This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we’re tackling the second half of the Prologue of A Crown of Swords. We’ll catch up a little with Morgase, watch Pedron Niall make his one big miscalculation, and find out how Gawyn’s doing… which is not great. He’s still alive though, which is more than we can say for a lot of the folks who fought at Dumai’s Wells. Or for Niall.
Pedron Niall loses a game of stones to Morgase. When they first began playing together she deliberately played to lose, but Niall recognized what she was doing. Now she beats him about half the time, and Niall is enjoying challenge. Still, he knows that the games, and her polite indifference to him, is all an attempt to lull him.
For one so beautiful, she was a tough woman. No, she was tough, and that was that. She did let herself be caught up in the pure pleasure of the game, but he could not count that a fault when it gave him so many pleasant moments.
Morgase makes a careful, polite request to have Niall bring Galad to see her. It is not the first attempt, and as always he “regrets” that Galad is busy with other duties. He can see Morgase’s displeasure, but she submits meekly. Then they are interrupted by Omerna. Morgase departs, after demurely asking Niall to join her for dinner. He accepts, interested to see where this new tactic might lead.
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When she is gone, Omerna reports that he hasn’t been able to find either Gawyn or Elayne, and reports that the White Tower has broken and that the Black Ajah have taken control; he doesn’t know that Niall and his real spymaster, Sebban Balwer, are the ones who started these rumors. He delivers a tiny bone cylinder to Niall as well—one Niall has been waiting impatiently for.
Putting Omerna’s nervousness down to having to report about thing like the Black Ajah, Niall turns his attention to the cylinder and the message from Faisar, which confirms all of Varadin’s messages about what is happening in Tarabon. Distracted, Niall barely notices when Omerna comes up close to him, apparently trying to get a look at the secret missive. Suddenly, Omerna stabs him twice.
Omerna’s face was red; he looked ready to weep. “It had to be done. It had to be. You let the witches sit there in Salidar unhindered, and… ” As if suddenly realizing that he had his arms around the man he was murdering, he pushed Niall away.
Niall falls, and time seems to slow as he sees Eamon Valda come in, screaming about treason and running Omerna through with his sword. Niall is amused that this man, who he despises, is the one he must warn about Tarabon. He struggles to reach the fallen piece of paper.
Valda is joined in the office by Asunawa, and they discuss whether or not Valda will be the next Lord Captain Commander. The two conspired to set Omerna up to slay Niall, but now they struggle to see who will control the outcome. Asunawa suggests that his support for Valda is contingent upon having Morgase put in his hands, while Valda counters that he already has the support he needs. Valda tells Asunawa that he may examine Morgase, but he may not put her to the question until after Valda is finished using her to secure Andor.
They are interrupted by the arrival of Balwer, and Valda reports the news of Omerna’s assassination of his master. Valda doesn’t like Niall’s “useless scribbler,” and considers that his first act as Lord Captain Commander will be to evict Balwer from the Fortress. He tells the secretary that Omerna was bought either by the Aes Sedai or the Prophet, and sends Balwer to call for a meeting of the Council of the Anointed. After Balwer leaves, Valda finds a scrap of paper by Niall’s hand, but it has been lying in a puddle of spilled wine and is unreadable.
Perhaps a little something might be arranged to sate Asunawa’s appetite for a while. It might make sure Morgase remained amenable, too. Valda dropped the bit of rubbish on Niall’s corpse. The old wolf had lost his cunning and his nerve with age, and now it would be up to Eamon Valda to bring the witches and their false Dragon to heel.
Gawyn lies on his belly on a hill, surveying the land around him. He’s not sure what happened in the battle after he led the Younglings out of it, but Rand al’Thor had seemed to have control of everything by that time. Gawyn wishes that he could have killed al’Thor.
For his mother, dead by the man’s doing; Egwene denied it, but she had no proof. For his sister. If Min had spoken the truth […] and Elayne loved al’Thor, then that dreadful fate was reason enough to kill.
But he couldn’t kill al’Thor, because Egwene had made him promise. Gawyn cannot break his word to the woman he loves, no matter the cost.
Through his looking glass he sees an Aes Sedai on a horse come into view, and hopes that, if some Aes Sedai escaped the battle, more Younglings have as well. Suddenly her horse is shot and falls, and about two dozen Aiel appear as the Aes Sedai climbs to her feet. Gawyn figures that she should be able to use the Power to defend herself and slides down the slope in the other direction to get some Younglings to ride to her aid.
Before disaster struck at Dumai’s Wells, he was certain there had been a plot afoot to see that he and the Younglings died without returning to the White Tower. Why, he did not know, nor whether the scheme came from Elaida or Galina, but it had succeeded well enough, if not exactly in the way its devisers had thought.
