i am inhabited by a cry

FIRST. salem is legitimately a good strategist. this is not just an informed trait where we're told that salem is clever and then what actually happens is she has these elaborate rube goldberg plans that just kind of succeed by narrative fiat--which is what happens in a lot of stories with this sort of "grand strategist" character archetype, because many writers utilize complexity to create the illusion of brilliant planning--no. salem is for real competent. 

[sidebar: i actually think this is a major contributing factor to why people have such a hard time figuring her out and in particular so many people kind of fall back on assuming that she's not really very smart,just sort of brutishly cunning. she's such a realistic strategist that compared to the more fantastic rube goldberg plans fictional chess-master, salem does feel lackluster! her plans just aren't very complicated. and i think to a lot of people who don't have any grounding in real military theory, whose predominant exposure to strategy is fantasy/sci-fi tropes, the simplicity and flexibility of her plans seems like poor planning instead of realistic competence.] 

this matters because in order to follow what salem says in this part of 4.11, we need to understand why she's so mad.

(you might be thinking "what? she doesn't seem particularly mad," but bear with me. it'll make more sense if we outline the strategic reasoning first.)

what is the strategic principle guiding all of salem's plans? the correct answer is not "divide and conquer," although that is a tactic salem uses to great effect. if you step back, ignore everything her enemies think about her strategy, and just assess her actions and the actions of her agents, it becomes very clear that the foundation of salem's strategic philosophy is… best articulated by this precept from 'the art of war,' on the use of spies:

thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE.

mankind, salem says, is strong, wise, and resourceful. it was mankind's passion, ingenuity, and resourcefulness which allowed them to prevail against fate itself and survive. there will be no victory in strength, she says. 

by implication, then, in salem's thinking, victory lies in wisdom, ingenuity, and resourcefulness. in having the experience and creativity to make use of whatever one has to work with. in knowledge.

and if we assess how salem prosecutes her war against the huntsmen academies through a lens of basic military theory, what we'll find is that nearly every move salem and her agents make is about either 1. gathering intelligence needed to advance her strategic ends, and/or 2. confusing her enemies and crippling their intelligence. 

for the beacon operation: cinder recruits emerald for her illusions, and torchwick for his knowledge of and contacts in vale ("if you want to know a city, ask the rats"). they infiltrate beacon, posing as students, in order to collect information on the real competitors and infect beacon's network with an aggressive spyware. the black queen virus doesn't just give them control over the system; it harvests data. watts works behind the scenes to sift that stolen information, alerting cinder when he discovers things she can make use of (and doubtless relaying any items of interest to salem, as well). cinder uses this gathered intelligence to fine-tune and adjust her plans on the fly and manipulate the tournament to her intended outcome. 

salem's decisive victory at beacon is achieved through the superiority of her intelligence, in the military sense, over ozpin's. 

then cinder destroys the global communications system and salem distributes the seers, creating a lopsided information environment wherein her side is the only one with real-time long-distance communication.

in mistral, salem leverages lionheart's position as haven's headmaster to manipulate the mistral council, expose and eliminate qrow's spy network, and insure a swift return to normalcy for the civilian population--that being the ideal condition for her covert operation to capture the lamp. (i'll loop back to this at the end of the post because it's a long tangent and not very relevant, but: no, salem did not have tyrian and hazel kill literally every single huntsman in the kingdom and i think reading qrow's lines in that extreme literal sense borders on deliberately obtuse.)

had cinder known vernal was a decoy when she descended to the vault, even with all other things being equal, she probably would have won: her defeat is a consequence of inadequate foreknowledge. 

upon defeat at haven, both hazel and cinder promptly employ local spies (the spider) to gain intelligence on the enemy's movements; hazel brings this information to salem, who promptly sends watts and tyrian to atlas to pollute the information environment and again infect enemy systems with spyware. cinder recruits neo and likewise follows the trail to atlas, where she spends months spying on ironwood and his inner circle. watts quietly disables all the proximity alarms that would have given early warning of salem's advance; salem spends quite a long time eavesdropping through the seer in his briefcase before she interrupts.

