Melisandre's Flames

The fire never lies, she says ÔÇö but she has been wrong about nearly everything she read in it.

The prophecy

This entry is not a prophecy so much as a prophet. Melisandre of Asshai does not receive one great vision and spend her life decoding it; she looks into a fire most nights of her life and sees things, and she has been doing so since she was young. She was a slave child in the free cities before she was a priestess, sold and renamed and given to a temple of RÔÇÖhllor, and the faith she serves is the only home she has had. She arrives at Dragonstone early in the story with a red robe, a ruby at her throat and a fixed opinion about who the king of the world is going to be, and she never afterwards lacks conviction about anything.

The method is a religious discipline rather than a trance. A priest of RÔÇÖhllor stares into flame ÔÇö a hearth, a brazier, a burning man ÔÇö and images come. They are silent and they are brief. They do not announce whether they show the past, the present or a possible future, they carry no captions, and they arrive out of order. MelisandreÔÇÖs own account of the practice is that the god shows her true things and that the failing, when there is one, is always in the priest and never in the fire. She holds this belief with complete sincerity, and it is the most dangerous thing about her.

What she actually reports seeing, across the length of the story, is a strange and disconnected gallery: snow falling on a northern castle; a wooden face with a thousand eyes, watching her; a girl in grey on a horse that is dying under her, riding towards him; a tower by the sea being swallowed by dark water; a wooden fortress on a lake of frozen bones; skulls, and a shadow with the shape of a hound; a boy with a wolfÔÇÖs face; a kingÔÇÖs banner burning. Set beside each other they read less like a message than like a hand of cards dealt from a deck that includes several centuries.

Two further claims are made for the fire and both matter. The first is that it shows the war that matters ÔÇö that beyond all the squabbling over the Iron Throne there is one true war between light and dark, and that the flames keep returning to it. The second is that what she sees can be acted on: that the future arrives in the fire early enough to be changed, if one is willing to pay the price the god asks. The whole of her conduct follows from that second claim, and nothing in the story is more thoroughly tested.

Where it comes from

The red faith is a living religion with temples, hierarchies and an economy, not a folk practice. In Volantis its temple is the largest building in the world and its priests own slaves; in Braavos it has a house and a following among the poor; in Asshai it has whatever it has, and nobody who goes there talks much afterwards. Its theology is dualist and unusually clear for this world: one god of flame, light and life, one nameless adversary of ice and death, no others, and a war between them that the faithful believe is entering its final phase.

Fire-reading is only one of the arts its priests practise, and the others make it hard to dismiss. MelisandreÔÇÖs ruby glows, she takes no harm from poison, she goes without sleep and without food for long stretches, and she is capable of producing something out of shadow that walks and kills. Thoros of Myr, a priest who spent decades treating the faith as a joke and the flames as a party trick, produced something no maester in Westeros can explain. Whatever the theology is worth, the power behind it is not fraudulent.

The doctrinal content she carries is the Azor Ahai material covered elsewhere in this collection, and it arrived with her fully formed. This is the crucial fact about her sight: she did not look into the fire and arrive at a conclusion. She arrived with a conclusion and looked into the fire. Everything she reads is read against a template she was handed in a temple before she ever saw Westeros.

How often has the red faith declared its hero found? Often enough that the priests of Volantis have a candidate of their own, and often enough that the phrase carries no weight with anyone outside the temples. Within the story Melisandre is not even the only priest of RÔÇÖhllor advancing a claimant. She is only the one who reached a king first.

How it has been read

The central problem with Melisandre is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to get wrong. She is not a fraud, and the story goes to some trouble to establish that she is not. The images she reports are, so far as anything can be checked, genuine ÔÇö the things she describes seeing are things that exist or will exist. What fails, every time, is the sentence she wraps around the image. She sees an accurate picture and then supplies a caption, and the caption comes from her doctrine rather than from the fire.

A second and subtler failure runs alongside it. She looks for particular things. When she wants to see a king she sees a king; when she asks the flames about a rival she gets an answer shaped like her question. Late in the books she admits to herself that the fire is full of images she has learned to skip past ÔÇö including one face that keeps appearing when she is asking about somebody else entirely, and which she has been discounting for years because it is the wrong face. A seer who filters her own visions for relevance is a seer who will only ever confirm what she already thinks.

The third problem is the class of image the fire seems to favour. Almost everything she reports is a symbol or a fragment: a face in wood, a shape like a hound, a girl on a horse without a name attached. A picture of a girl on a dying horse is perfectly accurate about girls and horses and useless about which girl. When she guesses the identity she is not reading the fire at all ÔÇö she is reading her own expectations ÔÇö and the story arranges more than one occasion on which the reader can see that a different girl fits the picture better than the one she has in mind.

