I don't think them agreeing to bond Asha'man means that they trust them amongst the rest of the sisters/novices/accepted, at least not until they have been properly "tamed". Even though they agreed to bond the men, there is no sign that they see channeling men as anything but wild animals in need of a leash. The people who originally suggested the bonding thought they should fix the bond so that it not only had built-in Compulsion but so that the women wouldn't have to "share" with the men at all. That sort of attitude doesn't change overnight.

Do you really think they agreed to bond the Asha'man because they suddenly decided the men were trustworthy? I thought the text made it clear that it was out of necessity, so they could increase the numbers in their circles and that leashing them with the bond was preferable to them running free. No one changes their POV so quickly, especially not Aes Sedai, who are convinced they know everything and are always right. To me, it seems that keeping them away from the center of camp until they're properly "tamed" would be something they would do. That way, the men are still there to protect everyone, are close enough so their bondholder can get to them quickly, but are not in a position where they can cause too many problems.



Likely worse. I'm trying to get to the point where I can find humor in what seems to be a "let's hack apart Rand before TG" game.



It was a thought, not a declaration of complete belief in what will happen. I think the signs are there that Egwene will be the one to actually make a treaty with the Seanchan rather than Rand - her dreams, the impending Seanchan strike against the White Tower, the fact that Rand seems destined to have nothing go his way - so I don't think it's a total stretch to think it would go down the way I suggested. I may be completely off base, for all I know.

As for Tuon, yes I get that there must be some sort of ceremony to raise Tuon to Empress, but I'm also guessing that most of that normally happens in Seanchan, which is not an option at this point due to time constraints. I don't see her hopping on a ship and lollygagging for who knows how long to go back there (where there is apparently all out war going on), doing the normal ceremony, then coming to the Westlands. Her family has been slaughtered, her country is in complete turmoil and she's in the middle of attempting a massive takeover of the Westlands. The woman is going to have to prioritize. I think the attack on the WT is a priority. Personally, I think them taking the WT may take priority over Rand simply because they seem to believe he's either controlling the Tower or the Tower is controlling him. Get the WT (in their eyes) and he's an easier target. Since Tuon's ultimate goal is to get Rand in a collar and force him to kneel to her, then taking the WT out of the equation first makes sense.



Good point.



I'm going to waste time answering this because I'm bored of the movie we're watching...

I think it's amusing when my mother threatens me with death because I know she's not serious. I retaliate by telling her I could've been twins, which makes her cringe.

As for the eyebrow tic, I stop what I'm doing out of respect for her. For some reason, my mother hates foul language. She tolerates it for a while (she has to since my dad curses like a drunken sailor when he's mad or irritated or trying to fix his computer because he doesn't want to ask me for help!), but there are certain words that she utterly hates (the f-word and GD, basically). I usually avoid those words when I'm around her but forget when I get angry and/or hyper.



Perhaps it was, but I found it to be a bit less antagonistic than her usual behavior and there was a distinct lack of physical attacks on Rand (slapping him or switching him with the One Power to humiliate him) and she wasn't telling Nynaeve to shut up (as she did in KoD). Cadsuane is far less offensive when she isn't doing those things and I really don't mind her quite as much, even if she does still have her God-mode ter'angreal.



I go into this further below...if Cadsuane's demands are not to break Rand to her will, I fail to see what purpose they serve. As for her not demanding a certain amount of decorum from Nynaeve, I never claimed she did but she did treat Nynaeve like crap before and had no problem telling her to shut up when Nynaeve dared voice her opinion on something. This is the first time I've seen Nynaeve snap at her, actually. Before this, I was under the impression that Nynaeve had turned into a mealy mouthed wuss around Cadsuane (since, when Cadsuane told her to shut up, Nynaeve retreated to the corner like a whipped puppy) and that Cadsuane wouldn't allow anything else.



How can he possibly get better, though? He has a lunatic in his head and the lunatic's thoughts are beginning to merge with Rand's own thoughts to the point where Rand can't always distinguish whose thought is whose anymore. He is forced to shut down emotionally so he can't feel anything because he's in so much physical and psychological pain that a normal human being wouldn't be able to function with it.

