The Wheel of Time: Book Eleven, Knife of Dreams

Hello everyone – I’m Luke, and today we’re talking about Knife of Dreams: book eleven of The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. We’re definitely past the slog now! I’m really excited to get into this book, as it’s the most exciting one in quite a while, but first, as always, I want to warn everyone that I’m about to spoil the hell out of this book. If you haven’t read Knife of Dreams yet, stop watching and go read it first. Anything from New Spring is also fair for spoilers at this point, so if you haven’t read New Spring, I’d also recommend reading that first. I haven’t started on The Gathering Storm yet myself, so if you’ve only read through Knife of Dreams then you’re in exactly the right place. As always, I’d also like to remind everyone to keep spoilers from later in the series out of the comments. Everyone’s been really good about this so far – which I really appreciate – so keep it up! With that out of the way, let’s get to the summary.

Summary

The summary this time around is absolutely massive. I really tried to cut it down as much as I could, but there’s just more important stuff in Knife of Dreams than in any other book in the series so far. I’ll talk more about what this means later, but for now, try to bear with me (and if you’re watching the video version of this, note that I have chapters set beneath the video so you can skip the summary if you’d like. You can find a much shorter summary elsewhere, I’m sure, but I don’t want to leave anything critical to understanding the series out, so buckle-up!)

