This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we cover the last and most interesting section of the Prologue of Crossroads of Twilight! We also get to know Samitsu better, which I’m excited about.
In Cairhien, Samitsu studies the scaffolding around the damaged area of the Sun Palace, and the older scaffolding around the towers that were burned during the Aiel War. There are no workers out there today due to the weather, and she wishes the snow would give her a respite, too.
Cadsuane left a week ago, charging Samitsu to “make sure the Cairhienin pot did not begin to boil again.” Samitsu doesn’t usually dabble in politics, but the assignment seemed simple enough. Rand has named Dobraine his steward, and while Samitsu can’t stop thinking about how all of Rand’s appointments are making quite the mess for the Aes Sedai to sort out, Dobraine has been very cooperative, and seems only concerned with running the city and quietly rallying support for Elayne to lay claim to the Sun Throne. Rumors of al’Thor going to Elaida at the White Tower have kept all the nobles on edge, which is also useful for Samitsu; she would feel mostly content that she has done as Cadsuane wishes, except for Sashalle.
Sashalle is a puzzle to Samitsu, a Red who is oath-sworn to al’Thor, who wears a lot of bold Aiel jewelry in a very un-Aes Sedai manner, and who was recently Healed from being Stilled. Samitsu thinks that the Aiel jewelry might hold a key to understanding Sashalle, but the Wise Ones won’t explain it and seem to think Samitsu a fool for not knowing. The Aiel don’t treat Sashalle, Irgain and Ronaille the way they treat the other Aes Sedai who were taken at Dumai’s Wells, and while Samitsu doesn’t approve of the concept of making Aes Sedai apprentices, there are several Aes Sedai who stand higher than her who might be a problem if they weren’t occupied with the Wise ones.
Sashalle, however, is intent on taking over authority from Samitsu.
Lady Ailil wants Aes Sedai approval to take the High Seat of Riatin. Samitsu tells her not to, as Toram may still be alive and strife between House Riatin will be bad for Cairhien. Sashalle counters that upheaval will come whether or not they approve of it, and since Ailil is ready to swear to Rand al’Thor while Toram opposed him, Sashalle is going to give that approval.
As Samitsu tries to work out a way free of the quandary Sashalle’s intentions put her in, Marendevin, the Holder of the Keys, arrives to tell them that an Ogier and a human, traveling together, have arrived at the Palace looking for work as masons. Samitsu is the one who asked Marendevin to report anything unusual, but Marendevin seems aware of the power struggle and starts deferring more to Sashalle. Samitsu finds herself following Sashalle down to the kitchens, where all the cooks and other servants are gathered around the two travelers. The Ogier keeps asking about Rand, while the man with them wants to know if the Asha’man were really made Warders. When the two Aes Sedai are noticed, everyone hurries back to work.
The strangers have already introduced themselves as Ledar and Underhill, but Samitsu identifies Loial by his reputation and the man as Karldin, an Asha’man. Karldin is instantly defensive, asking what happened to his friends, and to Rand. Samitsu notices how tense he seems, and suddenly realizes that she’s used to thinking of Jahar, Eben and Damer as “tamed” because of their bonding. Karldin is certainly not tame, and he could be holding saidin without her knowing.
Sashalle is not making any move to take charge, now, so Samitsu lays a hand on Karldin’s arm, and gently reassures him that Rand seemed as sane as most men when last she saw him, and that she doesn’t know where he is but he was alive as of a few days ago.
“Fedwin Morr died of poison, I fear, but I have no idea who gave it to him.” To her surprise, Karldin merely shook his head, with a rueful grimace, and muttered something incomprehensible about wine. “As for the others, they became Warders of their own free will.” As much as any man did anything of his free will. Her Roshan certainly had not wanted to be a Warder, until she decided she wanted him for one.
She explains that the other Asha’man thought being Warders would be safer than returning to the Black Tower, and that the attack on Cairhien was carried out with saidin in an attempt to kill Rand. She notes that Karldin doesn’t seem surprised by the information, and wonders what the Black Tower must be like for him to accept such a thing so readily.
Samitsu is considering how to learn about the errand Loial and Karldin were sent on when suddenly a serving woman comes running into the kitchens shouting that Lord Dobraine has been murdered, found in a pool of blood. Loial is immediately angry at the news, while Sashalle suspects that at least some of the woman’s news has been overblown in the retelling. She orders Samitsu, Loial and Karldin to come with her to Dobraine’s chambers, and when Karldin insists that he is leaving, Loial interjects, insisting that they must find out about Dobraine, who is Rand’s friend, and Loial’s too.
