within a month she'd return for me.  She tested me today, it's why I came back early."

 

Selene's mother was silent for a long time, holding the bag of coins and her usually fiery temper showing not at all.  Eventually she said very quietly "It's not easy being a novice.  It's even harder when you've been one for 7 years and they tell you that you'll never make the shawl.  To go home, and forget about channeling and the Source."  Selene gasped and stared. "Oh yes, girl, I know you can channel.  I've known you could for years.  I was hoping you never would."

 

Selene shook her head quickly, she would become Aes Sedai, the woman said so, but her mother cut her off again. "You always expect the best of everything, 'Ene.  Not everything is sunshine and rainbows.  I know you're stronger in the power than I ever could have hoped for.  But you took this woman's money and I assume you gave her your word.  And child though you may still be, the word of Al'Thorin is something worth standing by.  You'll go off to the tower, but you won't go alone.  Jasine will go too, to see you there and he'll stay in Tar Valon until you come home.  Maybe he'll find work as a Tower Guard in the meantime."

 

Selene was speechless and her Mum just sighed heavily, as if she had either been relieved of a great weight - or had taken on a new one.  Selene couldn't tell.  She dropped her towel and ran across the room to her Mum, wrapping her arms around the larger, warmly rounded woman and burying her face in the woman's apron, tears streaming down as she laughed.

 

She would go to Tar Valon after all.