• Everyone
  • From each perspective we see that the dead are returning as ghosts. Sometimes just individuals and sometimes entire villages. The world is also afflicted with unnaturally fast spoilage that defeats Keepings and even taints oil. Pestilence, such as a man vomiting beetles until little of his body remains, seems to strike at random. There are also incidents of the world seeming to turn to fog and ripple, as though reality – and those caught in it – could be blown away. The interior of buildings begins to shift, causing people to become lost in buildings they’ve lived in for decades. The White Ajah debates what the failure of logical models to describe the world means. A Seanchan Banner-General comments that one of the Seanchan Prophecies of the Dragon states: “When the Wolf King carries the hammer, thus are the final days known. When the fox marries the raven, and the trumpets of battle are blown.” Tarmon Gai’don is very close at hand.
• Galad
  • Having heard rumors that Eamon Valda abused and murdered Morgase, Galad – along with Trom, Byar, and Bornhald – approaches the Seanchan manor that now serves as headquarters for the Children of the Light to confront Valda. As Valda is Lord Captain Commander and Galad has no hard evidence, Galad knows that he cannot bring the charge normally. Trom requests the right for a man under his command to invoke the right to a Trial Beneath the Light without providing details. After Valda agrees, Trom invites Galad to make the charge. As Valda is a blademaster, and doesn’t want to lose face in front of Asunawa or his men, he agrees. Both Valda and Galad expect Valda to win, but Galad – being Galad – is willing to die for what is right.
  • Galad performs a clever feint that wins him the duel. This makes Galad a blademaster and gives him the right to Valda’s heron-mark blade. The men also want Galad to become the new Lord Captain Commander, though Galad is hesitant to accept.
  • Galad takes this moment to explain to the men that Tarmon Gai’don is coming and if they want to take part then they’ll need to fight on the same side as Aes Sedai. He leads many of the remaining Children of the Light away from the Seanchan so they can fight off the invaders and prepare for Tarmon Gai’don. Only a few thousand Children remain with Asunawa and the Seanchan.
• Rodel Ituralde
  • Ituralde’s insurgent campaign against the Seanchan in Tarabon seems to be going well. He plans to raid his way across Tarabon, leaving the Taraboner Dragonsworn behind, then cross back toward Arad Doman. He has layers of backup plans, depending on how events play out, but his goal is to protect Arad Doman from both the Dragonsworn and the Seanchan.
• Suroth
  • Liandrin is still Suroth’s da’covale.
  • Suroth is personally upset by Ituralde’s success in Tarabon, as she’s proud of her success there. She orders nine in ten raken in Altara and Amadicia moved to Tarabon (which will be important for Mat, and to a lesser extent Perrin, later.)
  • Semirhage appears to Suroth. Recall that Suroth is a Darkfriend and has been for a long time. Semirhage offers Suroth the chance to become Empress, which would only require a handful of deaths. Suroth is wary, as the penalty for this is extreme, but then Semirhage states that the Empress Radhanan is already dead, along with all of her family except for Tuon, and Seandar is in chaos.
  • Semirhage tells Suroth that Musenge is trying to find Tuon. She also explains that everyone in the army has heard that at least some of the Deathwatch Guards are involved with someone impersonating Tuon. Suroth can turn the Ever Victorious Army against Tuon to have her found and killed. Tuon is happy to kill the new Empress to become Empress herself.
  • As explained more in Mat’s section, Suroth’s plan fails and she is discovered when it’s found that the army trying to kill Tuon was headed by Elbar, a loyal followed of Suroth. Suroth is made da’covale and handed over to the Deathwatch Guard until her hair grows enough for her to be sold.
• Hunters of the Black Ajah
  • Pevara and the rest of her group are still hunting the Black Ajah. They’ve found four so far, but the only remaining names they have aren’t in the Tower. Recall that the Black Ajah is organized into “Hearts” of three who each know the other two as well as one other from a different Heart.
  • Pevara convinces Tsutama, the new Highest of the Red Ajah, that they must go to the Black Tower and form an agreement to bond Asha’man as Warders. They will hide the plan from Elaida and the rest of the Tower, considering it to be Red Ajah business. This is separate from the arrangement that the rebel Aes Sedai enter into with Rand.
  • Elaida asks Seaine how she’s getting on “With discovering proof that Alviarin entered a treasonous correspondence with the Dragon Reborn.” The group now know that Elaida never so much as suspected the Black Ajah; she was just trying to dig up dirt on Alviarin. Elaida may be Black Ajah herself, and even if she isn’t, they cannot trust her to take them seriously.
  • At the very end of the book, Pevara and five other Reds, each more tolerant of men than average for their Ajah, Travel to the Black Tower. They meet with Taim, sitting on his throne and surrounded by as many as one hundred of his followers, to request Asha’man Warders. Taim, strangely, agrees without argument. “What would you have me say? Fair is fair? Equal shares? Accept ‘very well’ and ask who will let you bond them. Besides, you must remember the old saying. Let the lord of chaos rule.” I’m starting to think that Taim might be a Darkfriend.
• The Forsaken
  • Sammael, or someone disguised as him, gave orders to a Myrddraal. We don’t know more than this yet.
  • The True Power is limited to only Moridin among the Chosen now.
  • Aran’gar is trying to seduce Graendal.
  • Moridin commands that the Chosen can no longer go adventuring on their own as “the Time of the Return is coming soon.” He also commands that the time and choosing of Rand’s death is his alone.
  • Moridin wants the remaining three seals and he wants both Mat and Perrin dead. He insists that they must be dead before the Time of the Return.
  • Aran’gar’s thoughts imply that she plans to kill Rand despite Moridin’s command.
  • Semirhage plays a fairly large role this book, commanding Suroth and killing the Seanchan Imperial family (minus Tuon.) She also makes an attempt to capture Rand that ends in her capture.
• Perrin and Faile
  • Perrin’s forces capture a gai’shain, hoping to find information. They happen to pick up Galina. She gives no useful information, worried that Perrin will hinder her plans for seizing the oath rod and escaping. Perrin gives her a message for Faile: “on the day she sees fog on the ridges and hears wolves howl by daylight, she and the others must go to Lady Cairen’s fortress at the north end of the city and hide there.” Galina says she’ll tell Faile, but she doesn’t. This lie makes it necessary for Galina to kill Faile before Perrin can get to her, or else they could prove that she’s not bound by the oaths and is thus Black Ajah.
  • Perrin forms a temporary alliance with the Seanchan to save Faile. The Seanchan will supply forkroot so he can poison the Shaido’s water supply, incapacitating the Wise Ones. They will also supply military support. In return (and in addition to crushing the Shaido, which both sides desire) Perrin will allow the Seanchan to take all four hundred Shaido Wise Ones as damane. Perrin will also give up any claim to reviving Manetheren.
  • The Shaido continue to decline as Sevanna continues her descent into decadence and the Shaido follow her example. Gai’shain women are in constant fear of assault from Shaido men. Galina is punished severely for being late after Perrin captures her: most of her hair is gone and it’s hard to tell that she was ever Aes Sedai. The Wise Ones are in the process of sending a man to Rhuidean to become the chief, but it will take time. Faile has only avoided rape due to Rolan’s protection. The Mera’din also protect Alliandre and Maighdin now, but Alliandre was assaulted at least once before gaining protection.
  • One of the gai’shain sworn to Faile gets the oath rod to Faile. Faile still hopes that Galina will help them escape, though she’s suspicious.
  • Faile has come to accept that if Galina won’t save her she will likely need to sleep with Rolan to convince him to save her. She struggles with the emotional complexity of this situation, seemingly succumbing to a bit of Stockholm syndrome and developing positive feelings for Rolan, yet she is never unfaithful to Perrin.
  • Perrin notes that Aram has been spending time with Masema and he fears that he’ll be corrupted by him.
  • While meeting with the Seanchan, a man with a bad cough suddenly starts vomiting a swarm of tiny black beetles. He continues vomiting until what’s left of his body is deflated. The beetles themselves appear to be normal. Nearly everyone panics, but Perrin is so focused on saving Faile that he hardly reacts at all.
  • Assassins try to kill Perrin. They’re likely Darkfriends, but they commit suicide before they can be questioned.
  • Perrin pours the forkroot into Malden’s water two days before the planned attack. The wolves will also come then. Several people sneak through the aqueduct into the fortress in Malden to wait for the attack. Gaul is among them: he maintains that Chiad is properly taken gai’shain, but the Maidens told him that they plan to get to her first to keep her from him. Perrin notes that they’re goading him. Perrin wants to go too, but fears that Gallene and Argana would do something foolish in battle, so he needs to lead personally.
  • Grady and Neald are exhausted from constantly Traveling and Perrin knows that he can’t push them any further as they’ll just barely be able to accomplish what he’s already tasked them with.
  • Two more septs are coming to join the Shaido. They’ll arrive shortly after the planned attack.
  • On the day of the attack, Galina knows that her time is up. She tells Faile that she needs to give her the rod within the hour. They meet at an abandoned building in a fairly remote area of Malden. Once Galina has the rod, she collapses the building, trapping Faile and her followers inside. Maigdhin is able to channel a to wave a bit of cloth outside, summoning help, but then she passes out, as the forkroot is taking effect.
  • The wolves begin to howl and Perrin’s forces form up outside as the Asha’man create clouds of fog over the tops of the walls. Masema and a force of about 200 men stay near Perrin: it seems likely that Masema will try something during the attack. Tam leads the men from the Two Rivers and his expertise is important when the fighting starts, as Tam has a better intuitive understanding for bowfire than Perrin. Perrin tells Tam that Rand is the Dragon Reborn.