All signs point to the fact that things will get worse for him, not better, so it's not like he'll wake up one morning and smile in wonder at how great he feels. That's why, in my opinion, the only way he'll wake up to the fact that he has to stop coddling the females who follow the Shadow is if they cause so much damage that he's forced to act against them. Granted, doing that may make him snap completely and get to the point where he completely loses Rand al'Thor and allows Lews Therin to take over completely but at this point that may not be the worst thing.



Every time someone asks me, or any other poster, if they've been "reading the books", I could happily kick the one who asked the question in a place, and with such strength, that would cause him to sing soprano for a few years. Or more. That said...

Yes, I recall what she promised him. However, she could have easily decided that the care and feeding of a captured Forsaken was not something he had any right to oversee and informed him that she would be dealing with it. It would not have gone against her promise to him and it would have been completely in character with any Aes Sedai we've seen, considering their oaths aren't worth whatever disgusting crap they have beneath their fingernails. Furthermore, Cadsuane has already added more rules to her agreement with Rand (Rand commented on it in KoD), so we know that, when it suits her, she may alter the agreement as she pleases...much like Darth Vader.

That is why I declared my surprise that she is following Rand's wishes. She could've gotten away with taking over the entire thing with Semirhage, claimed that it was not reneging on their deal, and he could have done nothing to stop her and would have not complained because he knows he needs her. And, of all the things that I could see her pulling rank on him about (especially after throwing her weight around for such seemingly trivial things like him and Logain behaving like dogs marking their territory when they should really work things out on their own), I would have actually understood her doing it in this instance.



Okay, I can see how her following his wishes here fits with that line of thinking. I can see how her supporting him when he wished to cleanse saidin, despite any misgivings she had, also works toward that goal. It's the smacking down part that doesn't fit, in my opinion, and why I've been convinced she means to turn him into an Aes Sedai lapdog.

When you slap someone, or otherwise physically punish them, you establish authority over them. It's how parents used to correct their children before everyone decided a spanking might hurt their fragile little egos (and that spelling words wrong is fine because kids might be offended at getting corrected, but I digress...). It's even how the White Tower works - I've always felt the spankings the Mistress of Novices hands out is more about reinforcing the authority of the sisters, and the MoN, than about correcting "wrong" behavior. Punishing them in that way puts them in a better frame of mind for the Tower indoctrination.

What I'm getting at here is that, due to the usual purpose of physical punishments, Cadsuane slapping Rand around for cursing or getting angry establishes her authority over him. He behaves in a way she doesn't like and she punishes him for it. The more he accepts that punishment, the more it is ingrained in his mind that she is his superior. Not a friend and not a trustworthy ally, but a superior who has authority over him. Regardless of the actions he takes that she doesn't interfere with, that lesson remains. When you mix this training, and it is training him to obey her wishes and fear her disapproval, with what I mentioned above, to me the actions are conflicting and that is why it surprised me that she didn't take charge of Semirhage completely and tell him to shut up if he voiced objections.

I honestly believed her willingness to support him during the cleansing was because she knew he would refuse to obey her if she ordered him otherwise (he wasn't properly conditioned yet) and because she didn't want him to get killed. I thought it almost a twist on what Elayne did with Mat's men when she gave them orders to do things they were already going to do in order to condition them to obey her. I thought Cadsuane's game was to not object to things she knew he would fight her on (like the Cleansing) but to punish him when she knew he wouldn't be able to argue or fight back in order to condition him to having her stop him from doing what he wanted.
But with Semirhage, it actually seems like she's willing to follow his lead because I think now he's at the point where he would accept it if she pushed him aside and told him how things would be. That's why it struck me as surprising, because it doesn't fit with her other actions, which were (to me) clearly meant to condition him to accept her as an authority figure. If ever there was a time to throw her weight around with him, it's over Semirhage. So either I'm completely wrong (and she really does mean to support him in whatever he does and the smacking him around is for some purpose other than to teach him to accept her authority over him) or she is still at the point where she thinks she can't refuse him what he wants in this instance because he may ignore her and do as he wishes, which would leave her in a position where she looks weak and undo the authority she's managed to gain over him.



