"Why wouldn't you travel by main roads?"

Episode 4, Of Banquets Bastards and Burials - Kalis

Before we jump into the many things going on with Yennefer in the fourth episode, let's have a brief chapter on what little we know of Kalis. It's unlikely anyone else will be mounting a defense of her, so it falls to me!

We know she's had other children already - I would say at least three, and probably more. Kalis still looks young, so she's had those kids in close succession, and must have been even younger when she first married. Even in good circumstances, that alone is likely going to take a large mental toll. And she is not in good circumstances. She thinks her husband cares more about his dogs than he does her, and she's about to find out that's significantly overestimating his goodwill toward her. She is being shipped off to another castle and she's going only with her most recent baby and not her older daughters, and with no other companions. The only reference she makes to people at court is that they're pitying her behind her back. She's lonely and isolated. She tries to engage Yennefer and asks for Yennefer to stay with her. She also expresses that she's miserably bored with her life. And her behavior with her baby is worryingly detached, especially when there's nothing else distracting her.

Now, that doesn't justify ultimately offering the assassin her baby in the hopes of sparing her own life. But like all the other characters, it's pretty clear that her behavior is not coming from a rational and measured place, especially when it's not even a response that makes any sense - this is clearly happening because her husband wants her gone so he can remarry, and the baby is just collateral damage.

It would have been better of her to ask for the opposite. To beg for her child's life instead of her own. But that kind of behavior is heroic, and to treat it as expected cheapens it. Moreover, in terms of narrative, it is something very often treated as expected in the real world. It's not good of Kalis to do this, but it is narratively better to have her allowed to behave selfishly. It is rare in fiction to see a mother exist in any other capacity, and when a woman does it's because she either never cared or maliciously wanted the kid dead, not that she cares enough to try to save the kid as well but when pressed enough chooses herself over them.

(And the show overall is quite unusual for how much mothers feature and the many ways they're imperfect. In this season, we have Calanthe and Pavetta's relationship is on display at the banquet this episode, where Calanthe is willing to move heaven and earth for her daughter but not listen to her daughter's feelings, and Calanthe and Ciri, where Calanthe's desire to protect Ciri endangered her. In the first episode we have Marilka and her mother, Marilka feeling stifled by her mother's insistence their smalltown life is good enough and rejecting her mother's teachings in response, and we have Renfri and her mother and her stepmother. Yennefer's mother tried to protect her but didn't succeed - perhaps she did her best, and perhaps she could've done better. Tissaia both saved Yennefer and fucked her up further. And at the end we see Geralt, who has spent the season telling everyone to get over it and let bygones be bygones, snarling at his own mother for abandoning him.)