Quaithe's Warning

A masked woman who appears without warning to tell a queen that every road she wants runs the opposite way from where she is looking.

The prophecy

Quaithe first appears in Qarth, in the company of the two men who want Daenerys most ÔÇö a merchant prince who wants a dragon and a warlock who wants rather more ÔÇö and she is the only one of the three who asks for nothing. She is a woman of Asshai, that ruined black city at the far edge of the world where nothing grows and no children are born, and she wears a lacquered mask of red and black that she never removes. What can be seen of her is thin and pale. She calls herself a shadowbinder, which is the AsshaiÔÇÖi word for a practitioner of a particular and very old sort of magic, and it is the same profession Melisandre trained in.

Her first warning is delivered on a street in Qarth, unasked, while everybody else in the city is competing to flatter the girl with the dragons. It is a set of four reversals: to travel north one must first go south; to arrive in the west one must set out east; to go forward one must go back; to reach the light one must go under the shadow. Nothing else is offered. Daenerys asks who she is and is not told anything useful.

After Qarth she stops appearing in the flesh. She comes to Daenerys in dreams and half-waking moments ÔÇö in Astapor, in Meereen, on a terrace at night ÔÇö and she is always the same: masked, unhurried, and gone before the conversation becomes one. Her instructions are consistent. Remember what you are and what you were made for; remember your own houseÔÇÖs words; remember what the Undying showed you. She is the only figure in the story who tells Daenerys, repeatedly, that she is drifting from her own purpose.

The longest of these visits is a list of people. Quaithe names, without explanation, a kraken and a dark flame, a lion and a griffin, a son of the sun and a dragon made by a mummer, and she says to trust none of them. She adds a warning about a pale mare coming, and after the mare the rest. And she ends on a single figure Daenerys is to beware above the others, described only as a seneschal who is perfumed. There are no names, no faces and no timetable ÔÇö only heraldry, an epithet and an instruction to be afraid.

Where it comes from

Asshai is the source, and Asshai is the most sinister address in the known world. It sits at the end of a long river under a permanent gloom, its buildings are made of a black stone that drinks light, no fish live in its harbour and nothing edible grows in its soil; everything the city eats is shipped in. Sorcerers, blood magicians, shadowbinders and the priests of half a dozen faiths keep houses there, and the traders who go for the goods do not linger. Melisandre came out of the same city and speaks of it as a place of study rather than horror, which is its own kind of unsettling.

Shadowbinding, as far as the books describe it, is the art of making something out of darkness that can act in the world. Melisandre demonstrates what it can do, at a price paid by somebody else. Quaithe has never been seen to use it, and one of the persistent questions about her is whether her repeated appearances at a distance are travel, sending, or shadowbinding of some kind applied to herself.

She belongs to no faction the reader can identify. She does not preach RÔÇÖhllor, though she plainly knows the red faith; she does not want dragons; she does not want payment, position or a claim advanced. She has attached herself to one person and offers that person a running commentary, and everything she has said so far has been the truth as far as it can be checked. In a story where every other adviser can be traced to somebodyÔÇÖs interests, an interested party with no interests is the most suspicious thing on the board.

It should be noted that on screen she barely exists. A masked woman appears briefly in Qarth, says a few unnerving things, and is never seen again; the warnings, the list and the whole apparition thread are absent from the show. Everything of substance in this entry is book material.

How it has been read

The four reversals are the most quoted and the least contested in structure, though not in application. All four say the same thing in different registers: the direct route is not the route. Read practically, they are advice against sailing straight for Westeros ÔÇö the west is reached by going east, forward is reached by going back. Read as a matter of character, they say something harder: that the person she needs to become cannot be reached by continuing in the direction she is already travelling, and that she will have to return to something she has skipped.

The list of beasts is heraldic and readers have matched most of it with reasonable confidence. A kraken means the ironborn, and there are two ironborn captains with their eyes on her. A griffin points to an exiled house with a personal history involving her brother. A lion is a Lannister, and one of those has crossed the sea. A son of the sun suggests Dorne, whose sigil is a sun and whose prince has an heir. The dark flame is generally taken for a red priest. The dragon of cloth and poles is the one everybody argues about, because it also appeared in the House of the Undying, and because a young man claiming her nephewÔÇÖs name has appeared in the world at exactly the moment the warning describes.

The perfumed seneschal is the genuine puzzle and has produced three durable readings. The literal one points at the seneschal actually standing beside her in Meereen, an oily official who wears scent and whose loyalty is for sale. The second points at the fat magister of Pentos who arranged her first marriage, perfumes his beard and has been moving pieces around her since before the story began. The third notes that a seneschal is a steward, that a fragrance is a smell, and that a ship in the books carries a name that translates to something very close to a fragrant steward ÔÇö a reading which turns a warning about a person into a warning about a vessel and a voyage. None of the three has been confirmed.