and, of course, the instant salem gets her hands on the lamp, her top priority in the short term becomes learning how to use it; and cinder makes terrifically effective use of the lamp's final question to gain perfect foreknowledge of the enemy's plans.

now. there is a pretty strong implication that salem didn't want ozpin killed at beacon, most likely because she preferred to be able to keep eyes on him: where he is, what he's doing, what he's planning. salem values strategic intelligence more highly than she does killing her enemies. 

this brings us to qrow. both watts and tyrian are explicitly under the impression that salem would very much like qrow branwen dead. they are mistaken.

qrow is ozpin's scout and spy. one of his primary duties for the inner circle is tracking down unknown maidens, and at the top of v4, neither ozpin's circle nor salem know where the spring maiden is. 

tyrian has been searching for an indeterminate amount of time (salem instructs him to "continue" his hunt for the spring maiden in 4.1). if salem can't locate the spring maiden before the fall semester begins at haven, she will need to either indefinitely postpone the white fang's strike on the academy or arrange for it to be caught and foiled by leo; the latter option is safer in that it makes lionheart look loyal to ozpin after all, but both are inconvenient. nevertheless, she pulls tyrian off the search to do cinder a favor.

why?

because qrow, the man ozpin tasked with finding the spring maiden, is en route to report in with her double agent. for all intents and purposes, salem still has someone searching for the maiden--qrow is an unwitting asset. it would be beyond stupid to kill him at this juncture. 

tyrian did a spectacularly stupid thing when he stung qrow. i think this gets widely overlooked because most people share tyrian's perspective: qrow is a strong enemy combatant, so killing him is a good thing for salem. right? that is the natural, intuitive, seemingly obvious way to look at it unless!☝️you take the strategic calculation salem made when she pulled tyrian off the hunt for the spring maiden into consideration, under which, as i've just outlined, qrow is a highly valuable asset.

SECOND. i submit that salem is furious with tyrian, not for his failure to capture ruby, but because he may have just blown the whole plan for haven by poisoning qrow and then crawling home with an injury so severe that she can't possibly send him back out to search for the spring maiden in the time remaining before the fall semester begins. 

we all know her soft "you disappoint me" is a psychological knife twist that sends him into a sobbing emotional breakdown, yes. we all know salem either sets a beowolf on him or just can't be bothered to rein it in, yes. but think about this: when tyrian returns to evernight in 4.11, cinder is still struggling with the grimm arm and has yet to recover her voice. qrow nearly dies in the wilderness and spends an unknown period recuperating in mistral before he's well enough to meet with lionheart; by the time he does so, cinder has achieved full control over the grimm arm and her voice is completely healed. salem does not inform watts of tyrian's injury or call him back to evernight to provide medical treatment for at minimum several days, but more plausibly a couple weeks skipped between the end of v4 and beginning of v5. 

when tyrian returns, he tells salem that he didn't capture ruby, "but hope is not lost! my tail… my stinger! i poisoned him! qrow!" and he is, of course, visibly mutilated. salem could and undoubtedly did infer, correctly, that:

qrow was traveling with his niece.

someone (qrow or an ally) chopped off tyrian's stinger during or right after the sting, forcing tyrian to flee.

qrow was therefore envenomated but still alive when tyrian fled, and qrow had at least one person who loves him on hand to administer first aid and get help. 

there is a good chance he survived.

salem quietly tells tyrian she's disappointed and walks away as a beowolf attacks him, then withholds medical treatment for his very serious injury for days or, quite possibly, weeks until she receives confirmation that qrow did in fact survive, and did in fact bring the information she needed on the spring maiden to her double agent.  

this is the harshest punishment salem has inflicted on anyone in her inner circle by a significant margin, and it's also quiet. understated. practical. it lacks the theatricality of her disciplinary scenes in 6.4, 8.1, 8.4, 8.6, and 8.9. i've made this point before, but there is a stark difference between salem performing in a certain way to intimidate or manipulate someone, and what she does when she wants to hurt somebody.

