This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, Egwene deals with politics and sets her plans in motion. She also discovers that Siuan is in love with Gareth Bryne, and has a discussion about the Three Oaths. Aran’gar does some murders.
Egwene wakes from a restless, troubled sleep. Some of her dreams are those of a Dreamer, featuring Rand and Perrin and Mat. Others are murky and leave her with the feeling of needing to escape something. Siuan has come to report that Gareth Bryne is waiting for Egwene in the tent that serves as the Amyrlin’s study. When they enter the tent, Bryne bows respectfully, and reports that an army of Andorans and Murandians lies to the north of them. They are led by Pelivar and Arathelle, High Seats of two of the strongest Houses in Andor.
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Siuan and Egwene ask Bryne questions to figure out their options in this encounter. Egwene hopes to avoid fighting, and Bryne believes that Pelivar and Arathelle probably only want to keep Egwene’s army out of Andor. However, he is also confident that they will fight if they must, even if it means fighting Aes Sedai. Egwene instructs Bryne to arrange a meeting with Pelivar and Arathelle as soon as possible, somewhere other than in their ragged camp. She also instructs him to keep the news of the army and the meeting a secret for as long as possible.
Afterwards, Egwene expresses to Siuan that if she accomplishes nothing else, she hopes she can free the Aes Sedai from the Three Oaths. She’s surprised when Siuan becomes upset, telling Egwene that even trying would be disastrous, and succeeding would destroy the White Tower. Egwene points out that, while she tries to follow the Oaths for now, if sisters have to wait until they are in imminent danger they are likely to end up killed or collared by the Seanchan. What’s more, Siuan herself has taken ever advantage of being freed from the Oaths—they would never have made Egwene Amyrlin without Siuan’s lie about the Reds directing Logain, and they’d never have raised the army either. Elaida, Egwene is confident, really would destroy the White Tower, and would mishandle Rand as well.
Siuan replies that she has lied when she felt it necessary or expedient, but that she thinks it’s too easy for her to decide that something is necessary or expedient. She has lied to everyone except Egwene, and admits to having considered that as well. She tells Egwene that she realized that she must hold on to the Oaths with someone or she would lose herself—she doesn’t lie to Egwene or Gareth Bryne, whatever the cost, and as soon as she has the chance she will swear the Oaths again.
Still confused, Egwene agrees that she doesn’t care for lying, but that it is sometimes necessary, as long as you are willing to pay for it. She calls Siuan the first of a sort of Aes Sedai, and asks why she would give up her freedom.
“Give up?” Siuan laughed. “I’ll be giving up nothing.” Her back straightened, and her voice began to gain strength, and then passion. “The Oaths are what make us more than simply a group of women meddling in the affairs of the world. Or seven groups. Or fifty. The Oaths hold us together, a stated set of beliefs that bind us all, a single thread running through every sister, living or dead, back to the first to lay her hands on the Oath Rod. They are what make us Aes Sedai, not saidar. Any wilder can channel. Men may look at what we say from six sides, but when a sister says, ‘This is so,’ they know it’s true, and they trust. Because of the Oaths.”
The Oaths, she insists, are the heart of the Aes Sedai, and Egwene realizes that she has spent all this time trying to become an Aes Sedai without really considering what it is that makes a woman Aes Sedai. Siuan inists that they can survive the Seanchan, as they survived Artur Hawkwing and the Trolloc wars and everything else, but privately, Egwene remains skeptical.
Siuan changes the subject abruptly, advising that Egwene confide fully in Gareth Bryne. Suddenly Egwene realizes the reason for Siuan’s odd behavior around the man—she is in love with him. She feels a swell of empathy, thinking of Gawyn, but sternly orders Siuan not to reveal anything to Bryne. She also gives Siuan instructions to send Beonin, Anaiya, and Myrelle to meet with Pelivar and Arathelle.
In the morning Egwene announces to the Hall that she intends to remain in this camp for two or three days so everyone can rest. Her listeners are surprised, but there are no arguments—Egwene knows that the Aes Sedai are still hoping for a miracle that will reunite the White Tower without a confrontation. She goes back to her “study” where she and Siuan tackle a mountain of report and paperwork.
Elsewhere, Aran’gar returns from burying a body, considering how primitive and vulnerable this army of spears and horses is. She could kill all of them easily, without them even knowing who was killing them.
