This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, Min, Aviendha, Elayne and Rand are all finally in the same place at the same time. Rand tries to resist his fate, and everyone learns a bit more about how unconventional links and bonds can be troublesome things. It’s Chapter 12 of Winter’s Heart!
With Aviendha and Min, Elayne stalks through the corridors of the palace, intent on finding and cornering Rand. As they walk, servants are startled out of their work by the sight of Elayne’s female guards and their impressive regalia. Elayne reminds her companions not to tell Rand about the attempt on her life, and privately wonders what to do about Min and Aviendha.
Oh, they had agreed to everything—there really had been no choice, not when none of them could guess when they would all have the man at hand again—but she hoped they did not show one another again how skillfully they handled their knives. Very casually, not actually implying any threat, but very open about it, too. On the other hand, Aviendha had been quite impressed with the number of knives Min carried about her person.
Elayne leaves her bodyguards, Caseille and Deni, on guard outside the door. She suspects the women believe Min has brought Elayne to meet a lover. Inside, she finds Nynaeve and Lan, but only has eyes for Rand. He leaps to his feet, then staggers, but waves Nynaeve off, telling her that it isn’t anything she can Heal, and that she wins their argument. He tells Min that it is time to go, and Elayne is incensed that he is trying to leave without even speaking to her. Rand responds by warning her not to trust any Asha’man except, maybe, for Flinn, Narishma and Hopwil.
Elayne isn’t swayed by Rand’s warning, however, and pushes past his attempts to talk about other things, insisting that there is only one thing the four of them need to talk about. Defeated, Rand admits that he loves each of them. They each respond in turn, declaring their love for him. Nynaeve is disgusted, and Lan looks shocked, but Elayne is satisfied, and tells him that the rest of their discussion can continue in her rooms, in private.
Rand changes his appearance, shocking Elayne and amusing Min and Aviendha. The bodyguards are also shocked when they emerge with such an unfortunate looking man. Once they are alone in Elayne’s apartments, she tells Rand that all three of them want to bond him as their Warder.
“You really are mad,” he growled. “You know what’s ahead of me. You know what it means for anyone I’m bonded to. Even if I don’t go insane, she has to live through me dying! And what do you mean, all three of you? Min can’t channel. Anyway, Alanna Mosvani got there ahead of you, and she didn’t bother asking.”
Elayne is furious and horrified, and explains to Aviendha that Alanna has more toh to Rand than she could ever meet. But she also explains to Rand that it is possible for more than one woman to bond the same Warder, and that they all still want to share him. A little despairingly, Rand accuses Min of knowing what would happen if he laid eyes on them again. Min responds that she didn’t know about the bonding, but did hope for something like this. Rand relents, admitting that he does want this, but also begging them to think of the price they’ll all pay.
Elayne did not need to think of the price. She had known it from the beginning, had discussed it with Aviendha to make sure she understands, too. She had explained it to Min. Take what you want, and pay for it, the old saying went. None of them had to think about the price; they knew, and they were willing to pay.
Elayne links with Aviendha, and the two create the weaves that Elayne worked out for this after seeing how the Aiel adoption ceremony worked. Once she, Aviendha, and Min are all connected by a web of Spirit, Elayne uses a thread from each of them and connects them into one Warder bond.
When the weave settles into Rand, they all become aware of him. They’re struck by the horrible and unbearable pain he carries, and the hard knot of his emotions, held far too rigidly. But also by the strength of his love, which appears like threads of gold whenever he looks at any of them. Elayne knows that she’ll never have to doubt his feelings for her again.
Rand declares that it’s time for him to go, and his pleasure at the fact that he will always know when the three of them are safe, but Elayne has one more thing she needs from him. Min and Aviendha hastily excuse themselves, leaving Rand and Elayne alone. She tells Rand that Min and Aviendha have had something from him that Elayne hasn’t, and instructs him to help her with the buttons of her dress.
As she and Aviendha make their way down the hallway, Min ponders over the presence of Rand in her mind, how she knows so much more about him and how he must have the same knowledge of her. But the bundle of emotions and sensations changes as she walks, growing into a sort of inferno, and Min suddenly realizes what she’s sensing.
Elayne has taught her how the Aes Sedai mask the bond by imagining a kerchief wrapped around the bundle of emotions in her mind, but it doesn’t help. Desperate to move her attention elsewhere she starts talking to Aviendha, mentioning her vision that Elayne will become pregnant with Rand’s twins from this encounter. She explains how her visions work to a curious Aviendha, and wonders if she should tell Aviendha about the quadruplets she sees the other woman having in the future.