  • As the fighting outside starts, Faile’s group are saved by gai’shain and Rolan’s Mera’din. Rolan will carry Faile to safety so he can fight off the attackers but once the attack is done he will sneak her out and help her escape. What’s more, he won’t make her sleep with him to do so. Faile (ominously) notes that she won’t need to hide anything from Perrin.
  • Tam’s archers quickly defeat the first group of Aiel encountered outside. As Perrin’s forces advance, he and Aram break formation to charge ahead. After a while of fighting, Aram suddenly turns on Perrin, convinced by Masema that Perrin is a Darkfriend and Aram must rescue Faile from him. Before Perrin can respond, Aram is killed by Shaido.
  • Perrin comes across Rolan carrying Faile, who looks like she’s been rolled around in the dirt (because she had a building dropped on her.) Perrin charges Rolan. Rolan is distracted by Faile calling out Perrin’s name and Perrin quickly kills him. Faile’s followers kill the Mera’din with them as well and Perrin assumes that their tears are over the violence, not understanding the situation between the women and the Mera’din. With more pressing concerns at hand, Faile begins organizing the evacuation of the gai’shain. Perrin notes that Faile’s scent is odd, mixed in with sadness and shame. Perrin assumes that Faile was assaulted and figures that she can keep that a secret if she wants: the only thing that matters is that they’re together.
  • Tylee, the Seanchan Banner-General, has Sevanna captured. The fighting is over with nearly all Wise Ones captured and leashed. The Seanchan leave Perrin on good terms, noting that his plan worked perfectly and hoping that they never encounter him on the battlefield.
  • Therava is among the Shaido who escaped. She finds Galina and gives her the commands: you will never ride again, you will never touch the rod again, and you will never try to escape again. Galina is broken by this. The remaining Shaido will return to the Three-Fold Land, never to emerge again.
• Elayne
  • Elayne is still pregnant and her mood swings have gotten worse. She often struggles to grasp saidar.
  • Caemlyn is under continual siege from Arymilla’s forces. Elayne’s numbers aren’t sufficient to guard all the walls at once, so she’s forced to keep her soldiers near the palace and use Traveling to quickly move them into position when an attack comes. Lacking any loyal leaders, Birgitte is leading every attack personally and she’s near exhaustion.
  • Lieutenant Charlz Guybon brings a group of more than four thousand men and there are some others lords and ladies trying to reach Caemlyn with their armsmen, which would bring the total to ten thousand. This still leaves Elayne outnumbered compared to Arymilla, but not as bad as before. The undecided houses also overwhelmingly outnumber Elayne. Charlz is promoted to Captain on the spot and Birgitte makes him her second.
  • Three of Elayne’s mercenary captains try to negotiate for better pay. Elayne rejects their request, but knows that they may cause trouble in the future.
  • Aviendha discovers that she has the Talent to identify ter’angreal safely, without using them.
  • The Aiel take Aviendha away from the palace to continue her training as a Wise One. The loss of support is hard on Elayne. Elayne lends Aviendha the twisted ring ter’angreal and the turtle angreal. Aviendha gives Elayne a small deerhorn dagger that she’s pretty sure makes a person invisible to the Shadow, perhaps even to Shai’tan himself.
  • Elayne is convinced that Min’s viewing that her babies would be born okay proves that she cannot be killed until she gives birth. Because of this belief, Elayne is very reckless with her own life.
  • Elayne strongly suspects that Mellar is a spy or Darkfriend. She has him followed by a number of men, but they’re all killed. Finally, she has Mellar followed by Samwil Hark, a very successful cutpurse.
  • Someone continues to murder Kinswomen. Finally Reanne Corly is found dead, obviously killed with the Power. It seems that the murderer has been leaving clues and finally decided to do something less subtle. It seems their goal is to frighten the Kinswomen into leaving. Elayne orders that the Kinswomen must always move about in groups.
  • Duhara, a Red Sitter, arrives in Caemlyn from the Tower, commanding Elayne that she is her new advisor. Elayne tells her to find a room outside the palace. Recall that Duhara was Keeper to Sierin Vayu, the Gray Amyrlin raised in New Spring. We also know that, although Sierin was an unusually harsh Amyrlin who hated men despite being Gray, she was murdered by the Black Ajah, and was thus probably not Black Ajah herself. We don’t yet know much about Duhara herself.
  • Hark has found the house on Full Moon Street where Mellar meets with Mili Skane, still going by Shiaine. Hark also notes that there are two Aes Sedai there, Falion and Marillin. Elayne orders Mellar’s arrest and gathers Sareitha, Vandene, and Careane to arrest the Black Ajah. Elayne still doesn’t know which of Sareitha and Careane is Black Ajah, so she orders the group split into two circles, with Elayne directing for Sareitha and Vandene directing for Careane. Elayne’s group knows how to invert weaves and Jaem, Warder to Vandene, is very stealthy, so they’re able to successfully sneak up on Falion and Marillin. However, Asne Zaramene, Temaile Kinderode, Chesmal Emry, and Eldrith Jhondar are also hiding in the house and they’re able to use a ter’angreal to incapacitate Elayne’s group before being detected. They mention that Careane is one of them and Vandene immediately kills her with a dagger: “A gift from Adeleas.” The Black Ajah kill Vandene and Sareitha and they capture Elayne.
  • Outside, the Warders suddenly rush the house in a rage. Birgitte doesn’t try to stop them, knowing it to be futile, but doesn’t charge in herself. Instead, she rushes back to the palace, knowing that they’ll need channeling to fight the Black Ajah. While Birgitte is trying to get help, news arrives that the undecided Houses are marching towards Caemlyn. Then news comes that several mercenary companies betrayed Elayne and are attacking the Far Madding gate from the inside, trying to open it for Arymilla to enter the city.
  • Birgitte takes a large portion of the soldiers to save Elayne: she needs enough men to force the Windfinders to create a large circle to open the Waygate: enough Windfinders to overcome the Black Ajah. Birgitte can’t ask the Windfinders to help directly as the bargain states that they will not take part in any fighting. The Windfinders open the Waygate and Birgitte takes the head of the circle, Chanelle, through, saying that she needs to show her something. As Elayne’s soldiers charge the Black Ajah, they use the balefire ter’angreal to cut down a great number of them in mere moments. Birgitte explains to Chanelle that if Elayne is taken or enough soldiers die, then Elayne will lose the city and Arymilla won’t honor Elayne’s bargain with the Atha’an Miere. Chanelle gives in and, since she’s still the head of the circle, she quickly incapacitates all of the Black Ajah (and kills Asne.) Elayne is saved and several Black Sisters are captured. Throughout it all, Elayne never felt fear, still believing that Min’s viewing proves that she will survive to give birth.
  • With Elayne safe but the city under siege, Birgitte has the Windfinders open a new Gateway to the south of Caemlyn, behind Arymilla’s forces. When they arrive, they find that the battle for the Far Madding gate went better than expected and the gate is still closed. Birgitte’s forces attack Arymilla’s while those at the gate open it to flank Arymilla. After half an hour of bloody fighting, Arymilla is defeated. Jarid is still free, but the rest of Arymilla’s support is captured. Sylvase Caeren is now the head of her house, as her grandfather died, and she stands with Elayne (though it’s noted that Sylvase has a dark personality and might not be altogether trustworthy.) Naean and Elenia already published support for Arymilla, which they can’t rescind without destroying their reputation, but Baryn and Anshar will also publish support for Elayne. Elayne is up to nine out of the ten necessary Houses to win the throne.
  • The undecided Houses arrive and meet with Elayne. Their forces dramatically outnumber Elayne’s. Given that they’d need to take a fortified city, victory isn’t a forgone conclusion, but it’s slanted against Elayne and it would be very bloody in any case. Elayne asks Dyelin, again, if she wouldn’t rather take the throne, and Dyelin refuses it, stating that Elayne would be the better queen. The undecided Houses request a truce to fight the Borderlanders and Elayne explains that she already negotiated with them: not as Elayne Trakand, but as Elayne Sedai. She also explains that she’s doing nothing about the Black Tower as there’s nothing she can do. Finally, Abelle and Luan announce their support for Elayne, giving her eleven houses. Elayne understands that their support is more out of respect for Dyelin than for herself, but she can earn the rest in time. Ellorien never gives her support for Elayne, but she does pledge that House Traemane will ride for Tarmon Gai’don behind the Lion of Andor.
• Egwene
  • Egwene is not stilled or killed by Elaida. Instead, she’s made an Accepted, as the Tower doesn’t want to lose her (and having the rebel Amyrlin as an Accepted is good rhetoric for the Tower.) Egwene does not consider herself a prisoner: she chooses to “carry the battle into the heart of the Tower itself.” She can still serve as Amyrlin by meeting with the Hall in Tel’aran’rhiod, she can spy, and she can spread propaganda for her cause. Assuming Egwene doesn’t break and the rebels don’t abandon her, this could work out to Egwene’s immense advantage.
  • Egwene tells the Tower of the Seanchan attack from her dreams but they don’t believe her. Well, Elaida doesn’t.
  • Nicola is at the Tower. Despite the friction between Egwene and Nicola before, Nicola calls Egwene “Mother” when they first meet, and she’s impressed by her resolve. Egwene notes to herself that Nicola seems to be doing better here than she was before.
  • Lelaine wants those who swore to Egwene to back her as Amyrlin. This gives Lelaine incentive to betray Egwene.
  • Beonin is the one who betrayed Egwene, but she didn’t know that Egwene, herself, would be caught; she was merely helping Elaida. At least in Beonin’s eyes, this seems to be sufficient rationalization to say that she didn’t break her oath. We briefly see that Beonin is still held by the oaths, as she cannot speak a lie. Once Egwene was captured, Beonin further rationalized that, as Egwene cannot continue to be Amyrlin, her oath to Egwene as Amyrlin no longer holds, so Beonin returns to Elaida. Beonin isn’t greeted as warmly as she’d hoped, but she still teaches Elaida the rebel Aes Sedai’s weaves and gives up the names of the spies sent from Salidar.
