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 31: Mashiara
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Nynaeve al’Meara
Nynaeve is on a boat in Ebou Dar on her way to meet with Nesta din Reas Two Moons when she feels a flash of saidar. Suddenly she is in the water, her ship sinking. She is trapped in the cabin, on the bottom of the river with only a small air pocket and the door blocked by mud. She tries to make herself angry so she can channel, but she is too fearful. She surrenders knowing she will die, gives up hope, gives up seeing Lan, and as she loses consciousness she finally surrenders completely for the first time in her entire life. Saidar rushes into her and she bursts the cabin apart, drifts upwards, and weakly tries to swim towards the surface. Just before she thinks she is going to drown, she is plucked from the water by someone and pulled onto the deck of another ship. She vomits water, lunch, and breakfast. She hears Lan‘s voice and thinks herself dead. Completely embarrassed, she embraces saidar to dry herself, flush away her vomit, and turns to truly see Lan on the deck of a ship.
They embrace and Lan eventually explains that Myrelle currently holds his bond. Nynaeve beats him in frustration. He attempts to explain the suicidal depression that consumes Warders when the bond is broken and why he was bonded to Myrelle. Thinking he’ll die soon, he is glad Nynaeve would be spared the pain of the bond saying, “My last gift to you, Mashiara.” which means his lost love. Nynaeve, stubborn as ever, refuses and instead resolves to make him her warder, heal him, and marry him immediately. Lan reminds her that Myrelle can feel everything through the bond until it is passed on, including the activities between a man and his wife. When Nynaeve asks if Myrelle can be made to know the woman is her, Lan bursts out laughing. Lan wants to take her back to shore but she insists on continuing on to Windrunner, the ship of the Sea Folk. He tells her that he saw the ship sliced in half with balefire and Nynaeve suspects Moghedien. Lan promised to protect her when she’s not angry enough to channel. Finally, she notices she is not angry, yet still holds saidar. Her block is gone. As she thinks about the wedding and meeting Nesta on Windrunner, she realizes she is still seasick.
Point of view: Elayne Trakand
Elayne leads Merilille, Adeleas, and the Salidar Aes Sedai to surprise the Kin at their home. Reanne initially berates Elayne for returning but she and the other Kin present immediately quiet when the rest of the Aes Sedai enter. She presents herself to Merilille, thinking she is the Aes Sedai in charge, and begs forgiveness for not turning in Elayne to them for posing as a Sister, but she is quieted and told that Elayne is not only an Aes Sedai but she is in charge of their group. Elayne is very satisfied when Reanne and the other Kin learn that she is a full Sister. Elayne tells the Kin they are free to return to their training in the Tower, and have the potential to become full Aes Sedai, but they will not be forced to do so. The Kin are surprised, grateful, and tearful. Reanne reveals that there are 1,783 women on the rolls of the Kin. Reanne also states that she is 412 years old, and Merilille faints.
Mat arrives and states he followed a member of the Kin to a house in the Rahad, where the Bowl of the Winds likely is. Elayne states that they already know (which is not precisely true, although Reanne was about to reveal its location) but thanks him anyway.
REACTION:
It’s raining joy on my face. When a Nynaeve chapter lands, GOODNESS, it lands.
Nynaeve might, overall, be my favorite character in this series. This might be my favorite chapter from any of the books in the series. Is she prickly, hard to deal with, lacking in self-awareness, overly proud, and all the rest? Yes. Do those things sometimes make her hard to read and put up with? Yes. Is she loyal and brave and good and selfless and clever and filled to the brim with a desire to heal the world? Also yes. And it’s the good that pays off the readers’ effort in getting through the moments when she’s harder to love.
What do we know about Nynaeve? She’s an orphan. Before Moiraine arrived in the Two Rivers, she was the young, skilled, and not well-liked village Wisdom – a position that doesn’t usually lead to marriage. She was starting a long and relatively lonely life. She’s spent her life so far trying to find a place in it, by sheer force of will, and she’s self-justified by healing people. She’s grown frustrated over time though because life or the Pattern continues putting huge obstacles in her way. Maybe she thought subconsciously that if she heals enough other people, she’ll heal herself as a consequence. She is a woman with a lot of rough edges and insecurities, and one who often acts without a lot of tact. Beneath all of that though, she loves deeply and wants desperately to be loved.
Lan is much the same person. He’s also an orphan. His entire life was spent in service to duty, with his own wants and desires as a secondary concern. His duty was so large that it excluded even the possibility of a long-term love attachment… until Nynaeve came along. Lan is a king by birth, but Nynaeve is the most powerful female channeler since the Breaking of the World. Her destiny is greater than his. Whether he wants to think about it this way or not, she’s the one who will be remembered in the next Age, not him (or not him to the same degree.) She’s as committed to his fight as he is, if not more. She’s a person who can understand him, curb him, help him, and who badly needs his experience in the world. She loved him before she knew about his birthright, too, which undoubtedly matters to him. They make sense together and it’s the first time he’s had someone like that in his life.
I loved the way her almost death was written, and that it took her being so close to death to finally surrender. I loved even more her horror at Lan seeing her soaked and vomiting. I loved her horror at realizing she’d punched him during her rescue (she thought he was a shark or something dragging her away to be dinner.) I loved the way Jordan told us how she was giddy and giggling, and that it was in contrast to her internal thoughts where she was in denial about her reaction to seeing Lan. I loved her crazy physical attack on Lan after finding out he is bonded, and then her hilarious transition to stating that they will talk things through calmly and rationally, as adults, as though she wasn’t just slapping him. I loved her telling him that they were getting married immediately. I loved her reaction to finding out the consequence for the Aes Sedai to whom Lan is bonded and what it will mean if they start acting as man and wife.
