I don't like what she did.

Yes, I agree there should have been.. something to point out/force her face in the mess she created.

I also don't remember whether the Princeps and Princeps Guards were slain by furycrafting.



I would have to agree that Gaius could have protected Tavi better.

One point to consider: watercrafting can be used to change your looks. Max masqueraded as Gaius. Rook as Gaelle.

Gaius could have done some combination of giving tutoring to Tavi and hidin in refuge; he might've sent some reliable furycrafting instructor, a trustworthy Cursor, under cover to Calderon Valley, allowed "Fade" to remain there, and gone with the "Isana is Tavi's aunt" story.

Boom. Tavi grows up with another uncle as a furycrafting teacher, a slave with metalcrafting who may or may not teach him how to use a sword or metalcraft.


I don't know if it's possible for one person's Furycrafting to change another's appearance. But if it is, Gaius probably can do it. Otherwise, Tavi is tutored early on to do so.

Boom. Tavi grows up without very obvious green eyes, and looks far more like Isana's sister then any possible House of Gaius bastard.



He has powerful furycrafting. He has a tutor or two. He has a family. He has a future patron to the Academy in the form of said tutor.

Ironically, Fidelias' betrayal may never happen. If Gaius is clever enough to predict his betrayal, he may be clever enough to let on that there's a spare heir. So for the next 20 years, instead of "just" playing the Lords against one another and marrying Caria, he spends 20 years making sure the political field is.. right for a young successor to his house--such as taking out Kalare and others he suspects so they cant kill his next heir.
Originally, Gaius spent 2 decades planning revenge and avoiding a civil war, yes, but knowing earlier on that he DOES have a heir, he might speed up his plans to wipe out his enemies and gaining solid support. (Maybe Mt. Kalare erupts earlier at a time when Gaius is KNOWN to be elsewhere. Heck, maybe since Kalare hasn't bonded to said fury yet, Gaius can do it from afar.)

20-something years later, boom, he unveils he has a heir, who is strong in furycrafting and trained as a cursor, and maybe even has done some Legion time.

From then on, who knows what might happen?



And, really "Assassins!!1" is not a good arguement for Tavi's childhood not being different. If we assume some perfectly competent assassins, then, well.. everything's fucked. Anybody could be so killed. Gaius could be killed. Really, it took an invasion to kill the last heir.

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Hmm... Personally, I'm not sure my answer to "oh crap, my royal husband is dead by assassination" would be "stunt my child's growth."

Maybe "change his appearance with watercrafting. Especially those green eyes."

Stunt his growth though? That wouldn't even occur to me.

 

It's not clearly said that they were slain by furycraft, but it is either that or an aleran neutralized their furycraft and allowed the marat to kill Septimis, in the end, it's the same result.


About Gaius, that was kind of the point. She didn't trust him to be able to protect Tavi, he wasn't able to protect is own heir who had grow with furycraft. Hell, even Attis distrust Gaius because of that, his main reason to go against the House of Gaius.

While watercrafting his apparence may be good, it would not be enough. How do you explain that two nobody were able to give birth to someone with enough furycraft to be a High lord ? You can't, since furycrafting seem to be somewhat based on genetics. And if people know that Septimus had a son, his son will end up dead in no time with an ennemy like Lady Aquitaine.

True, it wasn't the initial plan which was to make him look younger, so no one will suspect him to be Septimus son, but it worked in the end.

And, what protected Tavi the most was his lack of furycraft and the fact that no one (not even Gaius) knew about him. Who would expect a furyless freak to be the Heir of the Throne? No one. At the same time, he was in danger because he could not protect himself against others fury or wilds one.

Of course, they could have said that he was a bastardm but...

And you forget that Gaius plan, has you call it, existed because he thought he was the last of his line. He didn't care what came after him. He created unrest among the High Lord so they would not revolt against him while they were quarelling agains each others.

The action of Isana weren't the ideal things she could have done in a perfect world, but it's what protected her son and gave him a weapon more powerful than furycrafting. So, ok, you disagree with her, but that doesn't mean that she's a crazy monster.

 

You're not really thinking of it right. What Isana did basically equates to breaking a child's legs because bullies keep chasing him around the neighbourhood. Sure, the bullies leave him alone since he doesn't go out much, but you've still broken the poor kid's legs!

 

Fidelias outright states in canon that the sole reason he turned against Gaius is because Gaius had no heir, so he's trying to save the realm the inevitable wars of succession by making it so there's one outright winner right off the bat. So if he knew Tavi was around, he would have spent all that time and effort preparing things for Octavian to take the reigns when Sextus passes on.

