A RED-ROSE CHAIN open thread!

Awesome! I finished my reread of the series on Saturday, and I was wondering where the false Queen had gotten off to. Makes much more sense now.

Also, wakey-wakey Rayseline? That should be very interesting to see (I hope we get to see?).

Now back to work. *sigh* How long until the next one?

...though the problem with technology is that it doesn't tend to stay under wraps particularly well.* Which, admittedly, isn't much of a surprise, because it seems unlikely that Eira would stay off the board forever, especially now that Toby is taking up a more active role in the handling of changelings.

* I realize that there's a long literary history of a singular spell being in a particular book, though, and arguably I don't know what rules we're playing under...

Oof, tunnel vision indeed! I didn't even think about Eira, though she at least is slightly less accessible than Raysel at the moment.

And Simon was elf-shot too.... Hmm, this is getting more interesting by the minute. And another year yet to the next book. Augh.

And I'm still holding my breath for the next bit of Selkies

For all of my "when the heck do we find out what's with the selkies" whining (I admit it, I'm Queen Whiner of the Western Hemisphere), I was shocked that oh, they haven't QUITE hit the deadline yet?!?

I think, if you count back, they've hit the deadline but the Luidaeg hasn't yet got round to calling in the debt, as it were...

Personally I try not to get hung up on dates and timelines in a series. It's the story as a whole that matters, not every little detail, or any errors that might slip through. However, if we really need an explanation for why the Luidaeg has yet to collect on the bill, I think there's a perfectly good one in One Salt Sea. Just look at the last two words of the book.

Everything changes.

I believe you're correct. And it's not like the Selkies themselves are gonna remind her. :)

And those are just the short term consequences. Though really, enough things might be changing that the longer term consequences might be less germaine. I mean, putting Eira's bullshit aside, the idea of elfshot, in pureblood society, might be a sound one - there might be a stabilizing effect to having a weapon that puts people in the penalty box for a hundred years. I don't know. Taking that option away, especially in the situation of prolonged absence of Oberon and his Queens, might make for a more brutal society.

Of course, even if elfshot didn't kill changelings, it was always going to be a higher stakes weapon for a society with a substantial mortal component - the time you lose with loved ones is guaranteed to be finite. (Which seems more and more to the point.)

That's the thing I've been thinking about.

Oberon felt the need for such a weapon. I'm thinking maybe he was a pretty wise dude and was onto something.

From his perspective, it elf-shot means that a particularly troublesome individual can be put on ice for a century or so - time to figure out what to do, and make sure that you don't have All the Crises happening at 3:00 pm on a Tuesday.

But in fey society in general, elf-shot is a handy safety valve. It's a nice, unequivocal way of expressing, um, very strong dislike. Doubtless political alliances and regime changes have long relied on the notion that certain parties would be indisposed for a while - even if they don't keep getting jabbed, many changes can be rendered fait accompli in a century, even with immortal lifespans.

I can't really work out in my head all the implications, but Walter's cure is going to have enormous consequences.

(And gods forbid he manages to use Toby's blood to make a regeneration potion)

I too was wondering what happens when the elf-shot antidote gets into anyone's hands we don't want it in. Oh dear.

I think that, really, too much is being made of what will happen if the antidote falls into the proverbial wrong hands. It's like finding the cure for cancer, and then hiding it away because it might be used on some 'bad people.'

So what? Some people get awakened that we'd really prefer to have out of the way. To me, that's a dodge. If these people are so bad that society would clearly be better off without them, they need to be dealt with, permanently.

Before anyone brings up Oberon's Law, I'll point out that it doesn't prohibit all killing, period. It's a 'prohibition against killing purebloods except in formally declared war." I would extrapolate that it also allows killing in self-defense, or in defense of others, but I can't recall if this was ever said in the books. In Late Eclipses, King Sollys pardoned Toby for killing Blind Michael, and thanked her for acting as his executioner, and, of course, that was necessary because the False Queen was hellbent on executing her, so capital punishment is allowed. If there are elf-shot people out there that have been judged, fairly and legally, to be too dangerous to ever be awakened, they need to just deal with them, and stop dancing around the law to make themselves feel better.

So Eira gets awakened. It's going to happen anyway. They aren't even sure elf-shot will keep her down for a hundred years. Mags said that she can heal from just about anything, as long as she can sleep; well, she's snoozing away right now, so she'll be back, even without the antidote.

Using elf-shot to deal with the bad people is like human society abolishing the death penalty, and instead placing those convicted of capital crimes in a medically induced coma until they just fade away on their own. The end result is the same, their life is over, but hey, we feel better because we didn't kill them.

And war? As said above, the law specifically exempts killing in a declared war, so this practice of using elf-shot in warfare is really a perversion of the law. It's like that Star Trek episode, the one with the two planets that had reduced war to a computer simulation, and then would execute the calculated casualties. War is supposed to be brutal and ugly, people are supposed to die because otherwise, in the words of Robert E. Lee, "we should grow too fond of it."

The fae seem to be there already, so I say rendering elf-shot null is a good thing. You can't hide behind it anymore, people, so it's time to step up, grow up, prove that you're really better than the humans and the changelings, like you think you are, and stop the killing for real.

Okay, this got way too preachy, so I'll stop now.

I also keep thinking, that the sleepers might be woken is one of those phrases that has a specific meaning in one context, but who the heck knows what it means more generally? Who knows what general set of people are asleep via elfshot? (Admittedly, for anyone who's been gone for more than 100 years, there needs to be a maintenance plan.)

...of course, that's right up there with the long term consequences of becoming known as someone whose blood can regenerate lost body parts. I mean, Amandine's approach to her heritage might look better all the time.

If Raysel is awakened, she'll be in a big pot of hot water. She faces trial for the attempted murder of her mother, and for killing the selkie. Intentional or not she still broke Oberon's Law, and we know there's only one penalty for that. Of course it's possible she could escape, perhaps with the aid of someone who can open the Rose Road?

I'm vaguely wondering if the false Queen's original name was oh, "Evening Winterrose."

Probably not because that's too apt an alias, but that would explain a lot.

Hmmm. Well, looking back at what Evening did at Shadowed Hills, I think not. If the False Queen (or Queen Crazy, as I like to call her) had that kind of power, she wouldn't have needed her siren's song to stop Arden and her allies in their tracks. She would have had them assisting her willingly, and with full control of their faculties, rather than robots she had to command.

That said, your comment does get the wheels turning in my head. Not Evening ... but perhaps her child? Evening was one of those who supported her claim on the throne, after all.

I was just thinking that Eira would be a powerful ally to have on one's side when you take over a kingdom, so that sounded like a reasonable person for her to make that kind of deal with.

Eira clearly has plans that are much bigger than the Mists or Silences. She's after Quentin too, don't forget.

I think the false Queen works for Eira, and has been trying to destroy Toby on Eira's behalf. When Toby was changing the Queen's blood, she heard the Queen's mind saying something like "She'll kill me." I think "she" is Eira.

Yeah, I thought that too (clarification: I thought that after I read The Winter Long. At the time of Chimes at Midnight, I had no clue Evening was still alive.), and I really wanted to smack Toby across the back of her head there. "She's about to reveal the whole evil plan, this is no time to be concerned about her privacy!"

Also, the false Queen had to have some people back her to take the throne after the earthquake when Gilad was murdered. At the time no one knew that Evening was Eira and Evening was relatalively well respected, even without her crazy First powers. If she was backing the false Queen, that is probably part of why the false Queen's legitimacy was never questioned. I think I remember Toby mentioning that Evening supported the false Queen way back around the time of A Local Habitation.