Gawyn now has less than 200 of the 581 Younglings who rode with him from the White Tower.
Suddenly about a hundred Aiel appear, seemingly surprised to stumble across a band of Younglings. Still, they don’t hesitate to veil and plunge down at them. The Younglings fight back, employing all the techniques they’ve learned in previous fights against the Aiel. As the only man on foot, Gawyn attracts special attention, and he fights them off until he’s facing one Aiel with whom he is evenly matched. The fight ends when a horse backs into the Aiel, giving Gawyn the moment of advantage he needs to run him through.
By the time he has freed his sword, he finds that the battle has ended—the Aiel merely fought their way through the ranks of the Younglings and continued wherever they were going. Gawyn orders half the men to stay and guard the wounded while he takes the rest to rescue the sister, but when they mount the slope again they find no sign of either Aes Sedai or Aiel. Gawyn is surprised that the Aes Sedai could have been out of sight already, but decides to go back and tend to the wounded Younglings before going to look for her. He turns back, thinking about how to set up a defensible camp and what explanation he can offer to Elaida for all of this. He thinks, too, that as big as today’s butcher’s bill has been, it will probably be nothing compared to what is coming.
I’ve always been a bit lukewarm on Gawyn as a character—he was fun when we met him and he was a lighthearted, mischievous scamp, but once he got all up in his weird honor-and-obligation feels he got a little tiring. The way he thinks about Egwene also really annoys me, though that is partly because the narration didn’t do anything to earn it and we have no idea why they like each other at all. So I really appreciated the way this section reminded me that Gawyn really is in the same position as Elayne and the Emond’s Fielders. He’s young, inexperienced, and carrying a very heavy burden. The fact that he has always known about this burden in a way that the Emond’s Field kids don’t means that he’s slightly more prepared for it, but it also means that he has spent his entire life attaching his sense of purpose, his sense of self, to that duty. Feeling like he has failed therefore feels like losing a part of himself.
It’s ironic, too, because of all our main characters, Rand is probably in the best position to understand what that perceived failure means to Gawyn, and Gawyn is in a pretty good position to extrapolate his own experiences into an understanding how Rand might feel under the weight of his own destiny.
This section gave me a little more empathy for Gawyn, while at the same time clearly illustrating where his blindspots are. Of course it would be difficult to be logical and not ruled by emotion when it comes to something like your mother being murdered, but it is significant to note that Gawyn refuses to even consider that Egwene might be right about Rand’s innocence. He reflects that she can’t prove that Rand didn’t kill Morgase, but neither can Gawyn prove that he did. It’s basically wide-spread rumor verses Egwene’s word, and although she knows Rand well and is the person Gawyn is in love with, he credits the former much more than the latter. One can assume that he was just too wrapped up in the narrative of the rumor and the pain he felt to shift his perspective when he was finally confronted by Egwene.
Of course, it’s a bit painful for the reader to watch all this drama unfold around Morgase’s death—with Rand feeling like he’s failed Elayne and Gawyn feeling like he’s failed his mother, Elayne, and all of Andor—when the woman isn’t even actually dead but could really use some rescuing.
Niall’s assassination took me completely by surprise. This is partly because I forgot about Asunawa’s little tête-à-tête with Valda back in Chapter 31 of Lord of Chaos, but there’s more to it than that. There is just something about Pedron Niall that made me believe that, despite all the upheaval, all the political intrigue and instability that’s arisen due to the Dragon Reborn being around, he would make it all the way to the last battle.
I think it’s something to do with what I was saying last week about the difference between Niall and Elaida. Niall was different from a lot of the other bad-but-not-Darkfriends characters. He definitely wasn’t a good guy, and a lot of his attitudes were abhorrent, but his intelligence and seemingly genuine desire to protect the world made him more interesting than, say, Valda, or most of the Tairen lords, or even a lot of the Forsaken. Niall had so many wrong opinions: his Whitecloak-standard hatred for the Aes Sedai and belief that channelers are inherently evil; his decision to allow and encourage death and destruction in the world in order to further his own goals; his manipulation of Morgase—not to mention the general wrongness of the Children’s black and white philosophy and belief that the world should be governed by them in a sort of military theocracy. But it was intriguing to consider someone like that still ending up as an ally to Rand. It would have been fascinating to see Niall’s hand forced by circumstances, Rand’s rise to power, and perhaps a realization that the Last Battle really is going to mean everything the prophecies say it will. I can see Jordan being interested in tackling the concept of having someone both the reader and our heroes despise still siding with Rand. Because there is a functional difference between being a horrible person and being a Darkfriend, between hurting others in pursuit of your own ambition and swearing your soul to the Dark One in pursuit of that ambition.