There's no way to tell how much more stable and unified and able to face the Vord and Canim Alera would be, if it weren't for Isana. She did more damage to the realm in a single decision than all Alera's enemies could possibly dream of.

 

I didn't say that what she did was right. If he never recovered his crafting, it would have been disastrous. But he was able to live without it. And she just allowed her fear and overprotectivness to take over, it caused some harm, but in the end it prouved to be the right course of action. And you can, at least, understand her action, even if you don't approve them.

Tehan : At it been known that Octavian existed, he would have been killed before he had the chance to grow old and Alera would really have not heir. It would have been worse, because the House of Gaius would truly have come to an End and with the death of another heir, who know how long Gaius would have been able to hold the power.

And a furyless Tavi permited the rediscovery of Romanic Art wich would never have happened if he had his furycraft.

Alera would not necessary have been a better place if Tavi never had his furycraft in short and long term.

 

Basically what Tylendel said.

It's fairly likely that had anyone actually known of Tavi's status that he would not have lived to his twelfth birthday.

If that happened, everyone would be dead, regardless of the state of the Realm.

Isana did not do the right thing in what she did, but there's logic backing the decision and, in the end, it worked. The Realm survived, and now has a number of allies it lacked previously.

Could it have also ultimately worked out if she had told Gaius? That's certainly possible, but there's no way to tell. All we can say with any definitiveness is that the course of action she chose worked. Any changes to the timeline based on her making a different decision are nothing but conjecture.

 

The end product is completely fucking irrelevant. Ecause she couldn't have known that going in. So it all turned out all fine that doesn't make it right. Especially if she couldn't have know at the time.

Look at it from this point of view, what kind of mother could deliberately cripple their child like that, and rationalize off as the right thing to do? What kind of irrational certainty do you have to have in your own rightness to deliberately cripple a child in -what we've been told- is a hazardous environment, removing any hope he has of making something of himself? When would she have told him? Everyone seems to be taking it for granted that Tavi would survive such a life, or that the chances were high because we've read the books. Isana couldn't know.

Wow, we have a new Dumbledore: I think DLP missed the first wave of Manipulative!Dumbledore hate, kudos to Jim Butcher for allowing us to catch up.

 

First, since you seem to be illitrate or to stuborn to read each words,we do not say that what she did is right. However, we can understand why she acted like she did.

Second, we may consider the end product, but you are worse : you ignore the facts. You seem to forget that at least 3 powerful High Lord Level crafter (Kalare, Invidia and Rhodes) wanted to end the house of Gaius. And they would not hesited to kill her son if they know who is his father.

Three, you do not understand her thought process at the moment where she took the decision : her husband was killed, evidence of Aleran complicity in the act and the inhability of Gaius to protect his son. How could she trust him to protect her son if he was not able to protect his own heir.

Finally, she didn't plan to take his crafting away from him, it was a side effect of altering his apparence. And once she realised what she did, she simply find it easier to continue to do it. After all, no one would expect one of the most powerful furycrafter to have a furyless heir. We have the expression "the road to hell is paved with good intention" for a reason.

Her actions weren't right, but they can be justified. What kind of mother could deliberatly cripple their children ? One who want to give them at least a chance to live!

In Isana head, she had to choice : do nothing and give her husband ennemy all the clue they need to realised that the house of Gaius have an heir, in other world sign the death warrant of her son, or do everything in her power to give her son a chance to live without being threatned by his father ennemy. Without fury, Tavi would have a harder life, but at least he would be alive. Blind have a disavantage, but they are not less human than everyone else and they develop their others senses to compensate for their lost.

And he was making something of himself, he was going to take care of the sheep in his Uncle Steadhold. Not the most recognized life for you or me, but it can be a good life for him.

 

Pretty much what Tylendel said.

I'm surprised that there is really that much debate about this. I thought it was rather self evident tbh.

 

'His own heir' was a soldier that died on a battlefield. That's a far cry to thinking the most powerful furycrafter in Alera couldn't protect his own grandson from assassins - blasting someone in the back during a chaotic battle is one thing, but infiltrating Gaius Sextus' household despite all the highly-trained loyal guards and Sextus himself is a very, very different thing.

Isana didn't refuse to even consider letting Sextus know about Tavi because of Tavi's safety, but because she blamed Sextus for Septimus' death. She put her own revenge against Sextus - 'fuck you, you're never knowing your grandson because you let my almost-husband die' - before Tavi's safety.