Of course, she would not survive them long. That thought made her shiver. The Great Lord gave very few a second chance at life, and she was not about to throw away hers.
She walks back toward the camp, thinking of the coming night’s dreams and enjoying the way men look at her as she passes.
Egwene is just taking a break from wading through the reports when Lelaine sweeps into the tent. She is followed by Faolain, who takes Lelaine’s cloak and gloves and stands obediently in the corner while Lelaine greets Siuan, then turns to speak sharply to Egwene about the Sea Folk, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Romanda, with Theodrin waiting upon her.
The sitters have learned that Rand, or as they refer to him, “that young man,” has been talking with the Sea Folk in Cairhien, and asks if Egwene knows why he would take an interest in them. The two snipe at each other, each wanting Egwene to pass on messages through Tel’aran’rhiod for Merilille. Romanda comes out of the argument slightly better, while Egwene does her best to answer diffidently without making any direct promises. Chesa interrupts the conversation by coming in with Egwene’s meal, reporting that Meri is nowhere to be found before respectfully withdrawing.
Romanda frowned, but she said nothing. After all, she could hardly show too much interest in one of Egwene’s maids. Especially when the woman was her spy. Just as Selame was Lelaine’s. Egwene avoided looking at Theodrin or Faolain, both still standing dutifully in their corners like Accepted, rather than Aes Sedai themselves.
The argument resumes, with Egwene privately wishing that she could know what Rand was thinking. Once the two Sitters have left, still jostling for supremacy and ignoring Egwene, she and Siuan get back to work. Chesa returns to take Egwene’s tray and light some candles.
“Who’d expect Selame to go missing, too?” she muttered, half to herself. “Off canoodling with the soldiers, I expect. That Halima’s a bad influence.”
Later, Siuan brings up the reports she’s been receiving via the Amyrlin’s eyes-and-ears network about soldiers moving south out of Kandor. Other tales have also been coming in, stories about Aes Sedai swearing fealty to Rand, rumor of a printer in Illian who had proof that Rand murdered Mattin Stepaneos and destroyed his body with the One Power, while a laborer on the docks claims to have seen the king carried onto a ship, bound and gagged. The Shaido, meanwhile, seem to be everywhere, and most sisters believe that this is on Rand’s orders. Egwene believes some of the attacks and destroyed villages must be the work of bandits, not Aiel.
Siuan eventually brings up something that has been on her mind: With the exception of Romanda and Moria, the sitters chosen in Salidar are too young. It’s very rare for the Hall to have even one Sitter under one hundred, but the Salidar Hall has eight. Siuan doesn’t know what it means, but states there is always a reason for a Sitter being raised young, including when she herself was raised to Amyrlin. Egwene knows that Siuan is very good at noticing patterns and solving puzzles, but she doesn’t see anything particularly suspicious in the age of the Sitters. So many things are changing, and it makes sense to her that younger, more adaptable women have been chosen to lead.
Romanda arrives suddenly, ordering Siuan out and erecting a ward against eavesdropping without even asking Egwene. Romanda is furious at learning Egwene has arranged the meeting with Pelivar and Arathelle—now that it has already been agreed to, they have no choice but to go forward with it. However, Romanda orders Egwene to present Romanda as the person who speaks for the Amyrlin, and to remain silent afterward. Egwene does her best to sound meek as she says she understands Romanda’s orders—and she knows that if she lets Romanda speak for her the Hall and the whole world will know who is actually in charge. Romanda declares that she will not see all their plans spoiled by a child who doesn’t know enough to find her way across a street without her hand held, and flounces out of the room.
Egwene is so furious at being talked to that way that she snatches up her inkwell and throws it after Romanda, narrowly missing Lelaine. Lelaine makes her own eavesdropping ward and says much the same thing to Egwene as Romanda had, though Lelaine is self-satisfied where Romanda was angry. Both women claim to have the support of the Hall against her rival, and Lelaine tells Egwene that she will speak for the Amyrlin at the meeting.
“Don’t you know by now that you aren’t really in charge of anything? The Hall is, and that is between Romanda and me. In another hundred years, you may grow into the stole, but for now, sit quietly, fold your hands, and let someone who knows what she is about see to pulling Elaida down.”