"you disappoint me," followed by either tacitly permitting a grimm to attack or actively setting a grimm on him, looks to me a lot more like salem turning around after oscar tells a lie to blast him with zero warning for a solid ten seconds and then saying the cruelest thing she could think of in the most psychologically devastating way possible. this is not a calculated manipulative cruelty meant to achieve a particular outcome. 

she is simply coldly, quietly furious because her entire plan for haven is now hanging by a single thread of possibility that qrow will survive and find the spring maiden within the next 2-3 months. AND THIS INCOMPETENT LUNATIC EXPECTS HER TO PAT HIM ON THE HEAD AND CALL HIM A GOOD BOY FOR POISONING HER ASSET. 

the last thing she tells cinder in 5.2 is to send tyrian is so she can "have a word with him." her tone is perfectly malevolent and theatrical, pause for dramatic effect and all. the minute salem determines that qrow survived (and found spring), she summons watts back to treat tyrian's injury and turns on a dimeinto that performative affect, because now the mess he made has cleaned itself up she is going to do a little song and dance to make sure tyrian understands what he did wrong and how very fortunate he is that qrow did survive. 

THIRD. with 5.2 helping to provide context regarding what salem is thinking when she receives tyrian in 4.11, what she meant by "the last eye is blinded" becomes much more clear. she isn't talking about ozpin's eyes--she is talking about hers.

she means tyrian and qrow. her eyes for seeking the spring maiden. "the last eye is blinded" and "you disappoint me" aren't discrete statements. salem is telling him WHY she's disappointed. 

and i think she's also jabbing at tyrian over something he said to cinder Months Ago that irritated her. remember this?

TYRIAN: If I were you, I'd hunt her down. Find her and… well, she took your eye, didn't she?

remember tyrian tauntingly muttering "eye for an eye" at cinder at the end of that meeting and then laughing maniacally?

<- salem does not want cinder to take this leaf out of tyrian's book. salem has been, as we see in 5.2, advising cinder to be cautious and focus on protecting herself rather than pursuing vengeance. 

cinder is standing right there, in 4.11. 

salem sent tyrian after ruby as a favor to cinder. tyrian failed to capture her and stung qrow during the altercation. one of them chopped off his stinger. 

sting for a sting. eye for an eye...

...leaves the whole world blind, right?

the last eye is blinded.

cinder is quite intelligent enough to make the same inferences salem does, and in 5.2 she seems quick on the uptake when salem brings up tyrian apropos nothing. if salem's reception of tyrian in 4.11 is performative at all, it's a performance for cinder's sake. this is what becomes of those who lash out with no restraint. this is where uncontrolled aggression and brutality lead. this is why you must act with caution and consider your weaknesses and how to guard them. do not be like tyrian; he is a disappointment whose lack of discipline may well cost you the spring maiden and me the relic. 

whether cinder receives that message as intended is a different question. i don't think she does, fully, until salem elaborates in 5.2. 

BONUS ROUND. on the huntsmen salem had killed in mistral. 

exhibit a: lionheart's cover story. 

"You could feel the dread in the air. With all that negativity, you can imagine what it was like when the grimm came for us... Mistral's territory is the widest reaching in the world, you know, and that makes it infinitely harder to protect. We lost so many great huntsmen, teachers from this very institution. And it's only gotten worse..."

[...]

"We may have dealt with the grimm, but the Mistral council's still at odds with representatives from Atlas. First it was the dust embargo, now it's the closing of borders..."

[...]

"This kingdom is in shambles. 'As soon as possible' does not mean tomorrow; It means as soon as I can convince the council that I need huntsmen more than they do. Unfortunately, bandit tribes aren't very high on their list of priorities when the threat of war is just on the horizon."

note… two things. 

first, the exact nature of the problems leo is talking about when he says mistral is in shambles. not the grimm. the grimm came in a devastating wave in the immediate aftermath of beacon's fall, and many huntsmen were killed holding the line. but they did hold the line, and the grimm have now been "dealt with." they are no longer a pressing concern. 