Because let's face it, if anyone even for a second knew about Tavi sitting there completely unprotected, he'd be dead. His only protection from the enemies Isana so feared was nobody knew about him. All it would've taken was them being a little tiny bit more efficient and taking out his almost-wife and then, finding her taking care of a child, killing him too.

Consider how he was before the story kicked in. He was the Holt bike's bitch because he knew the only chance he had of even getting a handful of boob in his lifetime was being a doormat because, let's face it, nobody wants a furyless spouse. And those doormat tendencies directly jeopardized his chances of getting any sheep to care for, because even his own blood relative was incredibly leery about gifting valuable sheep to someone without the furies to protect them.

If the plot had never kicked in, he would have been a bitter, virgin farmhand, up until the point his powers finally did kick in (and that's assuming it didn't take the weird-ass bond with Kitai to boot into gear). At that point, who knows what Isana would done. Tried to convince him to never use it, making him even more bitter? Force him into a bathtub and strip them from him, for his own good? Let word spread that there's a bastard child of a Great Lord sitting there until someone puts two and two together and hires someone to put a dagger in his back?

 

False. It's not like the plot kicking in magically made him super-amazing. Adversity reveals the true character within a person and magnifies it. In the case of Tavi, he was already intelligent, creative, resourceful, caring and had a huge heart. Bernard and Isana taught him well and instilled some great traits. The whole moral of the series is that he didn't thrive as a result of his power --> rather, his moral/intellectual character shaped his success and his latter manifestation of furies merely complemented that inner core.

 

None of this would have happened if he hadn't been abused. It was for the best.

...Right.

 

A. It's not abuse, so don't use presumptuous language.

B. If he had furies like a normal kid, he never would have had to think outside of the box. It's his ability to think in a non-fury paradigm that led to most of his successes.

 

It was abuse, despite that it was intended with the best of intentions or not. It would be like saying that a mother poisoning her child so that he can't run away very far is also not abuse because its for his own good and the mother is just doing the best she can. Anyways, it seems like the most damning piece of evidence is that even though she successfully managed to fool people into thinking he couldn't have been born in First Calderon, she still kept it up until he left for the Academy, which would explain why he grew so fast as soon as he left her.

The fact that he was furyless when he won should not mean that he won simply because he was furyless. It would be like saying that since he fought someone without a weapon and won, then he would have lost against that same opponent should he have had a weapon.

Say he was raised by his mother Isana and his uncle Bernard as a normal child would be in Alera. How would he be different?

Another point I would like to make, surely Isana couldn't have been the first overbearing mother in all of Alera. There must of have been some other women out there, some powerful fury crafters, who didn't want their children to leave the nest so quickly. Which begs the question, if she was the only one to do it, how fucked up would other Alerans consider her actions to be?

 

And he wouldn't have been successful being one of the most powerful furycrafters in the world?

Look at it this way. If Isana had gone to Sextus and told him that she suspected his son had been killed by Alerans rather than because of the Marat horde, Gaius would have put everything he had at his disposal into both protecting Tavi from the same fate and finding those responsible for Septimus' death. He's just that type of person.

You're basically saying that the combined forces of the First Lord, his closest friends and allies, the Cursors, the boy's Singulares and the police of Alera Imperia (the CAPITAL CITY) could do less to defend a single person whose whereabouts would be literally a closely guarded secret while he was a child than a farm girl whose decision to stunt his growth would potentially cripple the boy for life. After all, how would she know that doing it would let Tavi eventually regain his furies?

Last but not least, the Vord would not have been released if Tavi had not been there to wake up the Queen, so his 'out of the box' thinking would not necessarily have been needed as much as in the books. He would likely have been a brilliant general still, and likely as not creative enough to make him one of the best, but he would not have needed to think so differently as to warrant the kind of creativity as in canon.

 

Especially since the enemies of the Crown would have been crippled by the fact that Gaius had an Hier; pretty much all the political problems in the series came from that one fact. If Tavi had been alive and well (and know) than the Crown's enemies could have walked into a corner and fucked themselves for all the good their efforts were going to do.

Especially considering that Tavi's dad had friends in high places.

 

Except that she didn't know that. Isana had no knowledge, of any sort, of Sextus' personality. All she knew is that she had failed to protect his own son from the machinations of some powerful crafters in Alera.

