Welcome back to my re-read, recap, and reaction to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This post will only have spoilers through the current chapter.
You can find my previous chapter recaps HERE.
Chapter 9: Plans
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Pedron Niall
Pedron Niall makes plans with his two spy masters. The first man is just the publicly known spy master who listens to gossip. His true spymaster is his grumpy secretary Sebban Balwer, who doesn’t believe in anything unless there is plenty of proof. They talk about Morgase deciding that she has to give in and let them escort her to Caemlyn to take the throne back for her. The Children of the Light would then get to come and go through Andor whenever they wished. They decide that she will have to give in sooner or later, since the longer she stays penned in with them the more the people would believe that she sided with the Whitecloaks, forcing her agree to their terms.
Point of view: Morgase Trakand
Queen Morgase is riding out with ladies from where she was held in Amador by the Whitecloaks assigned to watch her by Pedron Niall. Morgase ends their hawking for the day and rides slowly back to the palace in Amador. Niall recently informed her that Galad has joined the Whitecloaks. On the way back to the palace, Morgase sees hollow-cheeked refugees. She vows to make the Dragon Reborn pay if he is letting her own people become as bedraggled as this.
One of her attendants likes to try to aggravate Morgase by repeating gossip that should make her unhappy. Actually the news is good to Morgase but she doesn’t let on, because the nobles that supported her have not moved to support the Dragon Reborn.
REACTION:
I kind of take Omerna’s side in that debate concerning the Illuminators. Given time (maybe 10-20 years), the Children could infiltrate them – especially if they were HQ’d in Amador – and from there they would have been sent around the continent as extraordinarily useful spies.
With most of the rest of that interaction, though, I am with Niall. I particularly liked Niall’s thought that a spymaster should look into a mirror and doubt his own face. I’m not exactly sure that this is the way Balwer (the real spymaster) is eventually presented, but it’s definitely closer to being the case than it is with Omerna. Jordan makes an argument here that the people who are best at sorting out truth from lies are those that start with skepticism on every issue. He’s basically making an argument for conspiracy theorists being the best at sorting facts from fiction.
Niall gets word about Rand fighting someone that looks like the Dark One, in the clouds above Falme, and immediately thinks he needs to consider having Rand assassinated. His blind spot is an unwillingness to consider that Rand actually is the Dragon Reborn. It’s strange in a world where literal magic exists that someone would have a blindspot like that, but I guess being able to take one supernatural thing for granted doesn’t mean you can easily accept something else. I might totally buy the idea of _____ technology, and reject that _____ technology is possible. People are innately tied to the world as it is, instead of as it might be.
I don’t really know where Jordan wanted to go with the Children subplot in the greater arc of his story. A lot of their chapters feel purposeless. Niall’s schemes seem completely doomed from the perspective of the reader and his armies seem relatively weak, too, when compared to the Aiel or Seanchan. Not having the one power to use in fighting is a catastrophic weakness for the Whitecloaks, though maybe they don’t know that yet. It would help their threat level if the in-story reality was that their troop numbers were *vastly* larger than a lot of other nation-state armies.
The strength of the Children, to me, seems to be that they are international. They can plant people / spies / assassins in every land with more easy than any other military power in the story because they have members from everywhere. That part of their situation should be played up more.
Morgase going to the Whitecloaks for help has never made sense to me. Do we have any reason to think the Whitecloaks could beat the unified armies of Andor? No. Would Whitecloaks marching on the country unify them? Probably. Now that Rand has the country, her position is even worse. (Little does she know that if she’d managed to not become a prisoner, he would have given the country back to her if she’d just showed up.) Of course, if she’d done anything else that made sense (like going to Andoran or Cairhien nobles) it probably would have gotten back to Rahvin and she would have been re-taken. She didn’t know that, though.
I was thinking about Morgase in the bigger picture. Jordan borrowed the name (in fact, he borrowed *much* of this story) from Arthurian legend and if you remember any of that, that version of Morgase was powerfully magical and a bit of a rapist (she uses magic to sleep with Arthur and to thereby bring about an incest-baby-monster, Mordred.) Jordan’s version of Morgase is thus an inversion of that. She is weak magically. She was raped by Rahvin repeatedly. She lost her country. Elayne in Arthurian legend is a kind of tragic, weak, pining character. She wants Lancelot but never gets him – losing him to Guinevere. Jordan’s version of Elayne is powerfully magical, the probable future queen of Andor, successful in getting her desired love interest to love her back – in fact, she steals Rand from Jordan’s Guinevere (Egwene al’Vere.)
All that is to say that I am concerned for Morgase here in Whitecloak captivity. If she’s kind of the opposite of the Arthurian Morgase, her future seems like it’s probably not going to improve any time soon.
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