When they reach Dobraine’s chambers, the stricken servants move out of the way for them. Dobraine is laid out on a stretcher and just being covered with a sheet, his coat stained with blood and a trickle of it coming from his mouth. Samitsu knows that anyone who has lost that much blood must be dead, but she still goes to him, passing the two dead bodies of his attackers lying on the blood-stained carpet.
Despite being sure he’s gone, when Samitsu Delves Dobraine, she finds a tiny spark of life still flickering. Knowing that the shock of Healing might be too much for that tiny spark to survive, she looks up, seeking out Karldin. He is busy searching the bodies, and when she asks if he knows the kind of Healing that Damer Flinn uses, the kind that employs all of the Five Powers, Karldin retorts that he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and that he has no Talent for Healing, though he hopes she can save Dobraine, who was at Dumai’s Wells.
Samitsu hates that all her options are bad options, but she reminds herself that no woman in living memory has the Talent for Healing as strongly as she, who can Heal by herself almost as well as a linked Circle. Most sisters can’t relegate the weave to any degree, but Samitsu can.
Oh, she could not Heal one particular thing and leave everything else as it was, the way Damer could; what she did would affect everything from the stab wounds to the stuffed nose Dobraine was also suffering from. Delving had told her everything that ailed him. But she could wash away the worst injuries as if they had never been, or Heal so whoever she Healed appeared to have spent days recovering on her own, or anything in between. Each took no less of her strength, but they did require less from the patient.
Samitsu knows that the strongest Healing will kill him before his wounds are even finished closing, so she needs to find a middle ground that will keep him from dying of his wounds but won’t overtax his weakened body. She reminds herself that Cadsuane told her that she is the best that has ever been, and makes her choice. Dobraine convulses, arching up out of the stretcher and then thumping back down. When she Delves him again she finds him alive, his injuries Healed enough to give him a chance at survival.
She orders the servants to get him into bed and feed him honey-water to help restore his strength, and to send for a Wise Woman to tend him. He needs ordinary healing now.
Servants carry him away, murmuring thanks, while others go out into the hall to spread the news. Samitsu is gratified to hear her name shouted along with Dobraine’s, but infuriated when Sashalle gives her an approving nod. Karldin seems unconcerned with the Healing, having found something on one of the bodies that he tries to show Loial without the two Aes Sedai seeing. Loial is not discreet, and Samitsu hears him muttering about how bad this is, and wondering if the thieves found something. Karldin’s alarmed shake of the head stops Loial from saying what.
Sashalle intercepts what Karldin found: a forged letter, apparently in Dobraine’s hand, giving instructions that the bearers be allowed to enter his apartments and retrieve certain things.
The Aes Sedai are certain that Loial and Karldin have some idea about what Dobraine’s attackers were looking for, and Sashalle declares that they can’t leave until she knows what they know. Karldin asks how she intends to stop them, but the dangerous moment is interrupted by the arrival of Rosara Medrano, who reports the arrival of a party of sisters, accompanied by Asha’man. One of the Asha’man is Logain.
Karldin laughs, and Samitsu wonders if she’ll live long enough for Cadsuane to have her hide.
Oh no, Dobraine!
The Prologue has been a bit boring so far, but this last section is definitely not. I’ve been wanting to get to know more members of the Yellow Ajah, and the way Samitsu feels about Healing is so interesting. It’s very similar to the way Nynaeve feels about it, which I’m mostly intrigued by because it’s a reminder that the Ajah classifications are more than just sorting Aes Sedai into their job titles or special interests. For them, their Ajahs are a declaration of who they are. The Battle Ajah, the Ajah dedicated to justice, the Ajah of Vulcans—I mean logic. And so on. Though not as important to show outwardly to the world, these identities are almost as important to sisters as their very status as Aes Sedai. Maybe more, even. In New Spring, when Moiraine enters the Blue Ajah quarters, she considers that to be entering her home, even though she’s lived in the White Tower for years. It’s even the name of the chapter. Perhaps part of this feeling comes from the fact that, until you are raised to the shawl, you aren’t actually Aes Sedai; despite the title of Accepted, students are only hopefuls in the White Tower until they pass the final tests and swear the Three Oaths. They can be put out of the Tower for their failures, denied any chance to become full sisters, for a variety of reasons. Still, Moiraine regards the Blue Ajah as her home and her fellow Blues as family much more than the other Ajahs, and we see this same perspective in other sisters as well.
