This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we’re finishing up with Rand and Cadsuane in Tear. Logain has arrived with his news about what Taim has been up to—news which, in my opinion, Rand is not taking as seriously as he should. But there’s other news to worry about too, like the ransacking of Bashere’s tent and Dobraine’s stabbing… not to mention the fact that Asha’man have been bonding Aes Sedai. Oh, and the Seanchan. Can’t forget those guys. It’s chapter 24 of Crossroads of Twilight!
The chapter opens with Rand lying on his bed, Min in his arms. He finds her presence distracting, and is worrying over what to do about her, Aviendha, and Elayne. He is no longer afraid of killing them, but doesn’t know if it’s too late to protect them. He still has Lews Therin’s presence in his head, and sometimes “a foggy face that he [can] almost recognize.”
Min senses Rand’s mood, and upbraids him for worrying. She has gotten even better at reading his mind since the bonding, but he’s doing his best to hide the fact that his two half-healed wounds have been hurting more since cleansing saidin—or at least Rand is more aware of them. He hopes that at least one will begin to heal now that Shadar Logoth has been destroyed.
Rand knew that sooner or later, someone would use the Warders left behind in Cairhien to find him, but he didn’t expect Bashere to be with them, and he certainly didn’t expect Logain, wearing the dragon pin and with half a dozen Asha’man and eight Aes Sedai in tow, to be with him. Min is worried about Logain, as she still sees an aura of glory around him. She also sees something dark around Bashere, though she doesn’t know what it means.
Min is overjoyed to see Loial, however, and Rand is hardly less happy. When the Ogier comes to their rooms, Rand takes the opportunity to seize saidin when no one is watching. The taint is gone, but Rand still feels nauseous and dizzy; the sickness he was experiencing hasn’t lessened at all after the cleansing. As he struggles not to throw up, Rand can feel Lews Therin reaching for saidin. In some ways, Lews Therin seems stronger now than he did before Shadar Logoth. But Rand tells himself it does not matter.
He joins Min and Loial in the other room, where the Ogier exclaims joyously over the fact that the house has rooms for Ogier.
Spinning a web against eavesdropping around the room, he knotted it so he could release saidin. The last traces of nausea began to fade immediately. He could control the sickness, usually, with an effort, but there was no point when he did not have to.
Rand realizes he has thought of what he was doing—spinning a web and knotting it off—in terms Lews Therin would use rather than those of this age. He reminds himself that he is Rand al’Thor, not Lews Therin Telamon.
Loial tells them that he and Karldin visited every stedding except Stedding Shangtai. Three of the Steddings didn’t take Loial’s message seriously but the others agreed to guard the Waygates, and Loial is confident that, once the message reaches Stedding Shangtai, the Elders there will take the warning seriously, since they have always felt unsafe having a Waygate so close to their home.
Ogier from all over are traveling to Shangtai for the Great Stump, but Loial wasn’t able to find out what they are meeting about—he is too young to be told such things. Rand notes how tired and gaunt Loial looks, and suggests that it is time for Loial to go home—but the Ogier still wants to finish his book on Rand and isn’t ready to get married yet. But there is something else Loial needs to tell Rand, about the Aes Sedai who arrived with Logain.
Lightnings flared anew outside the windows as he went on, and the thunder crashed overhead harder than ever. With some storms, a lull only meant the worst was coming.
I told you to kill them all when you had the chance, Lews Therin laughed. I told you.
Elsewhere in the manor, Samitsu is telling Cadsuane that she believes the Aes Sedai with Logain have been bonded by the Asha’man. She can’t ask the Aes Sedai about it outright, but she is confident in her assessment. Cadsuane remarks that this is “turnabout” and thanks Samitsu for the warning.
Samitsu is upset that Sashalle was able to take control from her, with Bashere talking Sashalle into setting the Warders loose and Sorilea making it clear that she thinks Samitsu is a fool. Cadsuane takes a moment to build up Samitsu’s confidence, praising her skill as a healer and her observant nature, and Samitsu agrees to go back to Cairhien and keep track of the Dragonsworn sisters and what they do “when neither [Cadsuane] nor the Wise Ones are looking over their shoulders and holding a switch.”