  • Mattin Stepaneos, former King of Illian, is still held by the Tower. Elaida took him to demonstrate her power and now wishes to reinstate him as a further demonstration. Until then, he is a prisoner, though he’s treated as a guest.
  • As Egwene remains cool and collected while continuing as Amyrlin from the White Tower, even Romanda begins to gain some grudging respect for her. She also notes the wisdom in Egwene keeping the Red Ajah for ceremonial purposes, even though no Reds are in the camp. Romanda is still against any significant change to Aes Sedai ways, but she’s not too stubborn not to be affected by news that many of the older novices show unusual talent with Nynaeve’s new form of Healing.
  • Romanda and Nisao discuss the murder of Anaiya and Kairen and that Lelaine considers the investigation to be Blue Ajah business. Romanda notes that: “The only thing that binded Anaiya and Kairen together, the two murdered, is that they were close friends. Them and Cabriana Mecandes. They were called ‘the Three’ because they were so close, but they were all closemouthed too.” We happen to know that Cabriana was taken by Semirhage in Lord of Chaos, but Romanda does know that Halima claimed friendship with Cabriana. Romanda also witnesses Halima yelling at Delana outside, which is odd considering that Halima can’t channel. Unfortunately, Romanda doesn’t put this all together until after Eben mentions that a woman channeled saidin at Shadar Logoth. By the time they search the camp for Halima, she and Delana have already fled.
  • Merise Haindehl, one of the Aes Sedai who follow Rand and Elaida and have Asha’man Warders, arrives at the rebel camp to extend Rand’s proposed agreement with the Aes Sedai: the Aes Sedai can have a total of 51 Asha’man Warders, so 47 more than are already held. This offer only applies to Aes Sedai who follow Egwene. The Aes Sedai can ask any Soldier or Dedicated and the man has no right to refuse. The Aes Sedai are very happy with this deal initially, as they think it’s unfair in their favor, but become concerned when they learn that it’s 51 to match 51. “Any sisters held by Asha’man brought it all back to a matter of equality, and that was intolerable.” Through this conversation, they also learn that saidin is clean of the taint (and the bit about Halima.)
  • A lot of time is spent showing what Egwene’s day-to-day life is like living as the Amyrlin Seat while Elaida’s prisoner. It’s hard to fit this material into a brief summary, but “Honey in the Tea” is one of the best chapters in the series. Egwene is treated as an Accepted but she refuses to be made into anything other than what she is. She cleverly resorts to civil disobedience, suffering so many beatings each day that she must be Healed multiple times so she can continue to walk unaided. She’s constantly fed forkroot to dull her ability to channel, yet she uses nonetheless demonstrates her uncommon ability to weave saidar even with reduced potency. Nicola and Areina have been telling the novices tales of how awesome Egwene is and Egwene herself has been mentoring many of the novices. Egwene is winning her war.
  • Egwene has a brief conversation with Mattin Stepaneos in which she dispels many of the rumors about Rand. “You’ve been kidnapped and brought aboard a sinking ship.” Egwene notes that Mattin clearly understands this, but it seems that the Reds are so unaccustomed to interacting with men that they don’t see it.
  • Egwene talks with Beonin, explaining that Beonin’s decision that Egwene is no longer Amyrlin and therefore her oath no longer holds is incorrect, as she is still Amyrlin, at least as much so as she was when Beonin made the oath. Beonin seems to begrudgingly agree, following Egwene’s orders to bring the spies talking points. Beonin seems to have shifted allegiances somewhat, perhaps in response to her cold reception from Elaida.
  • Elaida is starting to unravel, turning to alcohol and even allowing her Keeper to see her while drunk. Tarna is so afraid of Elaida that she’s unwilling to report how bad things really are, even implying that Egwene will come around soon.
• Rand
  • Rand continues to suffer from dizziness and nausea whenever he holds saidin. His mood also seems even darker than before. Everyone around Rand is wary of him. He often wakens in the middle of the night reciting the list of women he’s killed and cannot go back to sleep until he finishes the ritual.
  • Rand continues to see a man’s face in colors sometimes. It’s the same man he encountered at Shadar Logoth, which is almost certainly Moridin. Rand has the sense that this man can sense him as well and may even be able to locate him. Rand hypothesizes that the two were linked when their rods of balefire touched.
  • Logain is still with Rand and now wears a pin of three golden crowns in a field of blue that Rand doesn’t recognize. Logain explicitly warns Rand that Taim is a Darkfriend and is surrounding himself with men who receive secret training and are explicitly loyal to him above Rand. Rand continues to ignore the warning, going as far as to question why Taim would build the Black Tower if he was a Darkfriend. Rand seems to consider both Taim and Logain to be equally untrustworthy and he considers his other problems to be more pressing.
  • One of Rand’s questions for the Aelfinn was “How can I win the Last Battle and survive?” and they told him “The north and east must be as one. The west and the south must be as one. The two must be as one. To live, you must die.” Rand initially thought this meant he had to conquer everything, but one of the Prophecies states that he must bind the nine moons to him, so he now believes that he must ally with the Seanchan.
  • Loial’s mother, Covril, along with Elder Harnan and Erith show up. They want to retrieve Loial and they want him to marry Erith. They perform the wedding almost immediately. Loial is worried that he won’t be able to finish his book now, but he’s proud and happy to marry Erith.
  • The Ogier are holding a Great Stump, where they gather to discuss an important topic. The topic now is whether to open the Book of Translation and leave the world. Covril is arguing that they should while Elder Harnan is arguing that they should stay and fight the Shadow. Though Loial is anxious to speak in front of others, he gives an argument in favor of staying to fight. The scene is interrupted when an army of tens of thousands – perhaps a hundred thousand – Trollocs and Myrddraal appear outside.
  • The Asha’man, Aes Sedai, Ogier, and Saldaeans face the Trollocs. Lews Therin manages to seize saidin away from Rand and he quickly slaughters the Trolloc army. With the threat gone, Lews Therin starts trying to kill himself, likely creating a second Dragonmount. Rand is only able to stop him by promising that they can die at Tarmon Gai’don. Everyone around Rand notices that there’s something wrong when he fills himself to his capacity with saidin even after the Trollocs are gone.
  • Verin sneaks away, telling Rand via a letter than she can fulfill her oath to him better elsewhere.
  • Loial leaves with Erith and his mother. Elder Harnan will let Loial make the argument to stay and fight on his behalf so he can go close the Waygates to prevent Trollocs from invading through the Ways.
  • Lan wants to ride to Malkier. Nynaeve wants to stay with Rand to ensure that Alivia doesn’t kill him (as Min saw that Alivia will help Rand die.) Nynaeve agrees to Travel Lan to the Borderlands, but only on the condition that he goes to Fal Moran and takes anyone who wants to ride with him. Lan doesn’t want to lead anyone, but he agrees. Nynaeve tricks Lan, Traveling him to World’s End, on the opposite side of the Borderlands. She then Travels to several locations throughout the Borderlands to send out a call for anyone who will ride with the Golden Crane to Tarmon Gai’don. It seems that Lan will not be riding alone.
  • In Tear, Rand discovers that Master Poel actually managed to build some functioning steamwagons.
  • Recall that Rand left High Lord Darlin Sisnera as Steward of Tear and he’s been fighting off a siege by Rebels upset with having lost position due to Rand. When Rand arrives, he finds that the Aes Sedai managed to form a deal with the rebels: “Darlin is accepted as Steward of Tear for the Dragon Reborn, all laws you made remain unchanged, and they pay for feeding the city for one year as a fine for rebellion. In return, they receive full restoration, Darlin is crowned King of Tear, and they swear fealty to him.” Rand is initially enraged by this, but managed to calm down and accept the agreement. Rand orders Darlin to accept the crown, arrest the Seanchan, and gather every man in Tear capable of fighting so he can send them to Arad Doman to prepare for Tarmon Gai’don. Rand allows Weiramon to accompany Darlin.
  • The First Twelve of the Atha’an Miere meet in Illian. Rand sends Logain to meet with them in his stead. Logain states that Rand requires ships to deliver food and supplies to Bandar Eban from Illian and Tear. Supplies for more than a million people. While he’s there, word arrives of a tragedy from Tremalking: the Amayar have all committed suicide, taking the disappearance of the Choedan Kal as the sign that the time of illusions is at an end. Logain insists that they mourn on the march for Tarmon Gai’don.
  • Rand goes to meet with the Daughter of the Nine Moons, though we know that this must be an imposter as Tuon has not yet lifted the veil and we haven’t heard anything about this from Mat’s perspective chapters. Everyone involved, including Rand, feels that this is likely a trap, but Rand feels that he must risk it. Rand and a small group go to meet at a local Lady’s manor.
    • The woman who comes out to meet with him does look like Tuon, but for an instant her disguise fails and Rand instantly recognizes her as Semirhage. He calls out her name and she immediately attacks. As Rand is still struggling with Lews Therin for saidin and Min is right behind him when Semirhage attacks, he has no choice but to take the hit.
    • Rand loses his left hand, the wound on his side is opened such that Nynaeve can’t stop it from openly bleeding even after Healing, and Rand’s vision is damaged. Rand takes the loss in stride, to Min and Nynaeve’s horror and disapproval. Recall that the fisher piece in sha’rah, which Moridin said might be a dim memory of Rand, wore a bandage over its eyes and held a hand to a side dripping with blood.
    • As Rand tries to stand up, he briefly sees black flecks shimmering across his vision. This might just be because he was hit by a fireball and knocked down or it could be a “gift” of the so-called True Power from Shai’tan. That Semirhage’s disguise flickered just when it did is also left unexplained, but one possibility is that Shai’tan interfered.