When she leaves, Egwene is left feeling momentarily concerned, wondering if perhaps they are right that she is too young and inexperience and might be about to ruin everything. But she decides that if she spends a hundred years being led around she will end that time fit for nothing else—if she has to grow, it must be right now. Siuan comes back and Egwene informs her that everything went exactly as they hoped; they couldn’t have handed her the Hall better if Egwene had told them how to do it.
Returning to her tent, Sheriam is unceremoniously shielded and thrown down onto her cot.
A hand stroked her head. “You were supposed to keep me informed, Sheriam. That girl is up to something, and I want to know what.”
Sheriam has to endure a lot of physical punishment before her questioner is satisfied that she isn’t holding anything back. Left alone, she curls up and wishes that she had never spoken to a single sister in the Hall.
So many interesting questions are raised in these two chapters, including some philosophical ones. Despite the fact that there’s little action, there’s a lot of meat to get into, and a lot of character work to enjoy.
Let’s start with Aran’gar/Halima. I had suspected that she might be responsible for Egwene’s headaches, but it was hard to be sure given that Egwene suffered constant headaches after her encounter with Lanfear and her insistence on continuing to (secretly) visit Tel’aran’rhiod during her recovery. They were letting up as she recovered, but we were never told they fully stopped. After reading Aran’gar’s small section in Chapter 16, it seems that she is also giving Egwene the terrible nightmares she doesn’t remember afterwards. This is interfering with Egwene’s sleep, and no doubt the combination of headaches and broken sleep is designed to keep Egwene ineffective as a leader. Halima staying nearby also allows her to spy on Egwene and the doings of the Salidar Aes Sedai. The reason for killing Egwene’s other maids is probably to give her more time with Egwene and to undermine Romanda and Lelaine’s attempts to know what is really going on with their young Amyrlin.
I imagine that, at this point in the story, the Dark One’s goal regarding the Aes Sedai is simply to keep both sides of the Tower as broken and ineffectual as possible, and to continue sowing chaos amongst their ranks, as the Darkfriends and Forsaken have been ordered to do in all areas of the world. So Aran’gar might not have much of a goal here, beyond that directive. However, I do wonder if Aran’gar knows that Egwene is a Dreamer. I’m not even sure how many of her fellow Aes Sedai know, so it’s very possible Aran’gar has no idea, but if Aran’gar does know, the nightmares may be directly intended to interfere with Egwene learning important information in her Dreams.
I must admit, I am feeling rather smug that Egwene’s Dreams-capital-D made the same metaphor about Rand becoming his mask as I did last week. The Pattern and I are on the same wavelength, I guess! The bit about Perrin and Aram hacking their way through brambles that screamed with human voices was pretty chilling though. Given the coldness Perrin displayed to the captured bandits, I wonder if the next stage of Perrin’s journey might be reckoning anew with the costs of his leadership and his duty to Rand, and perhaps having to come to a new balance between violence and peace. Having Elyas turn up right now felt symbolic, perhaps prophetic, in a narrative sense, and I’ll be interested to see where Perrin’s story goes next.
We also get a short Sheriam POV scene at the end of Chapter 16, but it doesn’t do much to answer my question as to whether or not she is a Darkfriend. Stripping someone naked and beating them to make sure they’re telling you the truth about something is certainly a Forsaken/Darkfriend move, but they’re not the only group to employ naked corporal punishment and coercion. (Does Jordan like to have ladies stripped naked too often in his story? Yes. Yes he does.) After her tormenter leaves, Sheriam is left wishing “that she had never in her life spoken to a single sister in the Hall,” but even that could mean a number of things. Perhaps the person who questioned her is Romanda; she certainly wants to know what Egwene is up to, and if she had somehow found out about Sheriam’s secrets she could be holding them over her head the same way Egwene is. It could also be another Aes Sedai, someone who is not a Sitter and is working from the shadows the way Verin does. And if Sheriam is Black Ajah it could be Aran’gar or any number of others. I’m sure that there are at least several Black Ajah members amongst the Salidar Aes Sedai.
Which brings us to Siuan’s suspicions about the ages of the Sitters for the Hall of the Little Tower. I am quite confident that Egwene is wrong to dismiss Siuan’s concerns. Siuan is too sharp, and too pragmatic, to discount this way; she might be distressed about all the change happening to the Aes Sedai, but she isn’t the type of person to let her dislike of a thing blind her to reality. Quite the reverse, in fact.