It’s no wonder that Alviarin and her fellow Blacks have been so effective in sowing discord between the Ajahs, given that these divisions are so intrinsic to how the Aes Sedai define themselves.
But to get back to Samitsu and Healing. She states that she never feels weak or ineffectual except when her Talent fails her, and she hates those failures deeply. However, she doesn’t seem to have an ego around it; she’s quick to ask Karldin if he knows Flinn’s way of Healing, more focused on Dobraine’s survival than her own pride, and while she finds the accolades of Dobraine’s servants gratifying, it’s not as important to her as the job at hand. I’m looking forward to getting to see more of her, and maybe to learning more about how Healing with the One Power works, both in the traditional Aes Sedai way and in this new way that Flinn has discovered.
Speaking of the Aes Sedai sense of identity, I almost forgot about the loss of the ageless look that comes from being stilled. When Samitsu is dealing with Sashalle, she thinks about the changes that have come over the woman since her stilling, and remembers rumors that women who were stilled grew young again, if they lived. She wonders how long it will take Sashalle to regain the ageless look, and even considers that she might never do so; Samitsu doesn’t know that the Oath Rod is the true culprit for the blurring effect Aes Sedai experience, but she’s smart enough to acknowledge that they are in uncharted waters in this area. No one has ever been Healed from stilling, as far as anyone knows, and so anything is technically possible at this point.
Samitsu finds herself wondering if anything else has been changed in Sashalle besides her face, and the thought chills her so much that she thinks it’s probably good that she hasn’t figured out Damer’s techniques yet. Which makes me wonder if it will eventually occur to her—if it will eventually occur to anyone—to wonder if the binding by the Oath Rod might have been disturbed by the stilling. After all, they know that the Oath Rod requires channeling to work, though it’s possible that no one has ever thought to wonder what would happen if a channeler activated it while a non-channeler swore upon it. Perhaps they have no reason to think that wouldn’t work just as well—who would ever have needed to consider such a thing?
Though the horror around stilling has ebbed slightly for Samitsu, now that she knows it can be Healed, she is still alarmed enough wondering about the lasting effects on Sashalle to want to proceed very slowly in figuring out how to Heal it herself. Given how important Healing is to her, I think that speaks to a very high level of discomfort with the subject. This discomfort probably keeps all the Aes Sedai from thinking very hard about such effects even with sisters whose connection to the True Source has been restored. No one has thought to wonder if Siuan and Leane’s oaths still hold because they still don’t want to think about what happened to the two of them.
The thing I’m really wondering, however, is whether or not Sashalle has realized that she can lie now. Technically there’s a chance that she’s Black Ajah and could lie the whole time; she could be like Elza, acting under Verin’s pseudo-compulsion to protect Rand. In Elza’s case, she would not be technically bound by her oath to obey Rand, only by Verin’s interference, and so Sashalle will be too, since her stilling would have broken any binding she was under from the Oath Rod, and whether she was previously sworn on the Black oaths or the White Tower oaths, neither would be currently in effect.
In any case, maybe watching all these plots and wondering all these things has made me as suspicious as Elaida’s Aes Sedai, but my initial instinct is to suspect that Rosara’s story about looking for spices is a cover for something. Not necessarily Black Ajah stuff—although that’s possible, since she’s one of Cadsuane’s followers and not one of the Aes Sedai sworn to Rand—but the detail just feels fishy to me in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.
I could be wrong, though—Jordan can be very completist when it comes to describing his characters, so he might have just wanted to explain why Rosara was out and about and able to see the party approaching. I wouldn’t have noticed or cared if she had just come in and announced it without explaining how she knew, but Jordan never leaves loose ends like that, even when he could easily get away with them.
Oh boy, though, the Aes Sedai are going to be shocked when they find out that this isn’t a party of sisters accompanied by Asha’man, but a party of Asha’man accompanied by sisters they’ve bonded to themselves. I wonder if the Aes Sedai will hold Rand responsible for this, even though he doesn’t know it’s happening. I also really wonder what he’ll think when he finds out. In some ways, bonding the Aes Sedai isn’t that different from the oath of obedience that Rand has demanded, but in other ways it is very different, what with the non-consensual nature of what Logain and the others have done as well as the fact that the bond allows them to sense each other’s thoughts. And if the White Tower has a problem with the oaths, it is definitely going to have a problem when it comes to bonding Aes Sedai with saidin.