Noticing that Aviendha seems to be struggling the same way Min is, Min asks if the handkerchief trick isn’t working for her either. Aviendha admits that she forgot about it, and is able to mask the bond. Aviendha offers to get Min drunk, then spots a woman coming down the hall towards them.
Min sees more visions around Elayne’s Captain-General than she’s ever seen around anyone when the woman, who appears flushed and shaky, angrily accuses Aviendha of helping Elayne do this.
“You let me tell you, if she’s doing what I think she’s doing, I’ll kick her tickle-heart around the bloody Palace, and then I’ll flaming welt her till she can’t sit for a month—and you alongside her!—if I have to find forkroot to do it!”
Aviendha insists that Birgitte needs to stop treating Elayne and Aviendha like children, and Min realizes that she’s looking at Birgitte Silverbow. Birgitte responds that Silverbow is dead, and that she is Birgitte Trahelion now. Min introduces herself and explains that she, Elayne, and Aviendha have just bonded a Warder, and Elayne has every right to celebrate a little. Birgitte realizes that Elayne must be with Rand.
Still, Birgitte insists that Elayne has to stop what she is doing—she’s so wrapped up with Rand she clearly keeps forgetting to mask her bond with Birgitte. Min explains the handkerchief trick, but it doesn’t work for Birgitte any more than it did for Min. She tries to push past Min, but Aviendha, desperately, offers to get Birgitte drunk on oosquai, and even offers to pledge herself as Birgitte’s apprentice if only Birgitte will not shame Elayne by interrupting her.
Birgitte pauses, thoughtfully, and then decides that Aviendha’s early assertion, to think of the whole situation as a funny joke, suddenly sounds more appealing. She instructs the two other women to lead her to the oosquai, and that she wants to get as drunk as a drowned mouse.
The next morning, Elayne wakes to a cold, empty room. Rand is gone, but he has left a golden lily on her pillow, fully in bloom and still touched with dewdrops.
Where he could have gotten such a thing in the middle of winter she could not begin to imagine. But she wove a Keeping around it, and set it on a side table where she would see it every morning when she woke. The weave was Moghedien’s teaching, but it would hold the blossom fresh forever, the dewdrops never evaporating, a constant reminder of the man who had given her his heart.
It’s reported to her that Alivia has disappeared during the night, and later that Nynaeve and Lan have also left the Palace without anyone seeing them go. Much later she finds out that several of the artifacts from the cache in Ebou Dar have also been taken, including the most powerful angreal.
Some of those [items], she was sure, were intended for a woman who expected to be attacked at any moment with the One Power. Which made the hastily scribbled note Nynaeve had left hidden among the remainder all the more disturbing.
I’m so tickled by the title of this chapter. I had assumed that the name would be an elaborate metaphor about beauty and hidden strength in the face of hardship, probably describing Elayne, maybe someone else. But instead it’s literal, a gift Rand leaves for Elayne after they’ve spent the night (and part of the day) together.
It’s lovely to see that little bit of the old Rand. Even though he can’t let anyone see it directly, and keeps trying to harden himself against the kindness and care he used to possess so abundantly, the fact that his impulse was to find (or maybe create?) such a gift shows that the original Rand is still in there somewhere. And one can imagine that having this bond with three people who love him deeply—a connection that remains, however thinned, over whatever physical distance may separate them—might also nurture that side of Rand that he has been trying to destroy. In the same way that he couldn’t resist their decision to attach themselves to him, he might not be able to resist the influence of their love, and might come to appreciate those parts of himself in a new light.
When the bond connects them, Elayne is instantly aware that Rand’s emotions aren’t right. She perceives them as being too rigid “like a knot of hardened pine sap, almost stone.” And when he brings up the price they will pay for bonding him, she feels that knot grow a little bit harder as he steels himself against the knowledge. In a way, the bond allows those it connects to experience the metaphysical in a physical way—just as the weaves can be perceived as seen and felt by those with the ability. Rand’s feelings of love for Min, Aviendha, and Elayne—and, presumably, theirs for him—look like pulsing veins of gold. And the damage to Rand’s emotions, the ones he’s trying to harden, can instantly be perceived.