There is a real argument in her favour, and it is Thoros of MyrÔÇÖs. Thoros points out that his own flames showed him nothing for most of his life and then began showing him a great deal, and that neither the drought nor the flood had anything to do with his competence. Magic, in this world, appears to be waking up. On that reading Melisandre is a practitioner of an art that has only recently become usable again, working without a living tradition of correction, in a faith that has no mechanism for admitting error. That does not excuse the uses she puts it to. It does explain why a sincere and powerful woman gets so much wrong.

The reading that has aged best is the simplest: the fire is a poor instrument in the hands of anyone who needs an answer. It gives images to people who want names. Melisandre wants names badly, has a king to advise and a war to justify, and supplies them herself.

The problem with prophecy

Melisandre is the storyÔÇÖs clearest demonstration that the danger of prophecy is not falsehood but confidence. Her power is real, her sight is real, her god may well be real, and the harm she does comes entirely from the certainty with which she interprets. Nothing she has ever seen in a flame has told her to burn a person. That step is always hers ÔÇö an inference from an image, dressed in a liturgy, and delivered to a king who needs to be told he is chosen.

The mechanism deserves naming, because it recurs. She sees a true thing; she identifies it wrongly; she prescribes a sacrifice on the strength of the identification; and when the sacrifice fails to produce the result, the failure is attributed to insufficient faith rather than to the reading. That is a closed loop, and there is no image in any fire that can break it from the outside. The only thing that ever breaks it is the woman herself, and it takes a very long time and a great deal of other peopleÔÇÖs suffering.

Set against the rest of this collection, her case makes an uncomfortable point about all the others. The Ghost of High Heart is reliable largely because she never interprets. The warlocksÔÇÖ visions are useless because nobody can. Melisandre has the same raw material as both and the additional handicap of a theory, and a theory is what turns a strange picture into a reason to build a pyre.

How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril

The king she chose

She read Stannis Baratheon as the promised hero and spent years defending the reading, and the cost mounted steadily: a sept burned to produce a sword, shadows sent against two men who stood in his way, a bastard boy nearly bled for a spell, lords and cousins given to the fire for refusing the new god. The reading survived every setback, including a crushing defeat by the walls of KingÔÇÖs Landing that the flames had not warned her about.

It ended differently in the two tellings. On screen, in the snows outside Winterfell with his army starving, Stannis was persuaded to burn his own daughter Shireen alive on the promise of a thaw. The thaw came; so did the desertion of half his army and the suicide of his wife, and he was defeated and killed. MelisandreÔÇÖs certainty died on that field with him.

On the page it has not happened. Shireen is alive at Castle Black, Stannis is somewhere in the snow with the outcome of his campaign unreported, and the only account of it is a gloating letter from an enemy. Readers should be clear that the childÔÇÖs burning is, so far, a television event, though it is widely believed to be coming.

The girl on the dying horse

The single cleanest example of her method failing. She saw, repeatedly, a girl in grey riding a foundering horse towards Castle Black, and she told Jon Snow it was his sister ÔÇö because she knew he wanted his sister, because it made her indispensable, and because Arya Stark was the answer that fitted her purposes.

The girl who actually arrived was Alys Karstark, riding for her life from an uncle who meant to marry her by force and take her lands. The reader can see the mistake happening in real time. The vision was entirely accurate; the name attached to it was invented; and the invention was made by a woman who genuinely believed she was reporting what the god had shown her.

The show reworked this thread. There, a girl in grey on a dying horse does eventually reach the Wall, and it is Sansa ÔÇö an outcome that quietly makes Melisandre look better than the books ever allow her to look.

The mutiny she did not stop

She saw skulls at the Wall. She saw a face carved in wood watching her. She warned Jon Snow, more than once and with unusual urgency, that daggers were coming and that he should not go out without her. He went out anyway, on a matter of Wildling politics, and his own officers put knives in him in the yard at Castle Black.

This is her most sympathetic failure and also her most damning. The warning was correct, specific and ignored, which puts her in the same position as every other seer in this collection. But she had spent two years making herself impossible to believe ÔÇö burning men, misnaming girls, staking a kingdom on a reading she had to keep revising ÔÇö and the man she needed to convince had every reason to discount her. A prophet who is wrong about the important things does not get believed about the urgent ones.

The face she kept skipping

Alone at the Wall, in the books, Melisandre admits to herself what the reader has suspected for a long time: that when she looks in the flames for her king, she keeps finding somebody elseÔÇÖs face instead, and that she has been discarding it as interference. It is the closest the series comes to an authorial ruling on the whole subject of prophecy ÔÇö the images were right, the priestess was wrong, and the error was never in the fire.

On screen the same recognition arrives through defeat rather than introspection. Stripped of her king and her certainty, she rode north and did the one thing she had never done before: she asked for something without knowing whether it would work, and Jon Snow came back. She was afterwards banished from the north for the child she had helped burn.

Her end is a television event only. Having done what she came to do on the night the dead came to Winterfell, she walked out past the walls at dawn, took off the ruby at her throat, and let the age she had been holding back arrive all at once. The books have her still at the Wall, still reading, and still ÔÇö by her own admission ÔÇö unsure what she is looking at.