It seems to me that there are a lot of reasons that the Salidar Aes Sedai might have chosen to elect these young sisters to sit in their new, improvised Hall. Egwene herself was elected young as a political move, because of her connection to Rand and so that she could be used as a figurehead while being guided and manipulated by older, more experienced sisters. It’s also probable that some sisters gave Egwene their vote because they were uncomfortable electing a new Amyrlin at all. They might hope to replace Egwene with a “true” Amyrlin once Elaida is deposed, or even to find a way to reunite the Tower under Elaida. Egwene was raised without the trappings from the Tower, without swearing on the Oath Rod, without most of the symbolic weight put behind the raising of an Amyrlin. Some sisters might hope, once the Tower is made whole again, to label Egwene’s service temporary and symbolic, and to put it aside. This might just be possible with a young person like Egwene, but it certainly would not be with someone like Romanda. In the same way, the Sitters for the Salidar Hall might similarly have been chosen so that they could later be dismissed as young, temporary stand-ins for the old order, once that order is reestablished.
It’s also possible that one or more of the various factions are meddling with the Salidar Aes Sedai and their attempts to establish cohesion and order. Romanda and Lelaine’s fighting is responsible for a lot of the gridlock in the Hall, as are Siuan and Leane’s manipulations, as well as the general fear the sisters have around making the division in the Tower permanent. But it’s also possible that the Hall is ineffectual in part because of the youth, and relative lack of experience, of most of the Sitters. The Black Ajah could certainly have had a hand in making sure that less powerful and effective sisters were elected to the Hall. But it also might be Elaida’s meddling—she did say that she had spies in Salidar. And if Elaida can have spies, the old Ajah Heads back in the White Tower can, and almost definitely would. It would have been easy enough for them to have sent spies to find out what the rebels were up to, and, if necessary, to stymie and hamper their attempts to establish themselves as a legitimate order.
Of course, Egwene might not be totally wrong in her belief that some sisters, either the Sitters themselves or those that elected them, saw benefit in choosing young, adaptable women to help lead Salidar. But at most that might account for one or two unusually young Sitters. And I think that Egwene’s perspective on this is warped in the same way that she privately believes Siuan’s to be. Egwene personally thinks that youth is better and has more advantages, and is eager to see many of the old ways either rapidly evolve or be abandoned. And so she hopes and believes that the other Salidar Aes Sedai are thinking along the same lines. I think that is a very naive belief.
Speaking of naive beliefs, I got quite the chuckle over the passage where Egwene told Siuan she wouldn’t be surprised if Elaida had tried to kidnap Rand, except for the fact that she’s too busy worrying about the Salidar Aes Sedai. She then immediately walked it back with a “Well, maybe not kidnap, but she’d have done something. ” All in all, I think Egwene, Siuan, and Leane are doing a very good job under some very difficult circumstances, but they are not always infallible, either factually or morally. Here we see Egwene underestimating Elaida’s self-important audacity and overestimating how much Elaida fears the Salidar Aes Sedai. Elaida is blinded by her ambition and jealousy, but she is also intelligent and daring—or at least she was before Padan Fain and Alviarin got their respective hooks into her brain. Egwene has had moments when she’s recognized that leading an army might have a heavy cost to the men she is asking to fight for her, but I don’t know how much she’s considered all the potential costs to the Aes Sedai she is leading, or how much more complicated this endeavor of hers might get once she reaches the White Tower and the actual confrontation begins.
The problem of obtaining reliable information, a continual theme in The Wheel of Time, crops up here as well. Because of her connection to the Wise Ones, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Egwene that they might hold truly important information back from her. But we know that Rand has demanded that they swear silence on certain matters, including his kidnapping and the status of the Aes Sedai involved in Dumai’s Wells, both those who were captured and those who swore fealty. Egwene dismisses the rumors of Aes Sedai swearing fealty in part because “according to the Wise Ones, Merana was awaiting his return,” in the Sun Palace, which is an Aes Sedai worthy “technically true” answer if ever I saw one.
Egwene does, however, think the tale of Rand murdering Mattin Stepaneos and destroying his body with the One Power is more likely than other rumors, which actually really surprised me. I’m not sure how Egwene got to the point where she’d so casually accept a rumor that Rand brutally murdered someone, ostensibly to usurp his throne. After all, Egwene was around him for a while during her apprenticeship, and while she certainly saw him as being stubborn and arrogant, she also saw his care for her, and some of the ways in which he was suffering.