however, what with confused reports of atlesian forces attacking vale, the dust embargo, and now atlas closing its borders and withdrawing all its troops from mistral, the mistral council believes atlas may be planning to invade. they're scrambling to get prepare for an imminent war of aggression initiated by their onetime ally, which has just reneged on its defense agreements and left the kingdom vulnerable due to its reliance on atlesian troops to defend its borders. 

and second, neither qrow nor ozpin doubt leo's assertion that the mistral council has effectively commandeered most of the kingdom's huntsmen. indeed, this is the one part of his cover story that they accept as fact without question. as qrow says, "then damn the council, we'll do it ourselves." what makes them suspicious is leo's apparent reluctance to work around the council to get things done. 

it follows that the council must legitimately have the authority to do this and that it's a predictable action for the council to take under the circumstances and that it would probably be quite easy to verify. 

exhibit b: qrow's contacts. 

OZPIN: Now, we have two steps ahead of us. The first is enlisting the aid of more huntsmen. 

REN: But the Mistral council--

QROW: Doesn't own every huntsman in the kingdom, and I've been here enough times to know where we can find some more. 

OZPIN: So long as they're trustworthy. 

QROW: You can trust them to put up a good fight. I'll throw together a list tonight. 

so, qrow is explicitly only looking for independent huntsmen not employed by the mistral council; and--given he descends to the slums at the base of mistral to look for these people, one of them had wracked up a considerable debt at a noodle place, and another lived with her family in a derelict house with boarded-up windows--we can infer that this group of huntsmen who live in mistral but don't work on retainer for the council are poor. in other words, if you're a huntsman in mistral, not a criminal, and not ultimately working for the government, you're probably struggling to make ends meet. this is not an attractive situation to be in, and most huntsmen in the kingdom probably do not fall into this category. 

furthermore, qrow doesn't put out a general call for aid; he puts together a list of huntsmen and huntresses he knows and trusts enough to ask them to help him force raven to "give up her most prized possession"--so, to capture the spring maiden, essentially. 

we can infer that qrow is looking for people he knows well, people he has worked with closely in the past, perhaps people he considers friends. he's ozpin's spy. these are his assets.

exhibit c: the mission boards. 

the contracts we see on the mission board have three statuses: "terminated," "in progress," and "on hold." 

the purpose of the mission boards is for huntsmen to pick up new contracts, so it makes little sense for them to display completed jobs. "terminated" is therefore most likely a status indicating that the assigned huntsman or huntress has been confirmed dead, incapacitated, or perhaps fired by the client but remains open and available. "in-progress" status indicates the time since the contract was claimed or last updated. 

so what does "on hold" mean?

i think that is what leo alludes to in his cover story: most huntsmen in mistral work on retainer for the council, and the council can place holds on freelance contracts held by these huntsmen in order to reassign them elsewhere. this would allow the council to distribute the majority of the kingdom's huntsmen evenly and efficiently to handle major crises when necessary, although--mistral being mistral--corrupt use of this power is probably rampant. 

now, of the thirty unique and fully-legible records shown on the mission board, 10 are terminated, 7 in progress, and 13 on hold. the ones on hold are distributed evenly across a period of ten weeks at a rate of 1-2 per week, whereas all of the terminated contracts were marked as such within the past week. 

what this says to me is that either salem held off on giving the kill order until qrow turned up alive and hazel's been on a killing spree for the past week... or else there are still enough huntsmen active in the city that terminated contracts are picked up again usually within a week. 

of the in-progress contracts, two were last updated within the past month, 1 week and 3 weeks. two of the oldest, both eight weeks old, are "village security" jobs--which are presumably long-term contracts. now, we know there are air patrols around mistral keeping watch for signs of trouble, because one of these patrols saw the plume from the dying knuckelavee and came to investigate. if a settlement within the kingdom's territories were overrun by grimm and destroyed, these patrols would notice it fairly quickly; and if a village contracted a huntsman for defense and the huntsman died without the village being destroyed, the contract would be marked terminated and become available for pick up promptly. it makes no sense to assume that the huntsmen assigned to these eight week old in-progress village security contracts are anything but alive.*