 

~~~~

 

By the time Selenessin's Da and brother Jasine had pulled up to the house the storm had moved on again.  The world was left wet, shiny, and bright.  They unloaded the larger stuff into the barn and each brought in a box of goods for her Mum to go through and put away.  Da had brought home a necklace, a fine thing of silver and a small but beautiful firedrop pendant.  It was the finest piece of jewelry Selene had ever had and she gasped aloud and nearly dropped it when she pulled it out from between the sheaf of parchment paper and the box of nails from the blacksmith's.

 

"Tad, this is beautiful! By the Light, how did you manage to get this?"  Kairyn's eyes went wide and she'd completely forgotten the announcement that the boys were to hear.  They'd already told the two older girls, those not yet married off and in their new homes starting their new families.  Cairlyn and Lesael were at the same time happy for Selene and somewhat distant, as though their little sister whose hair they had pulled was already the Aes Sedai of legend and concern.  Neither girl really thought they would be punished for not being the sweetest sisters ever, but there was a wariness about them now that had never been there before.

 

"I heard some fine news in Four Kings, and decided to visit Jan's to pay off the balance on that fine thing I've been making payments on for nigh two years now.  It seems our Littlest Miss is off for a grand adventure, and I thought that would do for some celebration."  Tad tapped the side of his nose and nodded, smiling broadly.  He opened his arms wide and Selene leaped into them, still small enough to be picked up and bear hugged by her Da.  Jasine smiled broadly and unpacked a cake from one of the boxes, decorated in intricate frosting roses and vines.  Kairyn gasped again, eyes wide.  Selene had rarely seen her mom surprised so many times in succession in her life and she laughed, delighted.  She knew her Da would understand.

 

Da put the necklace around Selene's neck, gently kissing the top of her head as he closed the clasp.  Kairyn laughed softly and then kissed her husband, right there in front of the kids!  Jasine blushed and looked away, but Selenessin just smiled broadly.  When Mum announced that Jasine was to accompany her to Tar Valon Jasine looked even more excited than Selene had.  Da nodded in agreement and fetched his sword from the bottom of the chest in their bedroom, handing it to Jasine still in its scabbard and attached to the well-worn leather sword belt he'd worn in the war.  Cairlyn and Lesael each gave Selene a trinket, one of their few pieces of jewelry, to take with her to Tar Valon.  Selene had never felt so rich and fancy, or so loved.  It was a beautiful celebration and the best way the day's events could have concluded.  Better than even she had hoped for.

 

 

((OOC * Here Selene uses the term Listening to the Wind in the general term that most Wisdoms do, the reading of weather patterns and general movements and fronts, not the Talent.  She's good at reading the weather the same way farmers frequently are))

It was three days later that Jasine and Selenessin set off for Tar Valon.  The firedrop on its long chain was hidden from sight, nestled between her breasts and beneath even the thin layer of her shift.  Jasine had the sword their Da gave him strapped onto his hip.  He'd been practicing with it these past few days and had almost grown accustomed to the difference in weight and balance between the bundled lathes Da had been training him with and the feel of genuine steel.  He still had the bundled lathes wrapped in his bedroll behind his saddle, the handle poking out of the bundle where he would be able to draw the weapon if he needed to use something less lethal than the blade.  There were hugs all around and quite a few tears on both sides of the parting, and then they were off.

 

Selenessin wanted to gallop Rao the whole way to Tar Valon, just gather the reins and let the filly fly the whole way.  But the trip should take weeks and even an animal as feisty as Rao would have long-since died if forced (or allowed) to gallop that distance.  Jasine rode with a natural ease on the big bay gelding named Brownie, and his steadying presence helped calm both Selene and Rao.  Usually a sedate, steady, and level-headed girl most of the time, whenever Selene mounted her filly she felt a wildness, a desire to give up all restraint and move as the wind does, free of any boundaries.  Instead she rode at her brother's side, thinking about Tar Valon and letting the emotions of hopeful expectation and worried brooding war with each other freely.  Hope would prevail, it always did.

 

The wide road to Caemlyn was uneventful and quiet.  Their brief stay within Caemlyn was not.  They had just gotten through the gates into New Caemlyn when a vendor hailed Selene and she paused to listen to his spiel while Jasine kept watch on the crowd and general flow of people.  He didn't really expect there to be any issues with danger on the trip, especially in Caemlyn, which he still considered part of his 'home' of Andor. Selenessin simply did not expect danger at all - not from people anyway.  There was a muffled thump and when Jasine looked back to his sister, she was no longer astride her horse.  For a good moment he just stared at the empty saddle that sat on the nervous horse's back and then he realized the vendor was pulling away with his cart.  Jase leaned over and caught up Rao's bridle and when he did he saw feet sticking out of the back of the wagon from beneath a blanket.

 

Startled, Jase yelled to the Vendor and then spurred his horse, pulling Rao along by her reins.  Brownie, placid as he was most of the time, had been very well trained.  And being heeled in the ribs that hard that suddenly meant one thing to him: Run.  And he did.  Jasine nearly toppled off the horse, and as it was his shoulder got wrench horribly as he was pulled between the running horse he was mounted on and the standing horse he was holding the reins to.  Rao bolted at having her head jerk and it was only by the grace of the Creator himself that both horses wound up going in the same direction at about the same speed.  With one hand buried into the horse's mane, the other on Rao's reins, Jase wasn't controlling the horse at all until he could get his feet back in the stirrups and take up Brownie's reins.  The pair of animals shot past the vendor and in his brief glance at the man as he flew past there was little expression beyond blatant shock.  They were all outside the city gates and into Low Caemlyn  before Jase got the horses under control and turned around. When he did, the wagon and vendor were no where in sight.  Jase looped the reins over Rao's head so he'd have the length of them free and heeled Brownie into a trot, looking down side-streets to try to find where the wagon had gone.

 

Selene didn't know much of anything besides the musty smell of old blanket and the tightness constricting her arms fast to her sides.  She tried to scream but even to her ears it sounded muffled by the fabric against her face.  It had all happened so quickly!  The nice old man Maybe not so nice, I guess had said he had just the ribbon to match her eyes and so few pretty things were made to match eyes the color of melted chocolate.  She'd leaned into the wagon from Rao's back and was toppled and wrapped before she even knew what had happened.  At first she thought she must have fallen and been tangled among the man's merchandise, but even her naiveté could not sustain that hope past when the wagon jolted forward and she heard Jasine yell. 

 

Within her prison Selene squeezed her eyes shut tight, pressing out the tears that hadn't yet been shed but were now. 

 

