“If Bran can keep the sword safe, and if the Six and the Circle can keep Bran safe, then all will be well.”
Okay but. This is another case of (post-fulfillment?) prophetic ambiguity that I’ve been thinking about, and I’m really glad this line exists so that I can talk about it because! this is implying that the Six don’t include Bran! which I mean--I’ve always been confused by Bran being part of the three from the Circle, because he isn’t an Old One, he isn’t even really of the Light, and then I remembered the other day that Bran hands the Sign of Water to John Rowlands so he can cut the silver from the tree. Bran is something above, apart; he’s the Pendragon, not an Old One of the Light.
So yes I am in fact proposing that John Rowlands rather than Bran is one of the Six--of course, replacing Bran with John tangles the three from the circle/track issue even more (though Past Me is currently reminding me that I once proposed the idea that the Drews are the three from the Circle, because they’re bound together tightly by a bond and already close at the beginning of the books, while Will and Merriman and Bran/John got picked up and bonded with along the course of the books), but I wasn’t intending this to be foolproof, just like Bran as one of the Six isn’t completely watertight.
That’s the point of post-fulfillment prophetic ambiguity--even after the prophecy is fulfilled, it’s impossible to know which of multiple options it meant, or even if it meant all the options.