I suppose it’s the influence of all the rumors and the chaos attributed to Rand’s name—the chaos that the Dark One has ordered his minions to sow in the world and then lay at the Dragon’s feet. It’s also possible that Egwene’s current alliances, her deep connection to the Aes Sedai and attachment to her identity as one, is coloring her perspective in ways she doesn’t realize. Even knowing that the sisters don’t have the full story about Rand, the way they speak of him might be getting into her head. For example, she’s suspicious of his connection to the Sea Folk, but she knows that they see him as their Coramoor—at no point does she seem to consider that he may be meeting with them simply because they are requesting it.
Suspicion in so many directions, and then missing the dangers right beside her, like Halima. You can see why, of course—this is the Dark One’s plan, and it is very effective. No one feels able to trust anyone else, alliances are strained, and even the Dragon Reborn believes that no one will fight for the world unless he forces them using threats and fear.
I’m very curious to see how the rest of Egwene’s plan to gain control over the Hall is going to go. I’m not sure exactly how Romanda and Lelaine have handed that control to her—perhaps by ignoring both of their demands to be the speaker of the Amyrlin Egwene will gain the authority that each seeks to have? Or perhaps it is more to do with the way they have been undermining each other’s positions with the other Sitters? The good news is, I have a feeling that I won’t have to wait too long to find out.
Romanda and Lelaine are characters that are just designed for a reader to dislike, especially since we see all their interactions through Egwene’s perspective. I can’t blame Egwene for her frustrations in dealing with the two, especially with how they talk to her. Whether or not they are right to want to control her, they put her down every chance they get, and treat her youth and relative ignorance as a moral failing, rather than a simple fact of life. This is common among the Aes Sedai, with their strict hierarchy based first on strength in the power and secondarily on experience and the length of time one has been a full sister. Young people are generally dismissed, as are those who are weak in the Power, though the latter is much more important. And I have the same complaint about Cadsuane’s treatment of Rand; much of her opinion of him is not incorrect, but she somehow believes that she’ll get results debasing him to his face and calling him a stupid child.
But as much as I find this behavior from the senior Aes Sedai frustrating, I can see where they are coming from. It is true that Egwene and Rand are both young and inexperienced, and it is only through a fluke of fate (well, the Will of the Pattern, but let’s not get into destiny stuff right now) that such young people are in such powerful positions. If not for the existence of the Dragon Reborn, both Egwene and Rand’s positions would indeed be absurd—and these worldly, powerful, women are experiencing that sense of absurdity even as they recognize (at least in part) that the situation is necessary. Egwene feels this as well. Despite her anger and resentment towards Romanda and Lelaine, she also stops to wonder if she is too young, and if she might ruin everything through lack of experience. In the end, however, she comes to the conclusion that there is no time for her to wait to grow—she has to do it now.
Elayne and Nynaeve have also had to grow, both in the Power and in responsibility, in extraordinary ways. So have Perrin and Mat. But after Rand himself, Egwene might be the one who has had to change the most and the fastest. We know she was forced, both by Siuan in her Aes Sedai training and by her time as a damane, and now she has been elevated to a position of incredible authority literally overnight. And it is one she did not ask for. Perhaps she is too young to be Amyrlin, but that is not her fault, and like Rand, she has to do her best, what she sees as right and what she sees as necessary, because that is the position in which she has been placed. Like Rand, she will only be good and successful if she can learn to work with those who are there to support and advise her—at least some of them, some of the time. And yet, like Rand, she is also in a position to see some things that no one else can.
That doesn’t mean she is always right, either. But that is true of the old guard as well as the new. The trick to leadership is to know how to listen to the advice of others, how to weigh the good and discard the bad, to follow your own instincts but to allow them to be informed by those who do know more than you, through age, or experience, or expertise.
I was fascinated by her conversation with Siuan about the Three Oaths. We haven’t had this kind of philosophical defense of the Three Oaths since we were first introduced to the concept. I’m pretty sure what Moiraine said about the Oaths was similar to the way Siuan talks about them here, though I don’t remember the specifics and don’t have the wherewithal to go looking for it. But Siuan’s comments went a little farther than my understanding of how the Aes Sedai see the Three Oaths.
