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 2: Unweaving
NOTE: The following chapter summary comes from wot.fandom.com
Point of view: Elayne Trakand
Elayne watches the Windfinders as they come through Aviendha‘s Gateway, judging their strength in the Power. Most are not that strong, but three of the youngest are very strong, one as strong as Nynaeve. Horses bring through what was found in the Kin storeroom and Elayne begins sorting to get rid of the junk and see if she can find anything useful. The Windfinders have trouble mounting their horses since they have never ridden before. The Warders return from scouting and indicate that there is no danger nearby. Elayne finds a small amber turtle brooch angreal and several ter’angreal:
- a blue stone root-like carving
- a small ivory box with red and green stripes
- a flexible black rod (which Nynaeve says feels like pain)
- a tiny crystal vial filled with dark red liquid
- a two-foot bronze statue of a jolly bearded man holding a book
Vandene warns Elayne to stop messing with unknown objects of the Power: twenty-five years ago an Aes Sedai named Martine Janata burned herself out doing just that.
Suddenly, Merilille shrieks, startling everyone. Elayne sees that Aviendha has come through the Gateway and is in the process of Unweaving it; a dangerous, nearly impossible, task. Aviendha’s reasoning is that the residue could be read by one of the Forsaken on their tails, if they possess the talent for it, which Aviendha also possesses. Vandene and the other Aes Sedai try to bully Aviendha but she stands up to them and mocks their inability to do what she can.
Nynaeve gets everyone moving toward the farm while Aviendha privately tells Elayne that the man she saw watching frightened her. Elayne thinks Aviendha would never admit this to anyone else.
Point of view: Moridin
As Moridin watches the party depart, he is frustrated because he doesn’t understand how Aviendha was able to make the Gateway disappear completely without any residue. He angrily reflects on other skills the people of this time had discovered that no one in his own Age had dreamed of: a way to Heal severing, the Warder bond, and now Unweaving.
A servant, Madic, approaches to report the rumors of what the party took with them, including a ter’angreal that could fix the weather, called the Bowl of the Winds. Rage surges through Moridin—the Great Lord strained to fix the seasons in place, and will be very displeased if that is changed. Moridin realizes that he has inadvertently killed Madic in his anger and use of the True Power, but no matter. He must find the women before they can use the Bowl of the Winds or meddle with any of his carefully laid plans.
Point of view: a gholam‘
The gholam smells blood and finds the corpse of Madic. He begins to feed while planning to follow the women. He can feel where they Traveled to.
REACTION:
The most important part of this chapter is that everyone gets through the Gateway. The end of the chapter tells us that they aren’t out of the woods, but they seem to be safe for now from the immediate danger of the Seanchan, gholam, and Moridin.
The second most important part of this chapter is probably Elayne’s cataloguing of the One Power objects they recovered from the Ebou Dari storeroom. It’s highly likely that these things will be important and useful later. The Bowl of the Winds wasn’t the only object recovered. We don’t really know what they do yet, but Elayne seems to have a talent for figuring things like this out.
Vandene warns Elayne about a Sister who – after studying ter’angreal for forty years – was burned out while studying them. This happened twenty-five years ago. Her name was Martine Janata. Now that’s very interesting. Have we met anyone who might have been burned out from the One Power twenty-five years ago? This person would need to have an inexplicable knowledge about Aes Sedai (including seeming to know them personally) and we’d need to be able to trace her activities since that event back about a couple of decades.
I think Elayne has met Martine Janata. I think her name is now Setalle Anan. She knows what more than she should about Aes Sedai, despite not being a channeler, and we know she was saved by the Kin while giving birth about 20 years earlier.
The chapter title refers to what Aviendha does to the Gateway she weaved. We’ve seen the Kin and Sea Folk doing things with the One Power that Aes Sedai could not. Now we have something for the Aiel. They train on how to unweave things once woven. Avi does it so that nobody can follow the residue of her weave to this spot. We’ve seen channelers do this previously and taken it for granted. Now we know there’s a way – though obscure – to avoid this. Apparently the reason Aes Sedai don’t do this is because when done wrong, it’s potentially catastrophic.
Why did the Aiel learn this? If they were trying to avoid Aes Sedai notice after the Breaking, it makes sense that they might have begin learning to do something like this. The Kin wouldn’t have tried because most of them started as White Tower initiates. The Sea Folk had no need to learn it. They are never near Aes Sedai. To the extentthey likely ever had overlap with them, though, it was likely with former Sea Folk who were trained in the White Tower. Noneof that applies to the Aiel.
My guess at the end of the last chapter proved to be right. The strange man watching them was Moridin, not the gholam. He can somehow read the residue of a woman’s channeling and is FURIOUS that Avi unwove the Gateway. It will take him a while to track them down now. He will want to do so, too. He desperately wants to prevent them from using the Bowl of the Winds because the Dark One will be angry. So… danger still lies ahead for those women.
However, Moridin is so confident that they will have fled far away that he doesn’t consider the alternative. So he Travels away and (based on his thoughts we can assume this) starts reaching out to his network of servants in Rand’s, Egwene’s, and Elaida’s camps. He thinks they’ll go to one of those places.
The gholam tells us in his short POV as the chapter ends that he can sense where the women went because it can sense the One Power. He is debating about whether or not to follow because in addition to its instructions regarding the women, it is also instructed to kill Mat. In fact, it took the time to be certain Mat wasn’t with the women before climbing up to this vantage point where Moridin had been.
If the gholam follows the women, it will have to walk to where they are, and that will take some time. It can stay and try to kill Mat first. He also thinks to himself that he has the notion of taking orders from no one. We don’t really know what it will do, however, it seems not to know that Sammael is dead and nobody else has scooped it up yet, either.
So this is a bit of a cliffhanger. We don’t know whether the women *really* got away. How long will it take Moridin to find them? Will the gholam follow at all? What about the Seanchan? I guess we’ll see. My sense of what I just read, though, is that the author just provided some plausibility for how and why his characters can manage to do something without being caught or stopped.
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