    • Semirhage is captured. The Seanchan with her did not know who she was and are horrified when they learn. Rand sends them back to Ebou Dar to carry the message that he still wishes to meet with the real Daughter of the Nine Moons.
    • Everyone is confused that Rand could instantly recognize Semirhage until she explains that he’s insane. Some people hear voices and in some rare cases those voices are truly people from past lives. Semirhage claims that the fact that Lews Therin truly does speak in Rand’s head is actually worse for his prognosis, as even Graendal can’t cure that. Of course, she’s one of the Forsaken, so we might not want to trust her fully. Regardless, Rand’s companions finally know that he hears Lews Therin’s voice in his head.
  • We don’t know what Rand does after this scene yet, but we do know from Elayne’s perspective that he Travels very often.
• Mat
  • Mat continues to luck his way through courting Tuon, buying a rare horse – a razor – for her, which is a fitting gift considering that his station is much lower than hers. Of course, he just thought she’d like the horse, and it is a very good horse.
  • Mat tries imposing a pet name on Tuon – “Precious” – to match her continuing to call him “Toy.”
  • Mat asks Noal if he’s any relation to Jain Charin and Noal says that Jain was a cousin. He then goes on a rant about how Jain was a fool who went adventuring while leaving his wife to die without him, totally proving that they’re different people. Noal also almost lets slip that Jain was manipulated by someone, which is likely a reference to whatever Ba’alzamon was talking about way back in The Eye of the World.
  • Egeanin has embraced the name “Leilwin Shipless” and she’s coming to terms with not having a real future as Seanchan, no longer treating Tuon as a High Lady.
  • Mat walks in on Joline repeatedly slapping Bethamin, pulls them apart, and spanks Joline. The Aes Sedai discover that he is immune to the One Power. Mat finally yells at Joline for bullying him and endangering the group and they come as close to hearing him out as he’s going to get.
  • Bethamin accidentally channels for the first time. She’ll now require instruction or she’s likely to die; Joline will instruct her. After some time, Seta also requests instruction. The power dynamic between the Aes Sedai and sul’dam changes, with the sul’dam deferring to the Aes Sedai.
  • A group of Seanchan soldiers camp near Luca’s show. A couple soldiers try to get in for free which causes a scene. Violence is narrowly avoided, but they know that the two soldiers will cause trouble if they stay, so the show needs to move on.
  • Mat finally figures out that Aludra needs a bellfounder to make cannons which would be capable of launching explosives about two miles. She has plans to make these cannons mobile by mounting them on a cart which could be pulled by four horses. She names this invention “dragon” and calls the shells “dragon eggs.” Aludra also invents explosive grenades, thrown by sling, which use fragmentation to kill over a much greater distance than the explosive alone. Mat wants Aludra to make these devices for Rand and she agrees, assuming that they’ll still be used against the Seanchan.
  • Mat deduces that for the Eelfinn to have gathered all of these memories they put in his head, they must have had some connection to the men they took them from. Mat has no memories of other men’s childhoods, so it seems that contact with the Eelfinn is what starts it. Thus, the Eelfinn are likely in Mat’s head as well, perhaps seeing everything he sees.
  • Setalle Anan reveals to Mat that she’s either stilled or burned out, which explains how she knows so much of the Aes Sedai without being one herself. Given Anan’s interest in ter’angreal, I think there’s a good chance that she’s Martine Janata, the last person to make a study of ter’angreal, who burned herself out more than twenty-five years ago. This timeline also roughly fits with Anan having found a husband shortly after leaving the Tower and now having a couple of grown-up children.
  • Luca tells the Aes Sedai that Tuon is a Seanchan High Lady and they immediately try to treat with her. They’re pushy and Tuon has Selucia put a’dam on them. When confronted by Mat, Tuon asserts that even if she has the ability to channel, that she chooses not to makes her fundamentally different from them, just as she chooses not to steal or commit murder. Mat admits that the Aes Sedai annoy him and he could let Tuon keep them leashed for a few days, but he sets the Aes Sedai free and buries the a’dam. In this scene, Tuon tries to use the a’dam to channel at Mat and she’s shocked to learn that he’s immune.
  • Luca’s camp comes across a village Mat remembers as Shiota. It’s a dead village and it vanishes into the ground before their eyes, claiming a merchant who was standing too close.
  • Mat asks what Thom’s letter is about, which is the trigger – spelled out in the letter – for Thom to show Mat his letter from Moiraine. Moiraine is still alive (of course she is, we talked about this!) and being held in the Tower of Ghenjei. She can be saved, but only if the group that comes for her is comprised of Thom, Mat, and one other, and even then it’s not guaranteed. Mat knows that Domon knows how to find the Tower. Mat agrees to go (which stops a set of dice from tumbling in his head.) Noal wants to go too. Mat also explains his experience with the Aelfinn and Eelfinn, including the bit about his memories, but he holds back about the other answers and gifts.
  • Tuon wants to visit a “hell,” which refers to the most dangerous of inns. She’s looking forward to seeing Mat fight someone. Tuon witnesses Mat’s unusual luck with gambling, including a toss that Mat loses but is actually good luck as it avoids an accusation of cheating. While in the town, Thom discovers that the gholam is catching up to them. Moreover, the Seanchan army on the border of Murandy is making everyone who crosses drink forkroot to check for marath’damane . They’re also looking for a woman pretending to be the Daughter of the Nine Moons so they can kill her: Tuon is in danger. Outside the inn, which isn’t actually a hell, a group of men attack the group. They are able to defend themselves, but Tuon notes two things: first, Mat forgot to call her “Precious” when telling her to run, making her the winner of their pet-name game, and second, Mat is unwilling to kill any more women.
  • Mat is reunited with Talmanes and the Band of the Red Hand. With Seanchan all over Altara, the only way to get the Band and Tuon out alive is to make for a pass through the mountains into Murandy that Vanin knows of, but the pass is blocked by Seanchan. We get a chapter from Tuon’s perspective as she sees that “Toy” is actually an expert general. Mat quickly comes up with a plan to hit the Seanchan in many quick encounters, using his limited forces to throw the Seanchan into disarray and force them to move out of the pass to intercept him, allowing the Band to escape. Fortunately, Suroth redirected almost all raken from Altara to Tarabon to fight Ituralde, so the Band is able to move mostly undetected. Tuon also learns that Mat grew up with the Dragon Reborn and she’s shocked that he was able to keep that from her. Tuon realizes that she didn’t know Mat nearly as well as she thought: “A buffoon? No. A lion stuffed into a horse-stall might look like a peculiar joke, but a lion on the high plains was something very different. Toy was loose on the high plains, now. She felt a chill. What sort of man had she entangled herself with? After all this time, she realized, she had hardly a clue.”
  • Furyk Karede is in Altara and still searching for Tuon. He still believes that Thom is the real mastermind of Tuon’s capture. The Deathwatch Guard are not trusted by the Seanchan soldiers in this region, as they’ve all heard the rumors that some Deathwatch Guard conspired with someone pretending to be Tuon. After speaking with a local camp, Karede figures out Mat’s plan to make for the gap in the mountains. Karede can be there first.
  • Karede catches up to Mat (finally learning that it’s Mat, not Thom, who leads.) Karede tries to bluff Mat into freeing Tuon: he claims to have forces nearby to attack and a larger force will arrive in two days; even if Mat wins the immediate fight, he won’t have time to make it through the gap. Mat doesn’t care about that, he’s concerned with whether Karede has the means to bring Tuon safely back to Ebou Dar without being attacked by the Ever Victorious Army who believe that she’s an imposter. Tuon states that she trusts Karede and Mat frees her. At this, Tuon says the words to marry Mat, as this fulfills the fortune read to her by her damane when we first encountered her: “Beware the fox that makes the ravens fly, for he will marry you and carry you away. Beware the man who remembers Hawkwing’s face, for he will marry you and set you free. Beware the man of the red hand, for him you will marry and none other.” Though married, the two will part, both explaining that they are not enemies, but the Seanchan Empire is Mat’s enemy and Tuon lives to serve that Empire.
  • Vanin finds a group of ten thousand Seanchan – all but one are actually Altarans, Taraboners, and Amadicians working for a bounty on Tuon’s life – looking for Karede and, presumably, a woman matching Tuon’s description. Mat has a plan to keep Tuon safe: Karede will leave Musenge and a small number of Deathwatch soldiers with Mat and Mat will bait out the army coming for Tuon while Karede gets her to safety.
  • Tuon lowers the veil, becoming the Daughter of the Nine Moons again. Mat is now the Prince of Ravens.
  • Mat plays a very clever game with the army, deliberately leaving defenses incomplete to bait them into attacking without counting how few Deathwatch Guard they have. Aludra has outfitted a group of grenadiers with fragmentation grenades and the Aes Sedai will take part once they feel appropriately threatened. The Band also has extremely efficient crank crossbows which can be loaded much quicker than traditional crossbows. Between these tools and Mat’s tactics, Mat’s inferior numbers massacre the entire army, taking few losses in turn. Joline tries to take credit but Musenge, awed by Mat and the band, states that the battle was won by “crossbows and men with heart.” Musenge’s forces find the traitor Seanchan’s body among the slain and carry his head back to Ebou Dar.
  • In Ebou Dar, the Seanchan are in chaos over news from Seandar. Tuon arrives, now openly the Daughter of the Nine Moons. Suroth still plans to have Tuon killed before she’s made Empress, but then Karede produces the head of the traitor who led the mercenary army to kill Tuon. The man was Elbar, a loyal follower of Suroth. Tuon declares that Suroth is no more and the former holder of that name is now da’covale, to be used by the Deathwatch Guard is they please until her hair grows enough to be sold.

