Red and White

Her hand comes up red as she wipes her forehead, a smear like blood between her thumb and forefinger. She stares it in incomprehension for a moment - it meant something this morning, it was something more than a red mark on white skin - but rubs it off briskly on a fold of skirt. It is just paint now, pain now, and what it was does not matter.

(Even after weeks, she still painted her ki'sain on her forehead with the thoughtful, careful precision of the unaccustomed. Even after weeks, his smile and kiss on seeing it were so much at odds with his bruised, blue eyes. The painting, the smile. The ki'sain, the kiss. Their morning ritual, just as sparring with Rand was his.)

She lifts her head to the mirror, noting numbly that the paint has spread across her forehead and the bodice of her dress. The blue-green silk has a crimson stain across her breasts, drying to brown, and she mentally reviews the various herbs that could remove it. Soapleaf. Ash Blossom. Washmaid's Help. Andilay root. It is her own, strange exercise in calm, because she can no longer imagine herself a flower opening to the sun.

(The last son of the Seven Towers lying in the courtyard. Blossoming beneath him, red petals of a bloody flower spread across the flagstones. He had said she made flowers bloom where he had cultivated only desert. He had said he would not give her widows' weeds for a bridal garland. He had lied. Had he lied?)

Deliberately, she plunges her hands into the basin of water on the table and washes the last streaks of red off her forehead. Her face is very white and very young without the paint. Her lips are tensed against trembling. Her dark eyes blink at herself in surprise. In the mirror, she sees a stranger's face - strange because it has not changed with her since this morning, because nothing about it has died.

(Lifetimes of pain crammed into the second it took her to round the corner of the archway that led into the courtyard. His body on the floor. Red blood around him. His dead body on the floor. White hands touched her shoulder, stroked her arm, tried to restrain her. A sussuration of sounds around her. Rand's pale face and red-stained hands. Oh, Light, Nynaeve, I'm so sorry. I' m so . . . Light, it was an accident and Lan . . . opened himself to the form. He . . . was a blademaster and why . . . why would he Sheathe the Sword when we were just sparring and . . . oh, Light, I brought death to him and I can never forgive myself. Light.)

To her surprise, her hands do not tremble as she picks up the other, small pot of paint from the table and dips the thin brush into it. Her movements are precise, cautious, as she dots the white ki'sain on her forehead. The drop runs slightly, like a tear, but she does not redo it. It is the colour of bone, the colour of emptiness, and the painting of it will be her mourning ritual every morning of her long life.