I spent most of the night with Bird and my notes, and I've got a way to handle Erevain. It won't make things shorter, but it might make things fit better. I also have some thoughts on Merran's training and Melayne's suggestions on it.
And although I am quite fatigued, I'll try to lay out my Bird-inspired thoughts on Mandates.
Acts works because we identify with Anver from the get-go. Why? Because he has a problem that we can understand, and because we sympathize as well as empathize: He has to protect those kids--his family. If we didn't have that, nothing would work, not even the threat of the whole world subjugated to the Defiler.
Why not? Because we don't have to buy into the world. And because once we buy into the protagonist, we buy into the protagonist's view of the dilemma. Look at The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth and the whole solar system are destroyed in the first chapter, blasted out of the way to make room for a bypass off a Vogon skyway. But we hardly care because we are invested in the two sky-hitch-hikers.
For Mandates to work, we have to buy into Kha, and we must buy into Kha's dilemma. We have to have a sense of what that dilemma is, even if he doesn't quite know what it is. What is it? It's loss: Loss of power, loss of people he loves like family, loss of confidence in whatever ability he brought to the Wolves, loss of purpose, loss of--what?
(And I maintain that we need capsule descriptions and illustrations to bring those losses to the reader.)
Kha is flinty. Airen is flinty. Anver can be flinty. Tilly can be flinty. Kha needs Anver and Tilly, but he has somehow lost his sense of connection to the Guildhouse and its people. He needs the flint not contaminated by his present life--that's Airen. (And I think Airen should understand that Kha needs her to be flinty, though as an outsider, not through his eyes.) And through his time with her, he finds Sil. That moves the story to about where Acts is after Alina's death.
(And maybe Anver and Tilly aren't willing to be flinty to the recuperating Master, not understanding that the flint is what he needs to recover. I can see him saying something like this to Airen. God, you do characters well!)
Kha's love for Sil has to give him determination to save her when he might not have the determination to save himself. And ... he's long-lived; she's as near to immortal as you'll find. Without actually having Kha say it or think consciously about it, that ought to free him to love her wholeheartedly. (Or did you already have this in mind?)
Most of my suggestions about how to open Mandates seem to fit this model.
And with all this in mind, maybe Mandates isn't the best title.
Now I'll get some sleep.
(Oh, an I right in thinking that Kha found comfort in Tazar's taciturnity?)
