Why does Verin make Mat promise to obey her letter if he opened it in Towers of Midnight ? In my mind of course if he would have obeyed the letter if he read it. All that Verin had to do was say “Mat, read this in a few days it’s super important” then since he didn’t have any reason not to read the letter he would read it and prevent the horrible battle with the Trollocs. What was Verin’s reasoning?
A couple of things here.
The primary one is that Verin had to work around her oaths, which required her to go through some strange mental gymnastics. She actually tried out different ways of getting this information across, and could never make it work. (In her pouch was actually a letter that said something similar to Mat, but which read “Ignore what I say and open this immediately.) She couldn’t pick it up at the moment, however. The oaths were binding. She would either have had to take poison right then, or bet on Mat being too impatient to wait.
Second thing is this, and it’s a slight spoiler for the next book. She did build in redundancy.
My question isn’t regarding the loophole that she found, the question is as to why make Mat promise to obey the letter. She could have made him promise not to open the letter for three days and still maintained her loophole. It’s the promise to obey the letter that makes Mat not read it and now they are in a whole lot of trouble because of it.
Let’s just say that Verin…didn’t understand Mat as well as she thought that she did.
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