We know from Cadsuane’s sections that she and Sorilea believe that it is vital to teach Rand the difference between being “hard” and being “strong.” This is no doubt the important lesson that Min’s viewing showed that Cadsuane is going to teach Rand and his Asha’man. But Cadsuane being instrumental in this lesson, according to the viewing, doesn’t necessarily mean that she will be the only teacher. I think that Aviendha, Elayne, and Min will all play their part as well in helping Rand understand that his emotions do not make him weak, and that hardening himself will bring disaster, not only to him and the people in his life, but to his quest to save the world and defeat the Dark One.
Truly, nothing sounds quite so Darkfriend as the idea of turning off all your sympathetic, kind, and caring emotions in order to get a job done. But I can see how Rand ended up thinking that this was the only way. After all, who does he look to as a model of how to fashion himself into the leader he needs to be. Kings and generals, of course—and he saw what the weight of fear did to Ingtar—but also the Aes Sedai and the Aiel.
The Aes Sedai put a great deal of energy into making the rest of the world think that they are always calm, detached, and unbothered by the difficult decisions required of world leaders. Or rather, they show the world that the decisions aren’t difficult, not for the Aes Sedai. The calm demeanor is supposed to suggest detachment and omnipotence, as though Aes Sedai are something other than merely people. No one who is not a full sister is privy to the emotions they have in private, the doubts they might express to a peer or a trusted friend. Even those limited by rank and status have to have confidants, which is one of the reasons the distrust the Black Ajah is sowing in Elaida’s Tower is so very damaging. But an outsider would never see that—even Moiriane didn’t show Rand when she had doubts or when the burden she carried was difficult for her.
The Aiel don’t actually want to make others think they don’t have emotions; they just have a culture that is very strict about the proper way to handle one’s emotions, and about when and where it is appropriate to express them. But while an Aiel might be shamed by expressing their emotions in a culturally inappropriate way, the Aiel don’t expect people not to have emotions like fear or doubt. In some cases even the usual rules about ji’e’toh are different, such as among first siblings.
But again, to an outsider, the harsh demands of Aiel society might very much make them seem cold and heartless, even to people who haven’t faced them in battle. Even Min has had the occasional difficulty with it, despite her friendship with the Wise Ones. She isn’t hostile to Aviendha, but she’s understandably a little on guard against interacting with Aiel customs, especially after what she saw the Maidens do to Rand. Rand knows a good deal more of Aiel customs and way of thinking that Min does, but he’s also their car’a’carn, prophesied to destroy them, and what he’s learned he uses to interact effectively, not to become a part of them. (This is one of Sorilea’s concerns about him.) Rand engages in the occasional performance of ji’e’toh, for example, to keep the Aiel happy, but he doesn’t find any pleasure or comfort in meeting his toh the way the Aiel do. The way Egwene did, when she confessed to lying about her status as Aes Sedai and asked her friends and teachers to help her meet her toh.
Aviendha, Elayne and Min are all in different but excellent positions to aid Rand in the personal side of his journey. Aviendha is Aiel and a Wise One (apprentice), who understands a lot about personal hardship, pain, and sacrifice. Although she also grieves for Rand when she feels the pain of his un-healing wounds, Aviendha also finds a kind of exaltation in seeing how much pain Rand is able to carry, exclaiming that the car’a’carn is as strong as the Three-fold Land itself. In her, Rand may have someone who can at least partly understand the physical pain he has to contend with, who he might be able to confide in without worry that he sounds weak or that the other person will be overwhelmed by their own feelings in the matter.
Elayne is a leader, by temperament and by training, and as the (future) Queen of Andor and a powerful Aes Sedai, she can help him understand the difference between making a hard decision and being hard himself, how to balance the good of the many and the good of the few, and when it is necessary to allow others to help carry the burden. Elayne knows the pain of watching her people suffer and not necessarily being able to save everyone, but she is undaunted in her determination to make Andor flourish. She and Rand need to work on their communication skills—the bond will make this easier—but they actually have very similar dreams and ideas about the future.
Min’s visions are very useful to Rand, but perhaps moreso is her attitude towards life, and towards him. Min sees herself as a simple person—she isn’t nobility, or a channeler, and she comes from a family of miners and seamstresses. Her background is much closer to Rand’s own, and in her he has a tether to ordinary people, to the sort of person he himself was before his identity was revealed to him. Min is even from Baerlon, which is comparatively quite close to the Two Rivers. Min’s playfulness is also more accessible to Rand than Aviendha’s, due to the cultural differences.