I didn't take his thoughts on Nynaeve in this chapter to show mistrust of her (not any more than he showed in KoD, at any rate) but I did see the desperation in this and in KoD. Can you really blame him, though? The man has all the reasons in the world to distrust Aes Sedai - he was soul-raped by Alanna, kidnapped and brutally tortured both physically and psychologically, and now the girl that he grew up with, and has an antagonistic relationship with, is running one faction of the Aes Sedai and will soon be running them all. Nynaeve, as awesome as she is, has seemingly embraced being an Aes Sedai. For Rand, it's like being a black man and suddenly learning that one of the few friends he trusts just joined the KKK. I can see where he'd have some trust issues, even with Nynaeve.

I do see what you're saying, though, that if he can trust one person it can make it easier to trust another. I can see where that would benefit Rand as well, but as I explained above, I just find Cadsuane's behavior with him to be conflicting.



Point taken. That was one instance where I actually wanted to see Egwene hurt someone, though. Her attack on the Seanchan when they left was utterly stupid on her part and she deserved to have Nynaeve slap her silly for it...her attempting to attack and destroy a sul'dam, however, was understandable.



I'm all for torture, but I always got the feeling that RJ felt it was something that shouldn't be done under any circumstance and was a very "dark" thing to do. The picture he painted with Perrin, where he was wrong for lopping off the Aiel's hand, seemed to be proof of RJ's stance for me. Personally, I saw nothing wrong with what Perrin did - if someone I loved was in danger and I got hold of someone who had information, I wouldn't think twice about lopping off hands, using a hammer to crush bones, or making the person scream until they begged to give me the information I needed. But RJ had that whole Shadar Logoth thing as an example of why you shouldn't do such things, even to defeat the Shadow. Of course, he seemed to apply different rules to the females than for the males, so it's possible that if Nynaeve lopped off a hand, that would be okay.



Eh, he went even further than I take it. I don't think Egwene would gentle him before Tarmon Gai'don. But if he survived TG, I don't think she'd hesitate to gentle him and put him to trial for his "atrocities" against the Aes Sedai so she could get all the nations under her thumb completely. After all, if she doesn't hesitate to harshly punish the man who saves the world, she won't hesitate to destroy a ruler who goes against her wishes and refuses to bend knee to her.



Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not really out to get you.



See, this is what I don't get...what difference does it make? This whole "laughter and tears" crap is utterly lost on me, which is why I've always thought Cadsuane and Sorilea really mean to "humanize" him by teaching him to be their lapdog. Otherwise, the bloody thing makes no sense at all. The man is in ungodly pain - pain that even an Aiel is shocked and proud he can handle so well - is constantly losing more use of his body, and has absolutely nothing to look forward to except more pain, more people hating him, and a painful, horrible death. What difference does it make if he's ignoring his pain or if he does the Aiel thing and "sings" while he's hacked into itty bitty pieces? He's dead either way. He suffers either way. So who cares whether he "feels" the pain or not? This whole thing is like refusing a terminal patient morphine because you want him to "feel" his last few moments of life and think he should suck it up and "love" the pain.

You can scoff at Rand all you want, but if you had your hand blown off, I highly doubt you'd just get up and barely blink an eye about the pain. Instead, you'd be crying like a little wussy girl. And if you were walking around with unbearable pain in your side, you'd be curled into a ball begging for some painkillers, at least. Rand does none of that. He takes it and keeps going like the Energizer bunny, his only consideration being that he has to get to Tarmon Gai'don while there's still something left of him for the Dark One to kill.

I think it's freaking sick to want to make him actually give a crap about living when he - and everyone else - knows he's not going to survive! He accepts that he's going to die, refuses to allow himself even the tiniest bit of hope that he might not die, and accepts that he's going to have even more pain before it's over with. At the end of the chapter, it's obvious that he's ready to get on with it and die already. I think it's a bit asinine to expect, much less want, someone to do a happy dance at the fact that he's getting hacked apart and dying to save a bunch of thankless jerks who either get off on him suffering, want to leash him like an animal so they can stab him to death themselves in order to "win", or want to see him dead and gone. That he's willing, and ready, to do it should be good enough. To want more than that is just inhumane and mean - to me, it'd be no different than telling a woman she's about to be gang raped and gutted alive then get your panties in a wad because she doesn't seem gleeful about it. That he isn't running away and has, instead, accepted his fate, is all that's needed. Rubbing salt in the wound is sick.