Samitsu asks what the Dragon Reborn is planning, and Cadsuane answers only that he is planning something very dangerous. To herself, she thinks that the question is whether or not she should stop him.
In his rooms, Rand shouts at Logain that the bonding of sisters has to end, and that the Asha’man aren’t going to give him a war with the White Tower. Logain clearly hates being upbraided in front of Loial and Bashere, but he only asks calmly if the Aes Sedai are going to release the Asha’man they’ve bonded. Rand answers that what is done can’t be undone, but that there must not be any more. Stiffly, Logain tells Rand that Taim gave the order, and that he assumed it came from Rand.
“Taim does a great many things people think are at your direction,” he went on reluctantly, “but he has his own plans. Flinn and Narishma and Manfor are on the deserters’ list, like every Asha’man you kept with you. And he has a coterie of twenty or thirty he keeps close and trains privately. Every man who wears the Dragon is one of that group except me, and he’d have kept the Dragon from me, if he dared. No matter what you’ve done, it is time to turn your eyes to the Black Tower before Taim splits it worse than the White Tower is. If he does, you’ll find the larger part is loyal to him, not you. They know him. Most have never even seen you.”
Rand thinks sourly that what he has or hasn’t done doesn’t matter to Logain—the man knows that saidin is clean but doesn’t believe that Rand is the one who cleansed it. He tells Logain that Taim has to wait, and asks Bashere what news he has brought. Bashere reports the ransacking of his tent, and that whoever stabbed Dobraine was also searching for something. He believes that the same people are behind both actions, and that whoever it was is looking for the seals to the Dark One’s prison.
Privately, Rand wonders if all this bad news doesn’t herald the beginning of Tarmon Gai’don, wonders if the Dark One isn’t already breaking free. But what he says is that he can’t fight the Shadow and the Seanchan at the same time, and that he is going to send Bashere, Logain, and Loial to negotiate a truce with the Seanchan.
In her room, Elza listens to her Warder’s report, and tells him that he was right to come with the other Warders, as it would have been suspicious if he had been the only Warder to refuse to go after his Aes Sedai. Fearil is relieved that he won’t be punished, and pleased to hear that he may soon be ordered to kill. Elza instructs him to kill anyone who threatens the Dragon Reborn.
In the last chapter, Rand remarked to Cadsuane that he shouldn’t have expected events to wait on him, and she replied that events never do. In this chapter, I feel like we’re confronting a similar truth: Don’t expect one big action to fix all your problems—or, even, any of your problems.
It hadn’t actually occurred to me to consider that people might not believe that Rand was the one to cleanse saidin, never mind that they might disbelieve that it has been cleansed at all. Of course, I had thought of the fact that a cleansed saidin might be a hard thing to prove to the world. After all, most ordinary people barely understand what the One Power is; even for those who do know roughly what it does and what makes female channelers different from male channelers, it’s not like they can interact with saidin and test it for themselves. You can’t exactly expect everyone to just take an Asha’man’s word for it that the Dark One’s taint, the corruption that defined the brutal end of an Age and shaped the current one, is suddenly gone. People who can’t channel don’t even know about the beacon over Shadar Logoth.
So yes, that difficulty I expected, but what I didn’t anticipate was disbelief from those who do have the ability to sense saidin. I’ve mentioned before that I find it unrealistic, according to Jordan’s own worldbuilding, that an Aes Sedai who was able to experience the taint by linking with an Asha’man pre-cleansing would have any problem telling the difference between tainted saidin and clean saidin. Yes, the point is that saidin is a raging fire of chaos and saidar is a deep, steady river, but I cannot imagine that the filth of the Dark One’s taint could ever be mistaken for anything made by the Creator, any more than channeling using the “True Power” could be mistaken for using the One Power.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and specifically during my read of Crossroads of Twilight, about my first and ultimately biggest complaint about the series, which is the world-building premise that the very power of Creation functions on a binary system that is divided by sex, which is also treated as binary and equates sex and gender as one and the same. Putting aside that these concepts were reductive in the 90s and are even more so in today’s culture, what really bothers me about this world-building is the fact that it actually limits the storytelling, and creates contradictions in the themes Jordan is attempting to tackle throughout the series.
