Welcome back to my re-read, recap, and reaction to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. This post will only have spoilers through the current chapter.
You can find my previous chapter recaps HERE.
Chapter 52: Weaves of the Power
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Matrim Cauthon
Mat is dicing at the Wandering Woman when Vanin brings word the women have vanished from the palace again and Thom doesn’t know how. Elayne, Nynaeve, Aviendha, and Birgitte have been doing this for days and it grates on Mat. Instead of helping the women to search, he instead has to send the men out to look for them.
Point of view: Elayne Trakand
Elayne is near another six-story building in the Rahad. The streets look the same, the buildings look the same, and she has no landmarks to use to guide her. She located the ter’angreal that can fix the weather in Tel’aran’rhiod, but she is unable to find it in the waking world. Elayne is channeling to disguise themselves and their ability to channel. This lets them leave the palace without Mat’s watchers seeing and allows them to move about the city without appearing to be strangers.
Vandene and Adeleas are also searching in the Rahad, openly, but no one will deal with Aes Sedai. A duel is fought in front of them, with one man near death. Before Elayne can intervene, a red-belted woman kneels by him and tries to Heal him but fails. Mat and Nalesean walk by, but don’t recognize them.
Point of view: Egwene al’Vere
Egwene is meeting with Logain, to get his view on Rand‘s amnesty for men that can channel. Logain grows agitated, so Egwene leaves. It has been sixteen days since they left Salidar, with Talmanes shadowing them with Mat’s army, about ten miles behind. The two armies attract recruits, with most of them going to the Salidar Aes Sedai, which was part of the plan when they separated Mat from his men.
Egwene goes to bed and enters Tel’aran’rhiod to meet with Elayne and Nynaeve. She hopes they have found the bowl, but they haven’t. They exchange news, and then end the meeting. Siuan is waiting in the tent when she wakes. Siuan has finished arranging for Logain to escape. Egwene fears that the Hall will decide to gentle Logain or that someone will murder him to remove the problem. She hopes she is doing the right thing.
Point of view: Myrelle Berengari
Myrelle and Nisao are waiting for Lan to arrive at a camp separate from the rest of the Aes Sedai. When Moiraine died fighting Lanfear, she passed his bond to Myrelle, which is not proper without the consent of the warder. Lan arrives and they begin the Healing that he needs.
REACTION:
The start of this chapter seems to signal important events to come. Mat mentions ‘The Daughter of the Nine Moons’ after an unusual run of bad luck and another man at his dicing table, clearly Seanchan (we know because they’re the only people whose speech is described as “slurring”) coughs in surprise. Mat is eventually going to marry into the Seanchan royal family, apparently. That fits. He’ll be one of the most accomplished and powerful people on the planet and Nynaeve and Elayne will still be unable to see it or acknowledge it.
I don’t know if this will be relevant later or not, but Olver has become a horse racing jockey in the very short time Mat has been in Ebou Dar. He’s apparently good as he’s won twice. Jordan really starts to use the Olver character well, here, by letting him taking on Mat-isms (grinning insolently, flirtatiously complimenting women, etc.) and we get to see Mat react to it with surprise and disapproval. Mat’s lack of self-awareness is one of his best attributes. It’s funny because he’s super-aware of nearly everything else.
The big plot movement in this first section is that all the women are leaving the Palace without any male escort, at all, and none of the men know how they’re doing it. Is this incredibly dumb? Probably. Is it surprising? No.
The four women are wearing disguises with the One Power. The other Aes Sedai don’t recognize them, either. On one level, this makes a certain amount of sense. They’re trying to blend in and be non-descript. On the other hand, they’re narrowly avoiding things like knife fights semi-regularly. They also have the problem of having absolutely no idea where to look for one lone storeroom in a large city. What they really need is someone who is lucky, right? Anyone think of that? No?
This Elayne POV section gives us another hint of something that will likely matter much more later. There are Red Belted women in Ebou Dar who use the One Power for healing. The woman is not Ebou Dari (she is Domani) and she is particularly skilled in Healing despite not being very strong overall. Why is an outlander in Ebou Dar channeling?