On the other hand, there might be some kind of truce that can be reached. The problem with bonding, and with linking in general, is that one part always has at least partial control over the other(s), which means there is always a challenge in convincing people who don’t trust each other to participate in them. But we also know that channelers of different halves of the One Power working together can accomplish much more than those working with only saidin or only saidar. With saidin cleansed, there is a lot of advantage to having Asha’man and Aes Sedai bonded together; the ability to sense each other can lead to increased trust and ability to work together, and that will no doubt be invaluable when it comes to fighting with the One Power at Tarmon Gai’don. I don’t think establishing the kind of trust required for bonding or any other kind of linking will be easy, but perhaps the first steps have been made, imperfect as they are.
My guess as to how consensual the bonding of Narishma, Hopwil, and Flinn was seems to be right on point, based on Samitsu’s inner narration. What she tells Karldin here is basically exactly what Alanna told Rand: They made the choice “of their own free will” and saw becoming Warders as a better option than returning to the Black Tower. All this is strictly true; nobody bonded the three by surprise or while they were actively saying no. But it’s also clear that Rand’s most loyal Asha’man were left with little alternative. Seemingly abandoned by Rand, left behind without so much as an order or direction to guide them, right after other Asha’man tried to assassinate the Dragon Reborn, they wouldn’t have known where to turn or if they could trust the men at the Black Tower, some of whom might have been in league with the attackers, or might believe them to be in league with the attackers.
The Aes Sedai are incredibly skilled at manipulating people, finding their pressure points and the weaknesses in their positions and driving that home until they get what they want. Samitsu considers the situation to be the same as any woman having the skill to convince a man to decide the way she wanted, and perhaps some aspect of that was part of the negotiations between the three Asha’man and the Aes Sedai, but I am quite confident that other types of pressure were applied to convince them, and that Cadsuane was very carefully directing all of it.
Still, the point is that the three are better off now (or were, since Hopwil’s dead, a fact that I am still not over) than they would be if they’d gone to the Black Tower. More than anyone knows, in fact, though that is likely to change now that Logain has gotten away from what’s going on there. Though I wonder how long it will be until anyone can do anything about it, since Rand is off on his own quest. He might come straight back to Cairhien, but as far as he knows things are settled there under Dobraine, so he might turn his attention to the myriad of other things, and it could be a while before anyone can tell him about Logain’s news.
One thing I am very pleased about is that we now know roughly where we are in time. Cadsuane left Cairhien a week ago, so she is still in Far Madding with Rand. I’m not sure how long they were all there together but it can’t have been that much more than a week, so we’re close to the cleansing of saidin now.
Another thing that I am very pleased about is that Loial’s back! I forgot how much I love his character, and I also forgot how often he serves to temper the people he interacts with. He performed that function for Mat and for Rand, and now he’s doing the same for Karldin. Karldin seems like an okay guy, as Asha’man go, but he’s got the same defensiveness that they all have, and it doesn’t seem to apply to Loial at all. We’ve only seen a little of their interaction, but it really seems like Karldin trusts Loial, even though they have very different ideas about concepts like discretion and trusting Aes Sedai.
I think Loial is just good for people that way. He’s so guileless, and he doesn’t have a temper, though he does have a very powerful sense of justice. It’s hard to imagine anyone not liking him, unless they’re some kind of monster. Or Darkfriend. And then if you like him, you need to accept his calm and caring manner, even if he directs it towards people you don’t like or trust.
In my notes I just wrote “Loial is so good at tempering everyone’s drama, and I love him.”
I also wondered whether Loial was thinking of the Access keys when he worried that the people searching Dobraine’s chambers might have found something specific, but then I wasn’t sure that Loial would know about them. I’m certain that Karldin wouldn’t; Rand would never trust an Asha’man with that kind of power. He can barely trust Narishma with Callandor. I can’t think of what else the robbers might have been looking for, but the fact that two men were searching Bashere’s tent, were caught by Deira and could have killed her, and then around the same time two men were caught by Dobraine searching his rooms and very nearly killed him seems like an impossible coincidence. Someone is clearly looking for something they think Rand left with one of his allies. I’m not sure if Bashere knows what it is, but I did think the man he sent Tumad to talk to was going to turn out to be Logain. But now that Logain has turned up in Cairhien, that means there’s some other mystery man yet to be revealed.
We won’t be answering that question next week, however, because Chapters One and Two are all Mat Cauthon. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer until we get to the cleansing of saidin, but there are no male channelers in Valan Luca’s show (unless Noal turns out to be one, which is highly unlikely but anything is possible) so even if it happens while Mat is trying to juggle his new group of unlikely companions, we wouldn’t necessarily know.