The Aes Sedai’s inability to tell the difference between tainted saidin and untainted saidin is one such example. I could buy the fact that an Aes Sedai who never experienced the taint might feel that “anything could hide in [the] chaos” of saidin, as Merise put it to Cadsuane in chapter 23. However, I cannot fathom that someone who has ever touched or sensed the Dark One’s corruption could ever fail to tell the difference between his touch and the work of the Creator. If neither Merise nor Cadsuane can, that implies that the difference between saidin and saidar is greater than the difference between that which was made by the Creator and that which comes from the Dark One. Which is an absolutely bizarre idea to posit.
I have always wondered where Jordan was going with the premise of this binary system, and if the point wasn’t, eventually, going to be that men and women aren’t actually as different from each other as they believe themselves to be. It’s a suggestion that the narrative pokes at from time to time, such as in the way each gender seems to have the same stereotypes about the other: Each “side” believes that they are the logical ones, and the other side the emotional ones; each side views the other as being gossipy, etc. We also know that channelers of saidin and channelers of saidar are meant to work together, that being able to combine their efforts results in more than just a total increase in how much power can be accessed, but actually in the ability to do new and incredible things. This is how it was during the Age of Legends, before the taint on saidin robbed the Aes Sedai of male channelers.
We also know that the hole in the Dark One’s prison was made by scientists during this time, in an attempt to access a new Power that they believed would be equally accessible to both sexes. In many ways, it is this, not the attack on Shayol Ghul, that led to the taint being placed on saidin, that is the “original sin” of the story. It results in the Dark One beginning to break free of his prison, in War coming to an Age that did not know it, in the creation of Shadowspawn, and finally, in Lews Therin’s desperate attack on Shayol Ghul, which led to the incomplete patching of the Bore and the placing of the taint upon saidin.
I found it very notable that the narrative emphasized that the scientists were excited about finding a source of Power that both sexes could access equally, because this implied, from a thematic point of view, that such a desire is dangerous, unnatural, and perhaps even morally wrong. However, it is possible that the eventual lesson, as it were, is not going to be that men and women are wrong in wanting to be the same, but rather that they are wrong in perceiving so many fundamental differences between themselves. There is much in the text to support this idea, including the fact that saidar and saidin are not two separate forces, but part of the same singular force. Human beings may perceive that power as being divided, may see the two “halves” as being very different, but that doesn’t mean they are, from a cosmic point of view. It makes me think of the common phrase “two sides of the same coin.” A coin has two sides, and there may be different markings on each side, but it is not two things. It’s still just one coin. One Power.
In any case, there are still plenty of pages left in my read in which these themes can play out further, and I’m interested to see if any of my impressions come to fruition. However, the fact that Cadsuane and Merise can’t tell the difference between tainted saidin and clean saidin doesn’t make sense to me as a worldbuilding choice, even if the point is supposed to be that the two halves—the two sexes—are fundamentally opposites. They are still all part of Creation, while the Dark One and his powers are anti-creation. I can’t see how there could be any confusion between the two.
But I digress. I was also surprised that Logain doesn’t believe Rand is responsible for cleansing saidin. I suppose some reluctance is understandable, but Logain would have been able to sense the channeling over Shadar Logoth, and would have discovered the change in saidin right as it ceased, or very shortly after. Rand’s explanation might be astounding, but what other explanation could there be? As Rand points out, in his own head, at least, it’s a far more likely an explanation than the Creator suddenly deciding that the taint has been there long enough and intervening directly.