He saw the scuff marks in the dirt road that lead off the cobbled main street and turned Brownie, Rao following along with the instincts of generations of being a herd animal.  He tucked his heels close to Brownie's sides and the horse responded by stretching out into an easy canter.  Rao tossed her head and whinnied and pulled past Brownie, making a race of it, but a slight twitch at the reins held in one fisted hand brought her back to his side.  Jasine heard the crack of a whip and a coarse yell to his left and turned down the next side road, taking it faster than was really safe, but the horses didn't skid this time.  Just ahead was the wagon and he could see the bundle of what was his sister in the back.  Jasine wondered for the first time what by the Light the man had wanted with his sister but shoved the thought aside for later.

 

They caught the wagon easily just as it passed out of low Caemlyn and into the open fields beyond.  As Jase leaped from the horse to the wagon seat beside the man, the man swung at him with a dagger.  If he hadn't bobbled and almost fallen from the wagon, the dagger would have taken him in the ribs.  As it was, his clumsiness saved him and the blade sliced deeply into his left bicep.  The man drew out his dagger and turned to leap off the other side of the wagon.  Jase pulled his blade and impaled the man from behind, wincing at the blossoms of red the bloomed across the man's shirt.  He tumbled off the wagon and lay still.  Jase dropped the sword on the wagon seat and stood unsteadily as the mule pulling the wagon slowed on his own, no longer being driven to run.

 

Jase pulled out his kerchief and wrapped his arm clumsily, one handed.  He stopped the mule and Brownie and Rao stopped as much out of herd instinct as anything else, standing beside the mule companionably.  As Jase climbed into the back of the wagon to free his sister the guard showed up. One stopped by the man lying prone on the road while the other two approached the wagon with swords drawn.  There the found two kids, hugging each other and crying.  Jase was doing most of the crying, which he would later deny, but he kept smoothing down the girl's mussed up hair and whispering "You're safe, you're okay."  Selene shuddered and tried not to think about the man's filthy promises of where he'd touch her.

 

 

------

 

 

They decided not to spend the night in Caemlyn.  As soon as the guards had determined no fault lay in Jasine's actions, the two were free to go.  Jase had cleaned his blade and resheathed it, and the two left without ever seeing Inner Caemlyn and the palace of the Queen they both thought of as theirs. All they did before journeying north was restock their supplies with some of the coin the Aes Sedai and their Da gave them for the trip.  They made camp that night well off to the side of the road to Tar Valon and doused their fire early into the evening, hoping not to be seen.  The evening was warm, the chill of early spring long past, and they didn't need the fire for warmth.  They did the same thing the next two nights as well, and it was this third night outside of Caemlyn that Selene was woken from her sleep by a sound that made her wild imagination envision bones being rattled together and she spent several moments convincing her that it was only a child's fantasy doing it before she finally was able to place the sound.

 

Jase's teeth were chattering.  Concerned, Selene crawled past the banked coals of their fire and laid her hand against her brother's brow.  She startled and pulled her hand back with a gasp, he was so hot.  She quickly grabbed her bedroll and put the whole thing over him as a blanket, sitting curled up on the hard ground beside him.  It was an hour or so before first light still, so she didn't have much to do until she could see, but in the meantime she wetted her kerchief with water and laid it on his brow.  Jase didn't stir, not even with the delirious ramblings that frequently accompanied a high fever, and she was worried.

 

As the horizon lightened she filled a tin cup from her satchel with water from one of their skins and set it down in the coals, letting them heat the water within. She turned down her blankets over him and carefully pulled his arm out of the sleeve of the shirt he was sleeping in and untied his bandage.  Even by low light she could see that the injury he sustained while saving her had gone red, inflamed and infected.  She hissed softly through her teeth as she probed the probed the wound carefully and finally her brother reacted, moaning quietly and his head lolling to one side.  She searched through her satchel until she found another kerchief and set it in the cup to boil and be cleaned.  She pulled the kerchief out with her fingernails and waved it a little in the air to cool it to the point where she could use it properly.

 

She'd helped the animals doctors with the horses' injuries before, and she'd been at her Aunt Sari's skirts whenever she wasn't with the horses, so she wasn't completely ignorant of what to do.  She cleaned the wound carefully with the cloth and heated water, but it was already starting to knit shut.  She grimaced at the smell and the sun was a good hour above the horizon by the time she decided she had done all that she could do with water alone.  She left the wound open to the air  on top of the blankets and moved off to find the herbs that she needed.  She was lucky that they were still in Andor, and so close to her general area.  The herbs that she knew grew at home were apt to be found here, too.  She just had to hope that she could find some feverbane and worrynot.  A bit of healall or soufa wouldn't be amiss either.  She worried as she searched, wishing she had insisted that Jase see a real Wisdom in Caemlyn before they left.

 

It took her almost three hours to find the herbs, but she did find all of them.  She came running back to Jase as soon as she finally found the feverbane.  The worrynot was the easiest to find, and she pulled up some of the root and had used a corner of her skirts to rub the dirt from the precious plant.  She made up the tincture as well as she could, hoping that her lack of knowledge wouldn't cost her brother his life, and treated him.  She made him sit up and drink tea made with willow bark and changed the cool cloth on his forehead whenever it warmed up to his elevated temperature.  She slept fitfully, curled up against his side, and it was two days later that she was woken up late in the morning by a gentle hand petting her hair that was as familiar as her mother's voice.  Jase had always pet her hair, even back when it was just a wispy cap of curls atop a toddler's head, and she came awake instantly and fully aware.

 

"Oh Jase, are you well?  Did it work?" Tears stood shining in her eyes as she looked up to her big brother, sitting up on his bedroll and smiling down at her.

 

"It worked, 'Ene.  Whatever you did, my arm doesn't ache anymore.  How long was I asleep for?"  His voice was scratchy and a little hoarse, but his breathing was even and he didn't look pained.

 

"We're seven days since Caemlyn now.  We've been camped here for three days.  You must be so hungry!"  She rose a little unsteadily and moved to one of the saddle bags and drew out the dry oats.  She flitted about making oatmeal, shaking in the last of their dried fruit from home and then offered a bowl to Jase.  She wouldn't let him get up and help her, but she did sit down beside him to eat her own bowl of food. 

 

They stayed another three days in that thicket beside the road to Tar Valon, letting Jase recover his health and spending a little bit of time snaring rabbits so they would have meat.  They exercised together, Selene finding that she could finally best her illness-weakened brother at something physical other than climbing trees, to help him recover some of his strength before grueling days spent in the saddle.  They played cards when he grew tired, gathering stones from the stream nearby to use as tokens for betting.  They finally got back under way and it was almost as if the rest had done them both good.  They made better time north from Caemlyn than they had even when they first set out.  Rao was settling down into the routine of alternating trotting, walking, and cantering that Selene had often used on long trail rides, although it didn't occur to either of the children to dismount and walk alongside their horses to rest them further, but they still drew within sight of Dragonmount, and then the White Tower itself well before the deadline the Aes Sedai had given Selene.