You are using the quasi-omniscient knowledge of the reader instead of her extremely limited knowledge. She had no idea how Gaius would react, especially since Septimus had told her that Sextus was planning to wed him to some High Lady. From what we know of Aleran society, it wouldn't be a stretch for Sextus to completely ignore Tavi. Just look at how Max was treated. From what we're shown, that seems to be the norm with regards to bastards. While Tavi isn't necessarily a bastard, there's no reason to expect Sextus to welcome him with open arms. If anything, from Isana's perspective there's reason to believe Sextus would be furious upon learning of Tavi's existence, possibly even to the extent of killing Tavi himself.

We're saying that, as far as Isana knew, there was a better than decent chance that he wouldn't have any of that. As far as she knew, telling Sextus would have only revealed the existence of Octavian and left him more than vulnerable to the people who killed Septimus.

On a side note, unless I misread something, Isana only did it as a child. I could be wrong, as it's been a while since I read it, but I distinctly remember Isana saying she did it whenever she bathed him. I find it highly unlikely any male child older than 8 or 9 would allow their mother to bathe them, especially someone like Tavi.

Now this is true. Tavi not growing up in Calderon wouldn't have awakened the Vord, at that time.

There's absolutely nothing to say that they never would have awakened though, especially since it was Kitai's blood that awakened them. It might have been as simple as Kitai doing her ritual thing into the forest, awakening the Vord and dying there. Then no one would have any warning of the Vord, and everyone on the planet would have died.

Playing that kind of "what if" game will never end in a satisfactory way.

Yea, those friends certainly helped him against the assassins. You know, the ones who actually killed him You can't make that argument when it's already been shown that it can be circumvented.

All it means is that they would be even more motivated to make Tavi dead, if for no other reason than he shat on their plans.

PS - All of you guys are basically saying that a farmgirl from Podunk, Nowhere should have intimate knowledge of the political system of the Realm, know exactly who among that system is not corrupt, and how to manipulate everyone in that system to do as she pleases. That's simply never gonna happen, no matter the situation. Isana made the choice that, from her perspective, was least likely to get Tavi killed. It wasn't the "right" thing, hell it wasn't even a good thing, but it allowed him to survive. Other paths might have, certainly, but there's absolutely no guarantee there (and from Isana's point of view, those other paths were likely to end with a dead Octavian).

 

A. Gaius knew that his son was killed by someone from Alera, it is explecitly said in Captain's Fury after he killed Kalare. It took him 20 years to plan his revenge, because he had not evidence. The First Lord, contrary to your belief, isn't above the law.

B. The obvious political problem came from the uncertainity about the lign of succession, but it isn't the only one. Many people did no longer trust Gaius as a First Lord, and Tavi was young, many things may happen in 20 years. People like Kalara or Invidia would not have let something as unimportant as an heir come in their way.

C. You are thinking logicaly about an emotional problem. Would you give your children to someone that you do not trust to protect them ? I wouldn't. And if you would, what king of parent are you.

D. True, he would not have awaken the Vord, but Alera would still be at war with the Canim, the Iceman, the Marat,..

E. Killing a child is easier than a man. With people able to change their apparence with furycradt it would not be hard to reach Tavi in the heart of Capital city. After all, the Canim were able to do it. And Invidia is ressourceful enough to do it. And traitor exist for a reason, one of them may be able to come close to Octavian, and once the child is dead, it is the end.

F. Tavi greatest protection is the fact that nearly no one know of his existence. If Gaius knew about him, he would have to tell the Realm about the existence of an heir, or the political unrest would still happen. And he would have to prove that Tavi is still alive... When too many people know a sercret, it's hard to hide it.

G. It could create more problem. Lord like Aquitaine who do no longer trust Gaius, may not trust him with the safeguard of his grandchild.

Considering the facts, Isana actions can be undestood if not approuved. You theory about how she should have acted are like a really bad fanfiction author who want to write a crossover between Lord of the Ring and Harry Potter, but the end result his exactly the same story that the one written by Tolkien with Harry in it: a really bad fanfiction.

 

The one guy that was most successful in ruining Gaius, Aquitanne would be thoroughly behind supporting Octavian and protecting him from the people that killed his best friend and Tavi's father.

When I read through the books, I had the impression that Gaius knew who had been responsible for his son's death, Kalarus and Rhodes, but because the deed was done and he needed them to run Alera he didn't do a damn thing about it. Should he have had a reason to take them out, for example another Heir that definately needed protecting, he would have taken them out far sooner.

 

And the greatest, most divious and well hidden threat to Gaius line is still alive in the Shadow : Invidia. Killed the puppet isn't really helpful if the puppet master is still alive.