The Point: Penultimate Parallels

Alright, we’re finally done with the summary. God-damn there was a lot of stuff in Knife of Dreams. But, that makes sense, as Knife of Dreams is, thematically, the penultimate book in The Wheel of Time. I mean, I think it is – I haven’t even started The Gathering Storm yet. Of course, I have heard that the last three books were compiled from Robert Jordan’s notes for a single final book but split into three volumes due to length, but even without that extratextual info, I think it’s clear from the text itself that whatever comes next is the end.

Every major perspective in the book comments on the imminence of Tarmon Gai’don. We’re long past a bit of unusual weather: the very logic of the world is breaking down. I particularly liked the bit of discussion between a few White Sisters that Egwene overheard: they seemed to be debating what the failure of their logical models to describe the world means in a purely philosophical sense. One Sister asserts that “Logic is always applicable to the real world, but only a novice would think the real world can be applied to logic. Ideals must be first principles. Not the mundane world.”

The changing layouts of buildings really is a big step up from what we’ve seen before. Of course, vomiting beetles is more immediately shocking, but that seems more-or-less in line with what we’d expect from Shai’tan. We saw the Blight back in The Eye of the World and we’ve been hearing about weevils and supernaturally fast spoilage for a couple of books now. Even the dead walking is, at least for us as readers, somewhat expected from a story about the end of the world. I have to imagine that actually seeing a man vomit beetles until he deflates or watching an ancient dead city sink into the ground would be more impactful than merely reading about it, but again, it follows a sort of expected logic for an evil, unclean god.

The breakdown of logic is less expected and, in some ways, a lot more alarming. You can raise armies against Trollocs or bring together Aes Sedai and Windfinders to repair the seasons, but what can you do when things simply aren’t as they should be? We’ve seen reality shimmer as though the world were made of a fog that could be blown away on a gentle wind. I think the White Sisters are right to focus on the shifting layout of buildings, as this really does seem to be the most extreme change.

Thus we see a bit of their argument. Does the breakdown of logic imply a flaw in logical models, a mistake in applying the models, a mistake in perception, or a world that is no longer governed by logic? This is a common problem when applying scientific models to extreme circumstances: mistaking the map for the territory. Classical physics, for example, works very well for things big enough to see and things moving much slower than light, but it’s less useful outside of these limitations. There’s nothing stopping you from doing the math to track the trajectory of throwing a subatomic particle into the air in the same way that you might model a baseball, but the classical model won’t actually depict reality for the subatomic particle. This doesn’t make classical physics useless or even incorrect, depending on your definition of “correct,” but it does mean that the model doesn’t fully describe how things move in the real world at all scales and speeds.

I don’t want to chase this one thread too deep, but the reference to “sixth-order rationality” seems to imply that the White Ajah has a notion of higher-order logic with complex layers of quantifiers (you know, “for each,” for at least one,” “for exactly one,” etc.) but they’re finding that no amount of quantification or qualification can bridge the gap between logic and reality as Shai’tan’s presence manifests in the world. I’m really curious whether there’s any consistent pattern to the changes affecting buildings or if it’s affecting any other physical spaces.

I mean, think about it, it can’t be as simple as space twisting as the walls would tear or smash into each other. If a new special dimension is somehow being added, then why would it result in hallways, rather than gaping holes where the new space was added or walls crashing into one another as space is folded in on itself? Human bodies caught in the deforming space would be warped as well: why would it only apply on the scale of buildings? If you draw a picture on paper, cut it up, and shift the pieces around, the resulting image won’t likely make any sense at all. Changing the layout of a building without destroying the properties of a building requires intent.

Fiction has been playing with the idea of Non-Euclidean Geometry for a long while now, but that’s not really what we’re seeing here – or, at least, it’s not all that we’re seeing. Non-Euclidean Geometry is basically just defining “parallel” in a way where parallel lines don’t remain a constant distance from each other. Seeing this effect in real life would be disorienting, but I think it would fit into the White Ajah’s logical models just fine. In such a world, you could build hallways that run parallel to one another but also intersect. I have a feeling we’re going to see some of this when we go to the Tower of Ghenjei, given the little taste of that space we got before. But, regardless of the space, someone has to actually build the structures in it, and if the rules of that space changes, the structures will need to be updated. We don’t need to consider alien worlds to demonstrate this: just look at the aftermath of an earthquake.

That’s really what’s terrifying here. The logic of the world is breaking down in ways that are clearly intentional on at least some level, yet that intent doesn’t seem to follow any sort of logic that makes sense to a human. Changing the weather to cause a famine is supernatural, but it makes sense. Anyone who can channel might try to do the same thing, and a group of women were able to undo it. Spoiling food throughout the world is a bit more complicated and might be beyond the abilities of any humans who can channel, but again, it makes sense that Shai’tan would want to do this. Afflicting people with a disease to make them vomit beetles until they die is horrifying, but it seems like the sort of thing one of the Forsaken might do to prisoners.

Why would anyone even want to just change the layout of buildings? We’ve had little hints throughout the series that Shai’tan might be extremely alien, not just an evil deity but something altogether incomprehensible. What can anyone even do about it? If Shai’tan can do this, what else? Why not change the layout of the human heart or brain? Could Shai’tan change gravity, crushing everyone or letting them drift away? Could Shai’tan change the mass of oxygen, making it impossible to breath? Is Shai’tan a fantasy villain or a Star Trek villain?

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to come at this problem purely as a matter of space as Shai’tan also seems to exist outside of time and probability. Perhaps we’re seeing different potential layouts for buildings, similar to how the portal stones provide a view into different potential worlds. As Shai’tan is present in all worlds, perhaps the different potential worlds are being mixed together as Shai’tan manifests. This could also explain the walking dead and when the world seems to turn to fog. Perhaps this reality is at risk of dissipating and other realities – or other times – are becoming more solid. This interpretation lacks the intent of Shai’tan changing the world directly, shifting around layouts like he’s playing The Sims, but it’s no less horrifying. Whatever’s happening, it doesn’t follow any sort of human logic.