Jordan isn’t the best at writing how people fall in love, but I can’t help but think there might be more to this tangle of romances than the author leaving a lot of things to develop “off screen” so to speak. The fact that each woman seems so significant to Rand’s personal journey, the fact that the three of them also fit together so well as friends and sister-wives, and the fact that Min viewed their connection to Rand so strongly all suggest that there might be a little bit of the Pattern at work here, as well. Min’s viewing came before she had even fallen in love with Rand, after all, and all three were guided by it to start working on their relationship with each other. It’s possible that Rand’s ta’veren nature is partly at work here, on all four of them, just as it is partly at work on his connection with Perrin and Mat. Even the prediction of children supports this idea—you would want such a powerful channeler to pass his genetics on to future generations, especially with all the culling the Aes Sedai have been doing.
In the previous chapter, upon seeing that Lan had ended up with Nynaeve after all, that the man hadn’t taken his own advice, Lan answered that “Sometimes, she is stronger than you.” How true that also ended up being for Rand, just one chapter later. And how important the message, from these women to him—that he is lovable, that loving him is worth sacrifice and even great loss, and that he does not have the right to dictate to other people what risks they decide to take with their own emotions.
Of course, Rand is aware that he will also suffer if he loses any of the people he lets get close to him. But his primary concern has always been not for the pain he might experience losing someone but for the guilt and responsibility he feels for causing suffering in others. Which makes a lot of sense for his character. He has already decided that suffering and death is what his life is made for, what his life is. While he certainly fears losing Aviendha, Elayne, and/or Min, I think he is much more afraid of the guilt of being responsible than he is of the pain of the loss for his own sake. He is more afraid for them than for himself.
The whole thing about Min (and Birgitte, when Elayne forgets herself) being able to feel what’s going on in Elayne’s bedroom was really quite funny. It also raised some interesting questions about how the Warder bond works. Elayne was able to establish that link between Min and Rand, despite Min not being a channeler, but she doesn’t have the same ability to muffle it that Aviendha and Elayne do. There are a few possibilities for this, I think. The first is simply that only a channeler can affect the bond—that the visualization of the kerchief is simply a trick to help someone do the necessary channeling. That seems unlikely, however—Elayne would know whether she was actually interacting with saidar or not, and certainly would have made the distinction. However, if it were a trick using the One Power, one wonders if Rand would be able to mask a bond from his end. Not using the same technique, of course, but possibly.
More likely, the kerchief visualization is like the not-sweating trick—something that doesn’t actually require the One Power to do, but that utilizes a similar mental discipline that non-channelers don’t have. For Min, picturing the kerchief is just imaging something in her mind’s eye, but she’s not actually doing anything. It might also have something to do with who made the bond. Although Elayne was the one to pull the cords from each of them and attach them to Rand, Aviendha was also involved in spinning the web between Min, Elayne, and herself. Perhaps the bond can only be muted at the source, so to speak, by the person or persons who made it. This would fit with the way many bonds—the Warder bond, the bond created by the a’dam—flow in one direction more strongly than the other. An Aes Sedai or sul’dam can compel through the bond, but it can’t be done the other way around, just as a Warder can’t mask the bond the way his Aes Sedai can, despite having some sense of her through their shared connection.
Before we wrap up, I leave you with the following thoughts:
– I loved the way that Aviendha and Min kept mirroring each other without meaning to. It was a really neat way to show that they have a lot in common with each other, and to foreshadow their friendship becoming as strong as the ones they each share with Elayne. Also they’re both knife girls, and I respect it.
– It always amuses me that women in genre fiction are always getting pregnant the very first time they sleep with the Important Man. Sure, it’s possible, and I guess we can blame the Pattern and ta’veren stuff again, but it really comes off as silly. I am a little concerned for Elayne, though, that she’s going to get pregnant and have to deal with that while also trying to secure her throne, prepare for the Last Battle, and maybe even participate in the Last Battle. That timing is not ideal, though I suppose if Rand does die during Tarmon Gai’don then his ladies will have to get pregnant before then. Still, it feels a little weird.
– Did Nynaeve take Alivia with her for some reason? That would be a big change in attitude from their earlier encounter, but maybe Nynaeve wanted some backup, and preferred the unknown of Alivia to dealing with one of the Kin. Alivia is quite strong in the One Power, after all. Also, if Alivia is truly so happy to be free, she might have respect for Rand, or even feel she’s in his debt. That could make her a powerful ally to him, one who is not only an impressive channeler but might also know some helpful things about Seanchan culture.
Next week we’re tackling the very interesting and somewhat complicated Chapter 13, which is a Cadsuane chapter. There will be a lot to talk about there, that’s for sure.