It is clear that the Three Oaths were a necessary evil for the Aes Sedai who first adopted them. No doubt it was incredibly difficult for those female channelers who survived the Breaking, and the first few generations that succeeded them, to establish any kind of trust between themselves and the rest of the world. Very few people would have had any understanding of what happened to the men who suddenly became violently and horrifically destructive, who lashed out with the One Power to the point of altering the very shape of the land. And after such a terrible experience, the survivors, who probably knew little of the One Power even before the Breaking, weren’t going to just take any channeler’s word for it that only men were affected, that only they were dangerous. This Age was never going to see the Aes Sedai the way they did in the Age of Legends, even as those who remembered the Breaking eventually passed away.
From the start, the White Tower, and any kind of Aes Sedai organization that preceded it, would have been self-protective and secretive. And the rest of the world would have been suspicious and self-protective in turn. It is not surprising that some kind of bind or check on a channeler’s power would have been felt necessary to the early sisters of the Age. We don’t know when the Oath Rod first started to be used, but either some surviving sisters who still knew its purpose suggested it as a solution, or someone rediscovered how this particular ter’angreal worked, and proposed the same.
Given that the Oath Rod seems to shorten a channeler’s lifespan by quite a bit, it’s probably the latter. I can imagine those early sisters might have seen the shortened lifespan as a price worth paying, just as the Three Oaths themselves are, but if anyone in this Age knew how the rod worked, it would certainly have been recorded and remembered.
And so the Three Oaths became a necessary evil, a price the Aes Sedai had to pay in order to establish themselves as safe and trustworthy to the new order, the new nations that were establishing themselves post-Breaking. Then time passed, a lot of time, and the Oath Rod became a valuable tradition, cemented in the very foundations of what it means to be Aes Sedai, as Siuan says. We have seen other examples of how important tradition is to the White Tower, including many traditions that no longer serve their original purpose, or any. And at the same time, Aes Sedai developed ways of handling the (sometimes severe) impediment that the Oaths place upon them. Or rather, that the first oath places upon them.
The third oath was not terribly limiting (at least in a world where there were no Seanchan) considering the ways the One Power can be used to restrain people without harming them. An Aes Sedai can still use saidar as a weapon when her life is threatened, or against Shadowspawn and Darkfriends, and she can still defend others with the One Power by, say, wrapping a would-be assailant in Air or putting a wall of Air between an attacker and their victim. No doubt there are many other creative ways. It would probably be nice to use saidar to make weapons for the Warders, but the Warders have the advantages of the Bond and manage to be some of the greatest warriors in the world even without special Power-wrought blades. And it saves the Aes Sedai having to field lots of requests for such weapons from every nation—if any Aes Sedai were able to remember/relearn how to forge such weapons in the first place, that is.
But the lying is another matter. There is a reason that it is the focus of Egwene and Siuan’s conversation about the Oaths. Siuan insists that “Men may look at what we say from six sides, but when a sister says, ‘This is so,’ they know it’s true, and they trust.” But we have seen that they do not trust. They believe, maybe, but even when Aes Sedai speak in plain words, people still worry that the sister in question found some way to trick them. The Whitecloaks call them lies outright, and as much as I hate the Whitecloaks, you can kind of see why. A lie of omission, a lie of clever wordplay, is still a lie, morally and functionally speaking. And the Aes Sedai, even the good ones like Siuan, have convinced themselves that this is not true.
Siuan tells Egwene that, since gaining the ability to lie, she has done it when she believed it necessary. But because her perspective has been shaped by the culture of the White Tower and the tradition of the Oath Rod, she doesn’t realize that she has always done that. She hid the information about Rand’s birth from the Tower; she led everyone to believe that she and Moiraine hated each other; she planned and schemed and dissembled her entire career as Amyrlin—Elaida’s coup was built on the revelation of those deceptions. Now she is doing the same thing, leading people to believe that she has been beaten, that she and Leane are no longer friends, that she is not continuing to do the same thing she was deposed for doing, just from a different vantage point. The only difference is that she has access to a previously forbidden weapon—the direct, baldfaced lie, and the fact that no one has realized that she has the ability to tell one.
But it is more, even, than that. Siuan is a good person. She tells Egwene that she wants to reswear the Oaths because it is necessary for the Tower to survive, but also because she believes the Aes Sedai do need to be controlled this way. She recognizes her own impulses to abuse her power, recognizes that “what is necessary” can be highly subjective, that she also made choices for expediency, and that it’s easy to keep telling yourself that bad things are necessary, that questionable choices are justified. She wants that limitation back because it draws a clear line between what she is allowed to do and what she isn’t—a line that she is literally prevented from crossing, no matter the necessity, the justification, or the consequences.