But, to get back to my point, in Knife of Dreams things have been pushed to a point where it’s clear that the end – of the world, of the series – is nigh. It’s not just Tarmon Gai’don, but our characters as well. There’s still more to resolve, but at this point our character stories all seem very close to their climax. Rand’s secret about Lews Therin is out and he’s about as hard as a person can get. Egwene has gone from an obnoxious girl to probably the single most composed character in the series. Mat is finally married to the Daughter of the Nine Moons. Perrin is reunited with Faile and no longer carries his axe. Even Loial finally got married.

Again, we still have more to cover. None of our main character stories are finished, but they’re all at a point where it seems like they only have one or two major story beats before they’ll be wrapped up.

In some ways, this book actually feels the least… organic of the series. Robert Jordan is almost too methodical in wrapping up loose threads here. That’s not really a complaint, though. With a series this complex, the fact that he is wrapping up most of the threads sets The Wheel of Time apart from the competition, particularly if you include television. Were even half of the plot threads resolved by the end of Lost? The ending of Game of Thrones was pretty bad and I’m really not all that confident that the books are going to end much better than the series. It’s hard to wrap up every single loose thread in a story. It might necessarily require a little forcing from time to time, and I’d rather have a book that feels a little too big and too packed with resolutions than one that just drops any threads that don’t neatly tie together.

This is also, sadly, the last book finished by Robert Jordan before his death. Based on RJ’s Wikipedia page, I’m not actually sure whether he knew he was dying while writing Knife of Dreams. He didn’t disclose it until several months after the book came out, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he knew for some time before announcing it to the world. Again, I’m trying not to dig into interviews, fan communities, or guide books before writing up my critiques, but it’s hard to completely ignore an author’s death before the end of a series.

I will say that I really didn’t get the impression that RJ’s illness played any role in the book itself. I mentioned that it feels a bit inorganic or forced, but I think this is purely the result of preparing the characters and the world for Tarmon Gai’don and the end of the series, I don’t get the impression that he was rushing the writing process at all. Some of the best prose of the entire series is in Knife of Dreams, in particular Egwene’s chapter: “Honey in the Tea.”

Moreover, when I say that Knife of Dreams feels inorganic, part of what I’m referring to is the sheer density of the text. My summary this time around was nearly eight thousand words long. I really tried to trim it down, but there’s really just a ton of stuff going on. Lord of Chaos was actually much longer than Knife of Dreams – 389,823 words compared to 315,163 words. Knife of Dreams is actually pretty close to the mean length of 306,278 words (excluding New Spring.) Yet, Knife of Dreams managed to pack more significant events per word than any other book in the series thus far.

But, that’s enough about the length of the book and the fact that it’s sort-of the penultimate book – stuff you could learn in five seconds on Wikipedia – let’s get into some deeper analysis.

My main point this time around is parallels. We’ve been talking about parallels and foils between characters throughout the series, but at this point I think we’ve seen enough of our character arcs to make some more interesting comparisons.

Parallels

Rand and Egwene

Throughout the series, there have always been little hints that Rand and Egwene are similar people. Egwene underestimated how many Asha’man were in the Black Tower and Rand underestimated how many Aes Sedai were in Salidar. When they broke up, both were worried that the other would be crushed by it even though they both realized that they lost romantic interest in each other at roughly the same time. It’d be tricky to find specific examples, but I feel like even their voices and perceptions – the way they see and say things- is very similar. I imagine that they would have bickered terribly if they’d gotten married.

Rand and Egwene haven’t actually interacted directly with one another in a very long time, since before Egwene was made Amyrlin and before Dumai’s Wells. Granted, this isn’t actually all that much time – about half a year, I think? – but they’ve become very different people than they were when they last knew each other.

If you go back to my critique of the first few books, you’ll find that I occasionally commented that Rand was almost unrealistically good, considering his age and the situations he found himself in. Although characters like Egwene were very quick to accuse him of being arrogant, I really didn’t agree until several books into the series. Sure, he had the occasional moment – like believing that he had killed Shai’tan in The Eye of the World – but despite all the power he gained, he still came off as pretty humble, relative to his being objectively more important than other people. I think part of Egwene thinking he was arrogant was just a bit of… maybe not jealousy, but discomfort with their changing roles. Rand was also pretty chill – quick to forgive and move on – even when things were difficult for him.

Meanwhile, Egwene was pretty obnoxious and I often commented that she wasn’t really likeable at all. As I’ve explained before, I never meant that she was a bad character or even an unrealistic one. If Egwene had started the series in the state she’s in now, she wouldn’t feel very impressive: she’d just feel fake. We traveled together with Egwene while she grew from an obnoxious young girl into an impressive woman: both the journey and the result, together, make her awesome. A good character needs room to grow.

Well, not just grow, but change. Pretty much in-step with Egwene growing into a truly awe-inspiring person, Rand has been warped from a sweet and empathetic young man with hopes and dreams into a single-minded robot or Lews Therin’s revenant. He’s not evil or cruel and he’s devoting himself entirely to what he thinks he can best offer the world. Rand’s still a good guy, but he’s become cold and harsh. Consider Rand from early in the series, who wanted to grant more rights to peasants and valued the advice of people like Bashere. He even came to begrudgingly value Moiraine’s advice (which she did not make easy for him) and he wept when she died.

Compare that to Rand in Knife of Dreams. “The fewer people who obey, the more chance I’ll lose, and if I lose, everybody loses. If I could make everyone obey, I would.” Upon saying this out-loud, Rand immediately thinks to himself: “There were far too many who did not obey as it was, or obeyed in their own way. Why in the Light would Min feel pity?”

We watched both characters slowly change into the people they are now and it felt natural at pretty much every step. I get why Rand is like this now and Egwene feels believable to me.

But, what’s really fascinating here is why they’ve changed in this way.

Both Rand and Egwene have learned to “accept pain,” but they’ve gone about it in completely different ways. They’ve both suffered greatly throughout the series and they’ve both shocked other characters by their toughness.

Egwene learned to accept that pain is a natural part of life. It’s not pleasant and it’s not even really the means to an end: it’s just something that happens. She deals with pain by accepting this fact of life and simply living through it. She doesn’t try to look tough while being punished but she doesn’t dwell on it either. This philosophy is similar to some Hindu and Buddhist meditation practices centered on the idea of stepping back experiencing sensation to observe yourself experiencing sensation. Rather than thinking “this hurts! I hate it. how do I make it stop?” you think “this is pain. this is how I react to pain,” passively observing your own perception without getting your conscious mind involved in the process.

We could go pretty deep with this idea if I wasn’t already a little worried about how long today’s discussion is going to be. Given the religious inspiration in The Wheel of Time, I don’t think it’d be a stretch to connect Egwene and the Aiel’s acceptance to pain to the religious aspects of Yoga and the Bhagavad Gita, but it’s not really necessary for comparing Egwene and Rand. For this, we could also just look at something more familiar: box breathing. If you’ve never tried it yourself, keep it in mind for the next time you’re getting a painful medical procedure. Slowly exhale while counting to four (or whatever number, so long as it’s consistent,) hold your breath for a count of four, slowly inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, and repeat. It’s not about becoming too tough for the pain or ignoring it, the point is to just accept that it’s there and live through it sixteen seconds at a time. There’s a fantastic cutscene in Wolfenstein: The New Order where badass Nazi-killer B.J. Blazkowicz gets through a horrifying scene by counting out his breaths like this.

Rand’s method of accepting pain is to use it as a forge to temper his heart. You know, “I will be as hard as I need to be!” Every time we’ve seen Rand pushed to his absolute limit, he’s tried to embrace it and make it make him stronger.

The difference here is that Rand isn’t accepting pain as a natural part of life, he’s trying to give it a purpose. In a sense, this is the opposite of accepting it. When pushed too far, Rand can’t simply accept that pain just sucks, it isn’t applied equally, and sometimes you can’t avoid it. Instead, he has to give it some narrative purpose within his own life’s story. ‘This isn’t just a bad day, this is the moment I became strong enough to win Tarmon Gai’don!’ Rather than learning to see that pain isn’t really a big deal – it’s just something we all deal with – he makes it even bigger than it is, granting it the power to change him.