My favorite moment in this section is Birgitte seeing Mat and Nalesean at a distance and commenting in surprise that Mat is the more dangerous of the two. She’s eventually going to be mad at Elayne when she realizes that what the Daughter Heir failed to tell her about Mat was pretty relevant to their current task. Birgitte is smart enough to make use of the fact he’s ta’veren if nothing else.
Egwene’s section tells us that the Salidar group is now marching north – army and all. Mat’s army is following at a consistent distance. Somehow this is helping Egwene politically, though the main way explained here is that it’s helping Bryne grow his army. If two armies who look like they’re about to fight march by, you join the bigger one for safety. Then you’re stuck with them when you learn a fight is not imminent. As I said before though, if what Egwene wants is an alliance with Rand, and she knows he (and she) can Travel, why not use the two armies’ proximity to create a meeting with Rand? She could just skip over her Embassy and talk to her ex-boyfriend directly.
We learn here that you cannot use “need” in the world of dreams twice for the same thing, because it’s like eating the same thing twice. Does that make sense? It reminds me of Moiraine finding The Green Man, via “Need,” in Book One. I’m sure he was hiding in some way that used the World of Dreams to some extent. Maybe Moiraine succeeded because she *really* needed to find him again, or maybe it was that she brought other people who really needed to find him, too. Does it not occur to anyone to have someone else use “need” to locate the location? Birgitte is a genius at The World of Dreams.
At this point, Egwene and the others don’t know Rand has been kidnapped. Or that he even disappeared from Cairhien. They get distracted from Rand quickly though by talking about the fact Perrin married Faile. Nynaeve is actually happy for Perrin.
Elayne *for some reason* sounds doubtful when she says she hopes they will be happy. This is extremely odd. She barely interacted with either Faile or Perrin before. HOWEVER… she is almost certainly unhappy about recent events in the Two Rivers. She views that as her territory. Perrin isn’t allowed to be a self-declared Lord. None of that is mitigated for her by the lack of tax collectors in hundreds of years, or the failure of Andor to protect the Two Rivers from invasion. Maybe she’s planning to hang Perrin for treason? (That sounds ludicrous but this is Elayne… so that is probably what she’s thinking about.)
Jordan reminds us first via Nynaeve that Lan exists. We haven’t seen him since the end of The Fires of Heaven. Then we get a very brief moment of Myrelle (who holds his bond now) feeling him in the night, on his way to her. Finally he arrives. as the chapter ends. Myrelle has an arc in front of her – probably in the next book – of keeping Lan alive. Most Warders die when the bond is broken. So Lan is suffering from that. He’s also injured because the passing of the bond forced him to ride through war torn lands in a straight line to his new Aes Sedai. Despite all of that, he was more than capable of killing Myrelle’s other Warders if he hadn’t recognized them first.
Lan is based on Lancelot. He’s the most skilled fighter alive. His current situation has him as something like Darth Lan, though. More deadly and more fragile, too.
Let’s talk about Egwene and leadership. On the one hand, taking the initiative to smuggle Logain out of the camp was smart. It was not only the right thing to do, it was the politically intelligent thing to do. She can’t forge an alliance with Rand while killing powerful male channelers who want to take part in Rand’s amnesty.
On the other, not telling the Aiel about her promotion was moronic. She’s not getting VITAL intel from the Wise Ones because they don’t know to give it to her. She’s also disrespecting them to think they’d view her negatively, or as lying, after finding out she is Amyrlin. Ms. “Aiel in her Heart” is misunderstanding what it meant to get rid of her toh. They’d believe her. Sorilea would beam at her and then tell her the ugly truth about her underlings.
I guess that’s a passing grade for an 18 year old, but she needs to get smarter very quickly.
We are very near the end of this book, but it certainly does not feel like that yet. I expect the pace to pick up a LOT soon.
2 thoughts on “Lord of Chaos (Chapter 52): Weaves of the Power”