The largest interpretive question is not what she means but what she wants. One reading holds her to be a genuine friend, possibly the only disinterested one Daenerys has, giving accurate warnings for reasons of her own that are compatible with the girlÔÇÖs survival. Another holds that she is steering ÔÇö that the reversals are not advice but instructions, and that a shadowbinder from Asshai who repeatedly tells a dragon-queen to remember what she was made to be may be shaping a weapon rather than saving a woman. Both readings fit every word she has said. The books have not indicated which is right, and the ambiguity is clearly deliberate.

A minority position deserves a hearing: that Quaithe is not a seer at all. Nothing she says requires foreknowledge. Everything on her list is a person or an event already in motion, knowable to anyone with good sources across three continents, and the reversals are the kind of advice a shrewd counsellor gives. On this view she is intelligence, not prophecy, and the mask is theatre.

The problem with prophecy

Quaithe demonstrates a failure mode the others do not: correct, timely, specific warnings that are ignored because of their packaging. She tells Daenerys the truth, ahead of time, in a form that could be acted on. She names the threats by their houses. And she does it in a mask, in the middle of the night, in riddles, having declined to explain who she is or why she cares ÔÇö which means the advice arrives sounding exactly like every other piece of eastern mysticism the girl has learned to distrust.

There is a hard question underneath this. If a warning is delivered in a way that guarantees it will not be believed, is it a warning at all? Quaithe could say a name. She never does. Whether that is a limitation of her sight, a rule of her art, or a choice, the books do not say, and the effect either way is that the person warned proceeds exactly as if she had not been.

How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril

The pale mare

The first item on her list to arrive, and the one nobody misread as a metaphor for long. The pale mare is the bloody flux, a dysentery that came out of the besieging camps and into Meereen, killed in vast numbers, and could be neither fought nor negotiated with. Daenerys, who by then had a city to hold and an army she could not feed, watched it walk through her walls exactly as described.

It is the clearest evidence that QuaitheÔÇÖs information is real. She named a plague before there was a plague, in a city with no outbreak, and used a figure that turned out to be the local name for it.

The mummerÔÇÖs dragon

Warned about twice ÔÇö once by the Undying and once by Quaithe ÔÇö and the books have brought him on stage. A young man presented as Aegon Targaryen, RhaegarÔÇÖs son, supposedly smuggled out of KingÔÇÖs Landing as an infant with another child killed in his place, has been raised in secret by an exiled lord and a Pentoshi magister and has landed in Westeros with the Golden Company behind him. His griffin is Jon Connington, once RhaegarÔÇÖs closest friend and now dying of a disease he is hiding.

Whether he is genuine, a Blackfyre descendant, or a fabrication assembled by a merchant with a very long horizon, the books have not said. What can be said is that Daenerys was told, twice, in advance, to trust no cloth dragon, and that the man is already in Westeros while she is still in Meereen. None of this exists on screen ÔÇö the character, his army and his claim were cut from the adaptation entirely.

The son of the sun

Quentyn Martell of Dorne crossed half the world to offer Daenerys a marriage pact his father had signed before she was born, arrived after she had already married somebody else for political reasons, and was left with nothing to do and a great deal to prove. His solution was to go down into the pit beneath the pyramid and try to claim a dragon on the strength of Targaryen blood three generations back.

It went as badly as it is possible for a thing to go. He was burned and died of it days later, his companions were killed, and the two chained dragons got loose in the city. Quaithe had named him among the people not to trust, and he was, of all of them, the least treacherous and the most doomed ÔÇö which is worth noting, since it suggests her list was never a list of villains but a list of dangers.

The kraken, the lion and the dark flame

All three are in motion on the page and none has arrived. Victarion Greyjoy is sailing the Iron Fleet for Meereen with a dragon horn he has been told will bind a dragon to whoever blows it, and with a red priest called Moqorro aboard ÔÇö a black-skinned priest of RÔÇÖhllor fished out of the sea, whom many readers take for the dark flame, advising him. His brother Euron, who gave him the horn and kept the better part of the plan for himself, is a separate and worse problem.

Tyrion Lannister is the lion, and he has spent the published books being sold, chained, gamed and shipped across Essos towards her, arriving in the sellsword camps outside the city rather than at her court. Their meeting, which readers have been waiting on for two volumes, has not happened in the books. On screen it happened early, cordially and to everyoneÔÇÖs advantage, since the show had none of the pieces that make it dangerous.

The instruction she never followed

The reversals were advice about a route and about a person, and Daenerys took neither. She stayed in Meereen when the counsel pointed east, tried to rule a city she did not understand by becoming the sort of queen it wanted, and made a peace that cost her the thing she was. When she finally moved, it was west, in her own direction, on her own terms.

The books leave her in the Dothraki sea, on her feet, at the end of a chapter that reads very much like a woman going back in order to go forward. What she takes from that, and whether it amounts to obeying Quaithe a decade late, has not been written. The show, having discarded the whole thread, simply sailed her west with a fleet, and what happened after she arrived is covered under the Azor Ahai entry. Readers should not assume the two roads lead to the same place.