The lady does shoot fireballs, so let’s try and stay on her good side.

— Mat Cauthon

The second episode starts explosively. A terrified child, a vampiric army captain and a woman burning alive. ‘There’s a brutality to the dish’, the captain intones as he eats, banner-waving his own violent disposition. Half inquisitor, half witchhunter, Eamon Valda (Abdul Salis) of the Children of Light torments and burns his Aes Seddai captor – an execution made more lurid as we watch it reflected in his goblet and then blotted by his bloody fingers. A classic and effective piece of cinematography that could ask whether the captain is more akin to a vampire, without soul or reflection, who lusts for blood? He is, after all, deluded enough to think that brutality and mercy could ever co-exist.  

The episode also complicates this world’s politics in enticing ways. It makes very clear that not everyone follows the Aes Seddai. In fact, they are hunted as witches and enemies to the Light. It seems that calling yourself a follower of the Light does not make it so. Later, Moiraine crosses paths with the captain and the rest of the army of the Children of Light. She quickly removes her ring (to avoid having her hand removed entirely) and speaks around who she is. She does so convincingly and is allowed to continue her journey. Afterwards, Egwene accuses Moiraine of oath-breaking and lying to the captain. However, Moiraine is at pains to point out, ‘we will always tell the truth. It just may not be the truth you think you hear, so listen carefully’. This encapsulates both the importance of oaths and their flexibility. Oaths are clearly sacred in this world (consider what happened to the Fallen City when they betrayed an oath to aid their allies) but these oaths bend rather than break in the wind. This allows Moiraine to share just enough truth with the captain to keep his suspicions at bay but not so much that she endangers her life and the lives of those around her.

The captain’s hunt for the Aes Seddai goes to the heart of the female paradox. To obtain power as a woman is the only way to gain true independence yet power (or even ostensible power, as is the case with the 17^th century witch trials) also makes you extremely vulnerable to persecution. In any time, and any world, it appears that being a woman, perhaps particularly one with authority, makes you a target.

The mysterious One Power the Aes Seddai draw on and the Light and the Dark the world is caught between seem to mimic, respectively, the single deity and dual deities of modern Wicca. Wicca is a diverse set of beliefs and Wiccans can view the divine as one impersonal force or embodied in dual deities: the Lord and the Lady. This gendered duality repeats itself in the the male and female channelers of the One Power. Perhaps implying that, in this world, the two and the one are inextricably bound together. This is a rather taoist understanding (an Ancient Chinese philosophy Wicca has been linked to) which encompasses both the Tao, an ultimate oneness which is the source of everything, and yin-yang, an idea of opposing yet interdependent forces.

Within this context, The Two Rivers (where our young protagonists hail from) could be seen to refer to the two forces of this world – the Light and the Dark – a creative dichotomoy that explains the Dragon’s rebirth there. Taoism teaches that within one energy, there is the seed of its opposite and perhaps this approximates Moiraine’s own ideology as she believes that in the reincarnation of the one who broke the world, the Dragon, is the beginning of the world’s saviour.