Cyradis4 wrote:<Snip>
Aivah is a sharp cookie, I'm sure just being around Merlin / Ahbraim was enough to make her suspicious, and a bit of detective work, once she was suspicious, is all she'd need. Also I found Merlin's comments about keeping identities straight to be a for-shadowing that he hadn't succeeded there as well as he'd thought. DW is a master at doing such. Her hiding her ability to communicate with her spies, also, could be simply a matter of great skill / Merlin not putting enough effort into it to spot it. Her avoiding the guards to get to his quarters is, however a bit suspicious.
I agree that Aivah could have noted many similarities between Merlin and Ahbraim that went beyond being "Seijins." She is, after all, a master at disguise and reading people after all her years running her high class brothel. Merlin isn't good at hiding who he is, and he's the same person inside as Ahbraim, despite the physical changes and new accent.
The interesting question once she realized Merlin and Ahbraim were the same person and thus obviously had the ability to travel thousands of miles overnight, is why does she want to get to Zion in a day at some point?
Merlin's best option would be to sit down calmly and ask her why she thinks he's Ahbraim. (Have they received messages from him in Siddar City so that Merlin can admit that they both know Ahbraim exists?) I expect she'll point out similarities in their body language and the fact that they are never in the same place at the same time, and Merlin is always absent when Ahbraim is around. She's trying to prove a negative, so she doesn't really have anything more than circumstantial evidence and the similarities between the seijins.
A lot of people are speculating that she may want to go to Zion to kill Clyntahn. That's silly, she could simply request that Merlin go there and shoot him from 1000 yards if she has information that Clyntahn will be leaving the temple. After all, everyone knows that Merlin is the most deadly bodyguard and the best shot on Safehold! Killing Rayno would be more useful.
As for getting into his room, she is a very attractive woman, and she could potentially charm her way past the guards with vague hints that she's about to initiate an affair with Merlin. They'd grin and think "What a lucky guy" as she disappeared into his quarters. If there were a changing of the guard after that, they might not have passed on the information since she'd have asked them to be discreet. So Merlin arrives to find the alliance's spymaster in his quarters, not for romantic purposes, as the guards believed, but for her own purposes.
Of course I could be over thinking this. She could simply have told the guards that Merlin had requested a private meeting with her in her role as spymaster. That would certainly make sense, since a Seijin would know things that the spymaster would also need to know, but nobody else would. People and methods, and a leak could get her spies (and theoretically his) killed.
Merlin can probably bluff his way out of this, but he's always told the truth, and that's a policy of his. So does he trust her enough to bring her into the inner circle knowing that she's part of another organization with its own motives? I'd expect there would have to be a lot of "You tell me about yours and I'll tell you about mine" before Merlin could reach that point. He can truthfully say that seijins can indeed travel much faster than normal mortals when necessary without going into detail, and she
is bluffing when she assumes he can take a passenger along. Merlin's processors ought to be able to think much faster than a normal human, so he should realize that she's bluffing and be able to steer the conversation so that he learns a great deal about her organization as a tradeoff to explaining seijin's abilities and limitations. The existence of the inner circle never need come up - but she's probably noticed that Merlin and Cayleb learn things about distant events too quickly.
I was worried when she was made the spymaster, since the more intel she saw, the more pieces of the puzzle she was likely to put together, and now she's nibbling at the greatest secret on Safehold - that we
know of!
The others, though, I think have at least a miniscule chance of being correct. Please feel free to disabuse me of my delusions.