Given this, I would actually argue that Siuan’s argument is exactly backwards. Holding to the Three Oaths doesn’t require personal strength, moral conviction, or willpower. And that makes it easy to stop thinking about those things. A sister can justify any amount of evasion, misdirection, and trickery because the line is drawn at blatant, factual lies. She doesn’t have to make that determination for herself, and if she doesn’t use that moral muscle, it may atrophy with time.
Siuan noticed in herself an impulse to abuse her ability to lie, and when she did, she drew a line. She told herself she wouldn’t lie to Egwene or to Bryne, no matter what, and although she may relate it to the previous line drawn by the Three Oaths, it is a choice she made by herself, and for herself. She doesn’t need the Oath Rod to do it for her, or for people long dead and White Tower tradition and the world’s superstition to do it for her. And I think this choice she has made shows how strong she really is, but it is difficult and painful work to hold that line, and she would probably feel great relief not to struggle with it anymore.
Of course, this analysis is slightly simplified, brushing over details like how subjective a woman’s interpretation of her actions can be, the fact that there are many other moral choices for Aes Sedai to struggle with. But as a foundational observation, I think it’s sound. I also noticed that Siuan uses the word “trust” when she talks about how the Aes Sedai are viewed because of the Oaths. And here I think she is very blind to the truth. She believes that the Oaths make people trust Aes Sedai, but they don’t.
She tells Egwene:
“Because of the Oaths, no queen fears that sisters will lay waste to her cities. The worst villain knows he’s safe in his life with a sister unless he tries to harm her.”
This is true, but none of it has anything to do with trust. People don’t trust Aes Sedai. They treat them like chained tigers, or like dangerous tricksters who are only stopped from doing bad things because they are magically bound not to. Individually there can be trust, of course, as we saw with Moiraine and her allies, with some of the servants in the Tower, with loyal members of the eyes-and-ears networks. But as an organization, the Aes Sedai are not trusted by most of the nations. Three Oaths or no, there are lands where Aes Sedai are not welcome at all, and where it can be dangerous for them to go. The nations that have the best relationship with the White Tower are Andor, whose Queens have both a traditional and a personal relationship with the Tower, and the Borderlands, who have received the most direct help and protection from the Aes Sedai because of the fight against the Blight.
And even there, we see that the Aes Sedai fail to understand why they are welcome allies. They let the world think they abandoned Malkier because they believed they needed to appear omniscient and omnipotent. Just as Rand is choosing to control his followers through fear, the Aes Sedai maintain their power and authority the same way. But in this illusion that they abandoned Malkier, they didn’t impress people with their power. They sent the world a message that they will abandon their allies if it suits their mysterious, unknowable designs. Who, then, will trust an Aes Sedai even if she does speak to them in plain words?
However, Siuan has lived in the White Tower since she was a child, and she never got to travel and see the world the way she wanted to as an Accepted. If Moiraine, who traveled to many lands, were with Siuan now, she might have a very different opinion on how well the Oaths serve and protect the Aes Sedai’s relationship with the world. And Egwene, who was barely in the Tower at all and has a very different relationship with its rules and traditions, is going to have a different perspective from those who were trained and raised the traditional way.
All that being said, however, Egwene may not remain so eager to abolish the Three Oaths, at least not right away. Most sisters probably feel the way Siuan does, and most non-channelers would probably be very alarmed at the idea of releasing the White Tower from its traditional restraints. It may very well take time to change this tradition, and Egwene might find she needs to slow down some of the changes she is so desperate to make.
Again, the Seanchan are a big concern, but the third oath won’t hinder them at all in fighting the last battle. Though I wonder if the revelation that the Oath Rod shortens a woman’s lifespan might change some opinions. But as I always say at the end of these long, rambling musings… time will tell.
Next week we’ll be covering chapters 17 and 18, in which Egwene gets to have her meeting with Arathelle and Pelivar. I’m about to go read them now, and I must admit, I am on the edge of my seat!
Sylas K Barrett continues to wish that Jordan would show how people actually develop feelings for each other, and doesn’t like the relationship between Bryne and Siuan at all. However, he does like both characters individually, and so will hold out hope that the narrative will eventually change his mind.
