Quaithe

And there was Quaithe of the Shadow, that strange woman in the red lacquer mask with all her cryptic counsel. Was she an enemy too, or only a dangerous friend? (ASOS Daenerys I)

Quaithe is interesting to me because she seems to be the exception in Dany’s group.

Jorah was exiled from Westeros to foreign lands. His options in Essos are not very good by his standards. He could be a guard of some palace and live comfortably, or perhaps risk everything as a gladiator. Jorah stands to gain everything at Dany’s side, not least of which is his homeland at Bear Island. Barristan is a knight spurned from his life’s devotion. He seeks new purpose and he finds it at Dany’s side. Xaro wants a marriage. Pyat wants dragons. Quentyn wants marriage. Daario wants sex or marriage or dragons or something. Alright, maybe the jury is still out on Daario.

They all ultimately want power. Or, to grant them all the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they just want security. Power is a means to that end. Everyone who is helping Dany or has helped Dany has done so because (1) they want something from her (2) they benefit from helping her (3) they have nowhere else to go.

Everyone except perhaps Quaithe.

What makes Quaithe so interesting to me isn’t that I don’t know what she wants. It’s that I don’t know that she wants anything. Quaithe puts herself in what loosely seems to be a supporting role for Dany. Quaithe obviously has some powers that might be useful in harming our mother of dragons — dream manipulation, projection, future sight, shadow magic, or whatever Quaithe is using to accomplish her strange feats. So the absence of any apparent harmful intentions on the part of Quaithe is notable and leads me to believe that Quaithe is a friend to Dany.

Then there are Quaithe’s contributions to Dany, which come in the troublesome form of prophecy, metaphor, or whatever the hell those useless piles of words are supposed to mean to our favorite POV.

“They shall come day and night to see the wonder that has been born again into the world, and when they see they shall lust. For dragons are fire made flesh, and fire is power.”

‘Watch out for envious pricks who will inevitably try to steal your dragons. ‘ That seems like solid advice, and it’s simple enough to interpret. But it also seems kind of obvious, and I don’t know how much it really helps Dany to hear some shit she already knows. But maybe there’s something useful embedded in the flesh part that Dany is supposed to puzzle out. Or maybe the parts of this advice that seem obvious and useless have some tricky meanings that would be helpful to Dany if only she could free her mind and extract what’s useful.

“To go north, you must journey south, to reach the west you must go east. To go forward you must go back and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.”

Now Quaithe is doing this shit on purpose. There is no excuse for this, ma’am. Say what you mean!

While on the surface this seems wildly unhelpful for Dany, I suspect that what Quaithe is doing is giving tongue. Rather than attempting to interpret her vision and risk muddying up the details in faulty interpretation, she’s allowing the prophecy to flow uninterpreted from the images directly to Dany’s ears, leaving the task of interpretation up to Dany herself. From what I’ve gathered while tinkering with other prophecies in ASOIAF, it seems like this is the proper way to communicate a prophecy.

I’ll try to describe it with an analogy but I’ve never tried to articulate this before so it might fail.

Imagine that we’re playing a game at the zoo and the game goes like this. I’ll wear a blindfold, you describe one of the animals to me without using the animal’s name, and I will try to guess the correct animal. Our shared goal is that I should figure out the correct animal in as few guesses as possible.

If the animal you’re describing happens to be a pig, your first instinct might be a description like “this animal has a curly tail.” But you might stop short and, upon further consideration, decide that that description isn’t very helpful to me at all. There are quite a lot of animals that have curly tails. To really narrow the range of possibilities you might craft a really clever description like “this animal is an ingredient in a famous sandwich named for its three ingredients.” Now you’re relying on my knowledge of meat names and famous sandwich names to narrow my search dramatically. If I happen to be sandwich and meat literate then I might quickly solve the clue, realize that you are referring to a Bacon Lettuce and Tomato sandwich and then translate bacon to pig. However, if I happen to be sandwich and meat illiterate then this clue is more useless to me than the curly tail clue and it will remain useless until I happen to stumble upon this particular bit of sandwich knowledge and this particular bit of meat knowledge.

So the purest interpretation is a curly tail. While that doesn’t narrow the animal search for me very well and I may have to wade through dozens of animals before I find the right one, it doesn’t run the risk of double encoding the interpretation of images that are already encoded in metaphor. I don’t need to unravel the prophet’s bullshit out of the puzzle before I can engage with the god’s puzzle.

So if my intuition is right that this is how prophecy is communicated properly in ASOIAF, then it speaks highly to Quaithe’s competence but more importantly to her commitment to helping Dany. As a prophet I can imagine that it can be very tempting to try to help my subjects by interpreting those parts of the prophecy that seem safe to interpret for them. Why say “the shadow” when I can say “Asshai”? Because as obvious as the answer seems to me, it’s still possible that Asshai might actually be wrong. And if it’s wrong then that leaves Dany to somehow find a way to reverse engineer my interpretation to arrive at “shadow” again before she can try to interpret the prophecy herself.

“The glass candles are burning. Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the others. Kraken and dark flame, lion and griffin, the sun’s son and the mummer’s dragon. Trust none of them. Remember the Undying. Beware the perfumed seneschal.”

The identities of many of these are already evident, which, personally, confirms the predictive truth of the whole thing. And since it’s all turning out to be true in some interpretation, then the Quaithe-is-an-evil-manipulator theories lose virtually all credibility to me. I think Quaithe’s intentions toward Dany are 100% good.

False friends will give you false smiles and tell you exactly what you want to hear in order to get what they want from you, There is this idea that only your true friends will tell you the things you don’t want to hear. even at your expense. Quaithe’s troublesome and foreboding prophecies and guidance comes across like that to me.

“Remember who you are, Daenerys, … The dragons know. Do you?”

Quaithe could mean it in the sense that “You should embrace your identity.” And that seems to echo the identity themes prevalent in every main character throughout the story.

But there’s plenty of room in these words for the possibility that Quaithe is implying that Dany’s identity is not what Dany thinks it is. Is she implying that the dragons know that Dany is a true Targaryen or that the dragons know that Dany is a false Targaryen? It could be read either way, and it seems that the author might be directing me to analyze the dragons for more clues. Is there something about the dragons’ behavior that will give me a clue?

Anyway I’m terrible at ending these things but those are some of my thoughts on Quaithe.