Or is it? Perhaps I’m letting my own perspective color my read of Logain’s thoughts here. Earlier in the same chapter, Loial mentions that while the prophecy says that Rand will face the Dark One, that surely must be a figure of speech. For someone in this world, the idea of any human, even the Dragon Reborn, being able to counteract the Dark One directly may seem too impossible to be considered. Rand is the Light’s champion, not the Light itself, just as the most powerful Shadowspawn and even the the Forsaken are not the Dark.
We also only have Rand’s observations to tell us what Logain thinks. It’s possible that he’s merely keeping a healthy amount of skepticism around things, and I can’t imagine that he’s eager to share his thoughts with anyone, especially not with Rand. It would be fair for him not to be sure how far he can trust Rand, and Logain hasn’t had many good experiences with his fellow Asha’man. He may have come to Rand more out of desperation than belief in the Dragon Reborn.
I have to admit, Rand’s dismissal of the Taim problem put my teeth on edge. Well, I guess it’s not really a dismissal, and I can understand why the Seanchan feel like his most pressing problem at the moment. I’m also quite certain that Taim is a Darkfriend, which means his followers are too; Logain just knows he’s power-hungry and a bad guy. Still, Rand’s treatment of the Asha’man has always bothered me, and it continues to do so here.
Rand is responsible for the fact that these men have become channelers. This isn’t an accident where men chose to follow him because of what he represents or because of his ta’veren powers. He deliberately chose to put out the call, build a training ground, and put Taim in charge. He also deliberately chose to make his recruits into weapons, and he often doesn’t think of them as fully people. This mindset is in part to protect himself emotionally, since until recently these men were doomed to madness and a horrible death. However, Rand clearly thinks of the Asha’man the way he thinks of himself, doomed to die in Tarmon Gai’don if they are lucky, not due any care of consideration as human beings. However, now the Asha’man are no longer doomed to taint-induced madness, and they are not necessarily going to all die in the Last Battle, either. They are citizens of the world, who may go on and live in it, affecting it. Rand has barely checked in on them at all, and now Logain has arrived to tell Rand that Taim is acting of his own accord and making his own rules, and that soon the entire Black Tower will be loyal to him, not to Rand. Even if Rand doesn’t care about the well-being of the Asha’man themselves (which he should) and even if Taim doesn’t turn out to be a Darkfriend (which he surely is), having the Black Tower out of his control is a big problem for Rand, and dangerous for the world.
I don’t think Rand thinks of the Asha’man, or the Black Tower, as anything more than one more weapon in his arsenal, and I think that’s a mistake, both tactically and morally. And now he is sending Bashere, Logain, and Loial to negotiate with the Seanchan—surely there isn’t anything more pressing he himself has to get to once that assignment is given to others.
It is also interesting that news of the bonding of Aes Sedai by Asha’man came to the White Tower at the same time that Rand and Cadsuane are finding out about it. Toveine was clearly able to get the letter out because she was in Cairhien and had access to the Reds’ eyes-and-ears network. And a pigeon could certainly move faster than Logain and Bashere’s party, and wouldn’t be stopped by Egwene’s siege.
Pevara said that the news of Asha’man bonding Aes Sedai changed the whole world, and I think she’s right. Of course, having male channelers in general changes the whole world, but the Aes Sedai/Warder bond is something very significant, and very specific to this age. The particular weave used to bond a Warder didn’t even exist during the Age of Legends. Now we have yet another new weave, very similar but clearly a little different from the one used by the Aes Sedai. I am very curious how the rest of the Aes Sedai will react when they find out about the bonding. We’ve only seen a brief glimpse so far of Pevara and Tarna’s reactions, and Cadsuane has taken the very reasonable and practical stance of knowing there is very little she can do about it. Rand’s worry over the news causing problems with Elaida might be overblown; she won’t like it, but she already would see every member of the Black Tower dead if she could. However, how will Egwene take it? What about the Hal—either Hall? I can’t imagine every powerful Aes Sedai will be as practical about it as Cadsuane, and I think there will be a lot of (very understandable) fear, not to mention anger, that will affect how the Aes Sedai decide to engage (or not) with the Black Tower.