And with hope gone, flickering on the edge of consciousness like a guttering candle flame, she did something she had never done before in her life. She surrendered completely.
Wide eyed, Nynaeve barely bit back a wail. The horror she felt when she thought she was going to die was nothing alongside what flashed through her now. Nothing! This was a nightmare. Not now. Not like this. Not when she was a drowned rat, kneeling, with the contents of her stomach spread out before her!
Somebody giggled, not her, Nynaeve al’Meara did not giggle but somebody did.
“Maybe she is Aes Sedai,” one of the boatmen murmured, not quite low enough, “but I still say she’s one duckling who means to stuff herself into that wolf’s jaws.” Nynaeve’s face flashed pure scarlett and she snatched her hands to her sides, her heels thumping to the deck.
“Is there any way to make sure she knows it is me?”
There’s something profoundly satisfying about someone finally winning after a long struggle against numerous gigantic obstacles. We went through all of that with her. By comparison, the multi-book feud with Moggy is secondary. *THIS* was the real fight for the Wisdom all along and she just won. Is it difficult as the reader to be patient for a long arc like this one, where book after book, a character continues to struggle? Yes. Is the payoff of a chapter like this the reason you write (and read) an arc like that? Yes. Absolutely.
This is an incredible chapter.
Then we switch POVs and get more winning.
The first thing that happens in the Elayne POV is pretty funny. She is thinking about how she wishes she could wear an extremely skimpy feather costume for the Festival of Birds – like the one Birgitte or Riselle (the palace maid who took Olver) is wearing. The prim and proper future Queen likes learning new cuss words and uh, showing off.
Then the Daughter-Heir finally does some of that aforementioned winning of her own. She now not only commands the other Aes Sedai, she’s got the Kin groveling and apologizing to her, AND she’s delivering almost 1,800 new channelers to Eggy’s cause – almost twice as many women as there are Aes Sedai in the world. If Nyn won an enormous personal battle, Elayne won an enormously consequential geopolitical one.
Is Elayne getting a little of the credit for Nyn’s intuition re: what Mat’s innkeeper told them, Mat’s ta’veren nature, and Avi’s suggestion that they actually utilize Mat in this way? Yes. Is it annoying that it took Birgitte’s disapproval through the Warder bond and Avi looking over her shoulder to get her to treat Mat well? Yes. But she did. I guess that’s something.
It’s pretty funny, actually, that Mat seems to have COMPLETELY won over Birgitte. She hasn’t told Elayne that, apparently, but it’s true. I guess that makes sense. They’ve been hanging out, and earlier in this same night, she fought back to back with Mat against a group of murderous beggars and lived to tell the tale. She knows Mat better than Elayne does, despite spending comparatively much less time with him. Birgitte accurately views Mat as a hero and Elayne – for still unknown reasons – simply does not. We’ve got a lot of time before the end of the book to fix that, though.
Let’s think about the numbers the Kin possess. The *vast* majority would need to be Wilders for their numbers to make sense, even though Elayne is still under the belief that the Kin must refuse Wilders. There’s just no way that they could have their numbers solely from Tower failures, right? And if they do… that’s bonkers. Or it’s an indicator that Ishamael and the Black Ajah have been working hard for a very long time to keep the White Tower weak. I suppose their numbers are also bolstered by the fact that they appear to have much longer lifespans than Aes Sedai.
Let’s think through that. It’s hinted at that Sorilea is ancient. We have a 400 year old Kinswoman here. When Rand walked through the Aiel History ter’angreal, the Aes Sedai who helped set up the One Power objects in Rhuidean were several centuries old. Something about being Aes Sedai in the present day changes them. They’re the only ones who develop an Ageless face. Their lifespans are shorter.
The whole thing must have something to do with the Oath Rod. That’s the primary distinguisher between Aes Sedai and other channelers. It distinguishes them from Age of Legends Aes Sedai, too (they started taking the three oaths after the Breaking.) We got a big clue about that when we saw the change to Siuan and Leane after they were severed. Their faces abruptly got *much* younger and they could lie again. It must be interrelated.
Here’s another stray thought on that aging topic, too, though. If a Wilder was a Wisdom in the Two Rivers, for four hundred years, wouldn’t that arouse talk and legends? On further thought… how are Two Rivers Wisdoms trained? Just through apprenticeship? There *have* to be connections to a larger organization outside the region because Egwene was planning to leave the Two Rivers when she finished being Nynaeve’s apprentice. Maybe Nynaeve had a clue about what this Kin organization was, when hearing about them from Mistress Anan, because of her own background. Maybe she was in some ways on the fringe of their organization herself. If so… then maybe a village Wisdom leaves after a few decades to make room for someone new. By the time she returns home, nobody remembers her. We should probably assume then that at some point, “Wisdoms” are at least somewhat clued in about what they’re doing with the One Power. That’s my new head canon.
If Nyn had been born in a time period where the world wasn’t on the cusp of ending, maybe she leaves the Two Rivers after a few decades, and gets plugged into the Kin’s network herself. Maybe it was always her destiny to end up in Ebou Dar eventually. Or maybe not. We’ll see what we learn, re: the Kin and Wilders as we move forward.
In any case… fantastic chapter. Moggy accidentally made Nyn both far happier and more powerful. Egwene is on the cusp of swooping up almost 2,000 new channelers. It will be tough to match this moment down the stretch of this book, but if anyone can, it’s Jordan.