[*one of them might be brunswick farms, but in that case the deaths would have occurred about two weeks ago based on the stage of decomposition the corpses will be in when the kids discover them in approximately five weeks, in which case that strengthens my point that it's likely normal for village security contracts to go 6+ weeks without a status update]

so that is 4 out of 7 huntsmen on in-progress contracts that i think are more plausibly alive than dead; the others are all a search-and-destroy, and we know from what oobleck says in 2.9 that it isn't unheard of for S&Ds to take weeks. shiro wan is assigned to an S&D last updated five weeks ago, which qrow seems to presume means he's dead, so we'll assume the other two even older S&Ds are dead too. 

qrow, again, is not looking for just any huntsman who happens to be available right now. he's looking for his trusted contacts, and not finding any of them. but what the state of the mission boards suggests is that qrow's contact list is such a small group relative to how many huntsman there are in mistral overall that their deaths and disappearances get completely lost in the noise. the only person who notices is qrow, solely because he's going down his list of personal contacts and slowly realizing that every single one of them is either dead or missing. 

AND THEN he checks the mission boards, which tell him that in the aggregate, things look pretty much as you'd expect for business as usual during a period when the mistral council needs a lot of huntsmen to handle a national security problem. all of qrow's close contacts getting wiped out is statistically anomalous only in the context of them being his assets. that is what tells qrow something is very wrong. 

exhibit d: qrow's accusation. 

QROW: It was you… You sit on the Mistral council! You had information on every huntsman and huntress in the kingdom, and you gave it all to her.

LIONHEART: I…

QROW: I couldn't find any of them--because you let her kill them!

it bears repeating here that qrow was looking for his close contacts--people he almost certainly considered friends, or at the very least trustworthy colleagues--and in this moment he's realizing that a man he thought was his friend sold these people out to salem. he's shocked, horrified, outraged--not in a state of mind to speak with absolute precision! it's weird to take this to mean literally every single huntsman in mistral is dead now rather than qrow saying, essentially, "you bastard, you're the reason my friends are dead."

particularly when killing every single huntsman in mistral would have been counterproductive to salem's plans. her advantage at haven is that she can have her people just walk in and take the relic, quietly, without anyone the wiser. it behooves her to arrange matters in mistral  so that nobody is paying attention to haven academy…

…and the most effective way to accomplish that is by ensuring the kingdom absorbs the shock of beacon falling and makes a swift, smooth return to normalcy. her double agent is the headmaster of haven academy and sits in the council; he has orders from ozpin to act against the kingdom's best interest by keeping haven heavily guarded even while school is not in session. instead of doing that, salem has him send his faculty to join the defense on the front lines and use his authority as headmaster to encourage the council to keep siphoning more and more huntsmen and huntresses to shore up those border defenses. 

that removes all of haven's potential defenders from the city just as effectively as killing them, and it makes leo look to the general public and the council like he's taking this crisis very seriously and doing a good job (eliminating the risk that the council might dismiss him if he seems fumbling or incompetent), and it's a genuinely effective crisis response that enables life in the city to return to normal quickly. we don't see much of mistral in v5-6, but every glimpse we do get suggests that things are okay for ordinary people. there are bustling crowds in the markets and transit hubs, trains are running on time, there's a documentary on the fall of beacon coming out and a huge memorial for pyrrha getting built up in argus, and so on. things are rough out in the fringes of the kingdom, sure, but in the urban centers, life has gone back to normal. people aren't afraid. 

no one outside of ozpin's inner circle is worrying haven might be next. nobody is thinking about haven much at all. 

that would not be the case if all or most of the huntsman in the kingdom were dead. because people would notice that. the kingdom's authorities are obviously going to be on high alert for anything that looks like it might be an escalating pattern of threats. if the kingdom was running out of huntsmen,nobody would feel safe and the police would be watching haven like hawks. 

salem can get away with eliminating qrow's trusted contacts because they're impoverished nobodies who live in the slums and represent just a tiny sliver of the kingdom's huntsmen. even qrow doesn't notice anything wrong until he goes down the whole list. there's no discernible pattern in the data until he applies the hyper-specific filter of independent huntsmen he has strong working relationships with.