Perhaps Cadsuane can advise Rand on the best way to navigate the situation. I don’t see her offering unsolicited advice, but if he were to admit to being upset about the bonding and wanting to stop it, he could benefit from her practicality, as well as from her knowledge of how to talk to, and how to manipulate, other Aes Sedai.
Bashere, Logain, and Loial are kind of the perfect trio to send on a diplomatic mission to the Seanchan. Bashere is one of the continent’s greatest generals, so he’ll be able to stand as a peer to the Seanchan generals. Logain (also a great leader) is a powerful Asha’man who has just demonstrated loyalty to Rand by coming to find him and warn him of Taim’s activities. And the Seanchan seem to hold a lot of respect and reverence for the Ogier, so having Loial along, even if he is young, might be a very useful addition to the embassy. I don’t know how the Seanchan forces will receive the idea of a truce, however; compromise doesn’t really seem to be part of their worldview. I also think Suroth, a Darkfriend, is currently the highest ranking Seanchan in charge, now that Tuon is missing, so who knows what that will do to Rand’s negotiation attempts.
I really enjoyed the philosophical moment we got from Cadsuane, in which she reflected upon the idea that there really isn’t such a thing as fighting fair—either you fight or you don’t, and fairness is something debated over by those who stand on the sidelines and watch. She does, however, think about how to balance things out, with the acknowledgment that balance and fairness are not the same. We also get a similar moment from Rand when he reflects that the Creator doesn’t get involved with his worlds once he has made them, but leaves the worlds to make their own future.
I wonder if Rand is right about this. On the one hand, we do know that there have been worlds that were overrun by Shadowspawn, worlds that may have been fractured or otherwise ruined. However, we also know that time in this universe is cyclical, a turning wheel on which every point will eventually come around again. This implies a certain amount of control from the Creator being built into the system: Nothing can really end, from a cosmic point of view. Some Ages may be dark, others wonderful, but there is always more future coming.
Anyway, Cadsuane is a great character, and I feel like she’ll actually be very good for Rand—when (and if) he can come to trust her. It’s not just the laughter and tears thing, either; he is also a pragmatic person, and having someone else with a similar temperament but much more experience seems like exactly the kind of advisor he needs. I’ve noticed he often judges himself for his pragmatism, as well, and that he seems unable to tell the difference between doing what has to be done and doing something that is “hard” or cruel. Cadsuane may be able to help him to sort out that difference and adjust his perspective on the guilt and shame that he feels because of the decisions a leader has to make—similar to what Faile does for Perrin (but probably more effective).
But to take our subject matter all the way back to the beginning of today’s musings, I really didn’t expect that Rand would still struggle with sickness while embracing saidin. The fact that Lews Therin is still present makes sense. Whatever barrier existed between the different consciousnesses of the same soul, getting rid of the cause of that barrier’s dissolution doesn’t mean it’s going to come back up. And perhaps even if it did, Lews Therin might be fully on Rand’s side of the divide at this point, anyway. I also didn’t expect Rand’s wounds to get better. One was made by Ba’alzamon and probably with the True Power, and has nothing to do with the taint. The other was made by Mordeth’s dagger, and while Mordeth helped create the power of Shadar Logoth (and was probably shaped by it in turn), his power and the power of the dagger exist outside of the city, and there is no reason to think the destruction of one will have any bearing on the other. I can’t help thinking that Rand’s injuries are like the one Frodo received from the Nazgûl on Weathertop: something that will plague him his entire life. Although it may diminish with the proper Healing and defeating the Dark, it will never fully heal.
Two more chapters next week, possibly three, in which we’ll be back with Perrin, who is no closer to rescuing Faile but will have a nice creepy mystery to engage with when he, Berelain, and the rest visit the town of So Harbor and find that everything is very not right. Until then, I hope everyone has a lovely week, and some good food too.
