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November 12 - December 11, 2024
Who trusted Lanfear behind him deserved the knife he might well find in his back.
Fate and duty held him on the path like a rider’s reins, but he had often been called stubborn. The end of the road must be reached, but if it could be attained by a different way, maybe it need not be the end. Small chance. No chance, almost certainly. The Prophecies demanded his blood.
It often seemed strange that evil had left no outward mark.
‘The more women there are about, the softer a wise man steps.’
“Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.
The Aiel might be used to leaping from roasting in their own juices to freezing, but she was not.
“There are only three things you can do with a man like that,” Bair chortled. “Stay away from him, kill him, or marry him.”
Letting emotions go clouds judgment for a moment, but holding them in clouds it always. Just be sure you do not release them too often, or when it is best to keep control of them.”
“The Pattern does not see ji’e’toh,” Bair told her, with only a hint of sympathy, if that. “Only what must and will be. Men and Maidens struggle against fate even when it is clear the Pattern weaves on despite their struggles, but you are no longer Far Dareis Mai. You must learn to ride fate. Only by surrendering to the Pattern can you begin to have some control over the course of your own life. If you fight, the Pattern will still force you, and you will find only misery where you might have found contentment instead.”
Lan said that you should choose your ground, if you could, and make your enemy come to you.
Striding to the center of the room, he planted himself atop the mosaic there, the ancient symbol of the Aes Sedai, ten feet across. It was an apt place. “Under this sign will he conquer.” That was what the Prophecy of Rhuidean said of him. He stood straddling the sinuous dividing line, one boot on the black teardrop that was now called the Dragon’s Fang and used to represent evil, the other on the white now called the Flame of Tar Valon. Some men said it stood for the Light. An appropriate place to meet this attack, between Light and darkness.
In tale after heroic tale, the protagonist proclaimed he would have victory or death. It seemed that the best he could hope for was victory and death.
The world had changed since then. Or maybe she only saw the world differently. No, it is not me that’s changed. I’m the same; it is everything else that’s different.
Surely there was nothing that could not be Healed, not if the woman wielding the Power was determined enough.
‘A man is a man, on a throne or in a pigsty.’
A shoat squealing under a fence just attracts the fox, when it should be trying to run.
Not thinking about a thorn doesn’t make it hurt your foot less.
A big fish on the hook to catch a bigger,
Caution gets the boat home,
‘A fool puts her hand into a hollow tree without finding out what’s inside first.’
“If you don’t look for snakes, you cannot complain when one bites you.”
It seems to me that kings—and queens—can be fools when they forget what they are and act like who they are, but they’re worse when they only remember what they are and forget who. Most could do with someone whose only job is to remind them that they eat and sweat and cry the same as any farmer.”
“You are a dirty fighter,” she muttered. Melaine quirked an eyebrow. “Do we fight? If we do, then know that in battle there is only winning and losing. Rules against hurting are for games.
There was an old saying that she had never really understood before: “He strains to hear a whisper who refuses to hear a shout.” She would not shout at Rand again. A quiet, firm, womanly voice, that was the thing. For that matter, she ought not to shout at Nynaeve, either; she was a woman, not a girl throwing tantrums.
She did have dreams that she knew were significant, but learning to interpret them was another matter. The Wise Ones said the knowledge had to come from within, and none of the Aes Sedai had been any more help. Rand sitting down in a chair, and somehow she knew that the chair’s owner would be murderously angry at having her chair taken; that the owner was a woman was as much as she could pick out of that, and not a thing more. Sometimes the dreams were complex. Perrin, lounging with Faile on his lap, kissing her while she played with the short-cut beard that he wore in the dream. Behind them
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There is a saying in Cairhien, though I have heard it as far away as Tarabon and Saldaea. ‘Take what you want, and pay for it.’ Siuan and I took the path we wanted, and we knew we would have to pay for it eventually.”
“I know you are not giving up, Moiraine. What do you mean to do?” “I mean to deal with the world as I find the world, for as long as I can.
But it was better to be the hunter than the hunted, however roughly it went.
Muttering to herself, Nynaeve pulled a silk riding dress out of her chest. Sometimes she thought the Creator had only made men to cause trouble for women.
Promises buy small cups of wine.”
‘When the honey’s out of the comb, there’s no putting it back.’
‘Better to face the bear than run from it.’ ”
Thomdril Merrilin, House bard and then Court-bard, had been a joy at first, intelligent and witty, a laughing man who used the tricks of the Game of Houses to aid her to the throne and help strengthen Andor once she had it. He had been twice her age then, yet she might have married him—marriages with commoners were not unheard of in Andor—but he vanished without a word, and her temper got the better of her. She never had learned why he had gone, but it did not matter. When he finally returned she would surely have rescinded the arrest order, but for once instead of softly turning her anger
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‘A fool puts a burr under the saddle before she rides.’ ”
her old nurse had muttered some saying about displaying wares you did not mean to sell,
‘Dragging feet never finish a journey.’
How long now had he been doing what was necessary instead of what was right? In a fair world, they would be one and the same.
It seemed only yesterday that he had been a boy in more than age, a youth who asked and hoped rather than commanded and expected to be obeyed. He was changing faster than she could keep up with now.
Cerandin served as a s’redit handler at the Court of the Nine Moons, where the Seanchan Empress sits.
Birgitte had not even known who Moghedien was, so long ago, in the Age of Legends, when she foiled Moghedien’s finely wrought plan to lay Lews Therin by his heels.
“Well, don’t stop pulling oar with the shore in reach.
Helping Siuan find this gathering, helping bring Aes Sedai to Rand’s aid, was all very well and important, but she still had a personal goal. Making a man who had never looked at her twice fall in love with her before he went mad.
A fish in the boat was worth a school in the water.
“A thin straw to weave a basket,
The Maidens had broken her. He had broken people himself, and he knew the signs. Eagerness to avoid more punishment became eagerness to obey. The mind never wanted to admit it was running from something, so she would soon convince herself that she really wanted to obey, that she really wanted nothing more than to please the Maidens.
“I promised my near-sister to watch you.” She seemed to be speaking to herself as much as to him, in a low, almost expressionless voice. “I ran from you as hard as I could, to shield my honor. And you followed me even here. The rings do not lie, and I can run no more.” Her tone firmed decisively. “I will run no more.”
She was going to kill Thom Merrilin and Valan Luca. And maybe any other man she could get her hands on, on sheer principle.
‘You cannot hold the sun down at dawn.’
A soldier who takes blame for comrades who fall in battle is a fool.
“I always say, if you must mount the gallows, give a jest to the crowd, a coin to the hangman, and make the drop with a smile on your lips.” Birgitte’s smile was grim.
