Graybeard wrote:
Actually, this action is exactly what you'd expect of Sarine.
Consider: She's no fool, doing this at a time when she's fully awake, magically recharged, armed and armored. Pragmatic too; having presumably overheard Jon's view of the manacles the previous night, she knows that a parting of the ways is coming eventually whenever Sara decides to get out of the manacles, so why not get on with it while she has the tactical upper hand? She is also astute enough, and sufficiently wise in the ways of humans despite not being one, to recognize probably the one time in the last five years when Sara, being still in emotional turmoil, will respond to a gesture like this without getting into little-sister-magic-zombie-of-slicey-death mode.
But what gets me the most is that this action is completely consistent with one component of Sarine's personality that I haven't seen discussed here: it is exactly what a good mother would do. From the first time Sarine appeared, way back in the prologue, she has had a kiss-it-and-make-it-better way of doing things that I suspect most of us can remember from our own youth (and if your childhood didn't have such a way of doing things in it, I genuinely pity you). She's the one character of the whole bunch who has consistently looked for non-fatal ways to resolve problems where possible. (Of course, it isn't always possible; no amount of mothering was going to fix Derren Felmel. But every rule has its exception.) And if it involves a certain amount of faith and trust in one's "daughter," well, that too is what mothers do, whether the daughter recognizes it or not.
So more than anything else, this to me is a "maternal" action. I wonder whether Sara will recognize it as such; she probably doesn't have a great deal of experience with human compassion, let alone compassion of the motherly type. I think she will.
Sarine is amazing.
Well, sure, say what I was going to say.