You see a little bit of what I’m talking about with the way Niall handles the message from Faisar. Even though he dismissed Varadin’s first message about the Seanchan as the ramblings of a madman, he reconsidered after hearing more rumors and receiving Varadin’s second message. Now he’s heard from Faisar as well, and whatever is on that paper has confirmed for him that the Seanchan are a real threat, perhaps even more dangerous than Rand or the Aes Sedai. Despite having some strong preconceived notions, he is able to be flexible when he receives information from someone he trusts, and the Prologue contrasts this with Gawyn’s stubbornness about Rand and Elaida’s increasingly erratic opinions.
And then his assassination—Niall’s last thoughts are to pass on his information, even if it has to be to a man he despises. I don’t like Niall, but I respect this aspect of him. And I’d certainly rather have him in charge than Valda. I mean, at least Niall is smart. I don’t really think Valda is, or at least he’s so singular and narrow-minded that it doesn’t show. I guess Asunawa is smart, but he’s such a gross, smarmy bastard I didn’t want to give him credit for anything. I suppose Valda and Asunawa are the real reason Niall seems like he could have come around to being vaguely reasonable. The other two are both so gross that in comparison, Niall seems alright. I’m not best pleased with the fact that Morgase is going to be in their hands now. Valda won’t let Asunawa kill Morgase just yet, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t let Asunawa hurt her, and I’m sure he’d be happy to hurt her himself as well. I will admit that I’m looking askance at Jordan in anticipation of some more lady torture in the near future.
But I must say, Asunawa and Valda roping that dummy Omerna into their scheme was such a classic move. Omerna’s the perfect patsy—easy to convince since he believes everything, and pretty much discounted by Niall, which is how he manages to get close and stab the man despite being visibly nervous and out of sorts. Not that Asunawa and Omerna would necessarily have guessed that Niall finds Omerna ridiculous, since they believed he was the real spymaster. But it’s a little extra narrative something—like Niall, I also discounted Omerna and never suspected that he might be the unwitting instrument of a coup.
I am, however, deeply interested in seeing what happens with Balwer now that Niall is dead. Valda has already decided to get rid of him. I suppose it’s possible that Balwer might decide to reveal himself as the true spymaster, but it seems more that he might allow himself to be unknowingly let go, and instead choose to offer his services somewhere else. In Chapter 9 of Lord of Chaos, when the character is first introduced, Niall makes a few observations about Balwer that seem rather more important now than they did then.
Of course, he would have served any master as well as he did Niall, but that was all to the good. What Balwer learned was never tainted by what he knew had to be true, or wanted to be true. Disbelieving everything, he always managed to root out truth.
If this analysis of Balwer’s character is accurate, it could be that he’ll offer his services to Valda in turn, or he could choose to take his services to literally anyone else. He’s a clever man, and might well figure out who was really responsible for Niall’s assassination. Niall’s observation that Balwer would have served any master well doesn’t necessarily mean that he felt no loyalty to Niall after serving him for what seems like it must have been a considerable amount of time—it could only mean that he isn’t particularly about the philosophy of his employers. Neither Asunawa nor Valda seem to be particularly well-liked by the other Children, and I wouldn’t be shocked if Balwer shared those opinions. It would certainly be interesting if he ended up working for one of the good guys.
And once again the threat of the Seanchan goes largely unnoticed. Rand has been carrying that spear to remind himself that they’re out there, but he’s been far too busy to have any time to go looking for signs of them, and there really isn’t anyone else in any particular positions of authority who knows about them, except for Egwene. Who is also quite busy right now. I have a feeling that the Seanchan invasion is going to become more visible at some point in A Crown of Swords, but for now we’ll have to continue to wait and see.
I also have a feeling that the Aes Sedai Gawyn saw did not sprint out of sight as he assumes. And when it comes to that, why would he assume something like that, especially if there is no sign of her having fought off any Aiel? She certainly couldn’t outrun them, so unless he thinks the Aiel didn’t bother with her after shooting her horse and looting her saddlebags, it would follow that she must have been captured.
It’s a chilling thought, and a reminder that a lot is changing for the Aes Sedai. Next week we’ll start into the meat of A Crown of Swords, covering the first two chapters. I look forward to a windy beginning, and seeing how the world reacts when Rand suddenly shows up again.
It’s a short one this week, but that feels apropos. Everyone in the prologue is tired, and honestly, so am I. It’s time for to find a tavern and have a drink, maybe listen to a gleeman or two.