We actually saw Perrin do this a bit starting in Winter’s Heart as well when he was struggling with losing Faile. Like Rand, Perrin tried to see his pain as something meaningful. Both Rand and Perrin turned it into a ritual, too. Perrin had his knots and Rand has his list of names. I may have mentioned this before, but this list of names thing really hits home for me. I used to have a lot of very short-lived pets: mice, anoles, fish, hermit crabs, etc., and I used to make myself recite off all of their names before I could sleep, terrified that I’d forget one of them.

Of course, it’s not an accident that Egwene learned to accept pain as nothing more than a natural feeling from the Wise Ones while Rand and Perrin try to make it a teacher in itself. These two ways of looking at pain are, very broadly and stereotypically speaking, feminine and masculine, at least in the West. In Knife of Dreams, Cadsuane just explicitly gives the proverb: “The oak fights the wind and breaks. The willow bends where it must and survives” and Rand gives the perfectly cliched response: “A willow won’t win Tarmon Gai’don.” I’m almost surprised Rand hasn’t yet said that “pain is weakness leaving the body,” a slogan I first saw on t-shirts when some sleazy military recruiters came to my high school.

This is also in-line with the difference between saidar and saidin. You must surrender to saidar but you must master saidin. But, I think Robert Jordan is trying to make a bit of a distinction here. Throughout The Wheel of Time, masculinity and femininity are consistently treated as fundamentally different things. We’re shown different gender norms across cultures to prove to us that the specific forms that gender takes are social constructs, but there’s always an underlying theme that in each culture there are differences between the genders. We’re mostly left to make our own observations as to whether a particular culture’s gender norms are “good” or “bad,” but we also see that there are definitely cases where there’s an imbalance. The Shaido are the clearest example of this: healthy Aiel clans are led by both men and women, each with different roles, but Sevanna is serving as both clan chief and Wise One, cutting out the male part of leadership.

But for accepting pain, I think RJ is making a point here that this supposedly masculine way of accepting pain is just kind of bad, and there’s really no reason why it has to be part of masculinity. I mean, Aiel men don’t do this and they’re famously tough. Tarna, Elaida’s Keeper, also observes that Elaida is “harder than ever. And more brittle.” We’re not seeing feminine and masculine ways of dealing with pain, we’re seeing effective and ineffective ways of dealing with pain. Given that Knife of Dreams was published in 2005 (and this theme began much earlier) I think RJ actually beat society to the idea of toxic masculinity.

Through Rand and Egwene’s character arcs, this might actually be the key difference between them – the difference that makes them foils of one another. They’re very similar people with a similar upbringing and they’re both being forced into spectacularly difficult situations where they must endure pain while accomplishing extraordinary goals, but even at her least mature Egwene was always pretty good at just accepting pain for what it is and moving on while Rand has always focused on it. Perhaps this is what he needs to learn from Cadsuane, but if so, he could probably learn it from practically any admirable person in The Wheel of Time.

I occasionally imagine how much better Rand might be doing if he was still in contact with Tam. We’ve seen that Perrin benefits from Elyas’s advice, but the only male role-model Rand’s had for most of the series is Lan, and Lan’s not much healthier than Rand is. Tam’s the person who taught Rand about feeding his feelings into a fire in his mind, which is pretty similar to some of the meditation stuff I mentioned before. I bet he could’ve helped Rand quite a bit – just as the Wise Ones helped Egwene.

Rand and Elaida, Egwene and… Logain?

I briefly mentioned, just a minute ago, that Elaida has also been accused of being too hard and too brittle. I think this is actually a clue, just in case we hadn’t noticed already, that Rand actually has a lot in common with Elaida.

Both characters were given a prophecy, interpreted it in a very specific way, then got tunnel-vision on seeing it through. Elaida had the Foretelling that Andor’s royal family would be key to winning Tarmon Gai’don and she just decided that this means that she needs to be in a position to manipulate Elayne. Note that Moiraine and Siuan initially had a similar thought for Rand – that they must ensure that he makes the correct decisions – but from the very beginning they had at least some notion that he needs to be allowed freedom to fulfill his destiny, and through the series Moiraine grew beyond even that to see that Rand needed her as an advisor and teacher, but he didn’t need her to make his his decisions for him. Elaida’s never had that realization, for Elayne or for Rand. Elaida is certain that only she can make the right decisions.

Likewise, when Rand asked the Aelfinn how to win Tarmon Gai’don and survive, he was told “The north and east must be as one. The west and south must be as one. The two must be as one. To live, you must die.” Hearing this, he simply decided that he needed to to conquer everything in sight. That might not be entirely fair – he did spend a lot of time pouring over books trying to determine the best way forward while he was staying in Tear – but he ultimately made a call and stayed with it for quite a while, even when it wasn’t really working. Now, he’s decided that it means an alliance with the Seanchan.

In both cases, it hasn’t really worked out all that well so far. Granted, it’s not really fair to compare the two directly, as Rand’s severely pressed for time and fighting battles on too many fronts to manage whereas Elaida really should have the time and means to make better decisions. Nonetheless, they both received a prophecy and they’re both sure that they need to be in control of events. “If I could make everyone obey, I would.”

Worse, they both focused on this so hard that they’ve had tunnel vision for other problems. Elaida’s focus on ensuring that she’s in the right position to manage Tarmon Gai’don broke the Tower. When’s the last time Rand even visited the Black Tower? It’s been obvious for several books now that Rand needs to take a more personal role in managing the Black Tower but he just doesn’t see it. In Knife of Dreams, Logain makes it very clear that Taim is planning something that Rand isn’t going to like and that Taim’s followers are loyal to Taim, not Rand.

So, what’s Rand’s response? “The Seanchan have to come first. And maybe Tarmon Gai’don.”

I just… I need to ask Rand where he thinks the Dreadlords are going to come from. Does he think all of Shai’tan’s soldiers are waiting in the Blight? How does he expect to win Tarmon Gai’don if some of his own soldiers are planning to betray him.

My guess at this point is that Logain’s going to need to save the Black Tower, just as Egwene is saving the White Tower. Rand can hardly even look at an Asha’man without Lews Therin telling him to kill them all and it really seems that Rand is nearly in agreement with him. I’m not sure that I can see Rand saving the Black Tower at this point. We don’t really know enough about Logain at this point to make a good comparison between him and Egwene, but at least in terms of the two towers, it seems like Logain is in a similar position. I’m really curious if this is going to develop as the series concludes.

Lord Perrin and the Prince of Ravens

Now that Mat’s married to Tuon (who will take a new name as Empress next book, I would imagine,) he’s officially nobility. Perrin’s marriage to Faile did the same for him, though his leadership in the Two Rivers is really what pushed him into lordship. The two of them have been fighting against becoming lords for the entire series, but now they’ve been forced into it against their will. They didn’t want status, but they were willing to take up that burden when necessary.

…except, in Knife of Dreams, they really both acted like nobles. I’m not talking about leadership or grace or anything like that, I’m talking about how they were both willing to kill a lot of people for the sake of the women they love. Killing thousands upon thousands of men, both enemies and friends, just to save a single person – a person who’s more important than everyone else – is pretty much the epitome of the sort of distasteful lordliness that both Mat and Perrin disdain.

Now, I’m not saying this makes them bad people. I mean, the Shaido were doing some really awful things and they weren’t going to stop voluntarily, but Perrin also handed the Shaido Wise Ones over to the Seanchan. If Rand manages to form an alliance with the Seanchan, then this might work out for the best, but if he doesn’t… that’s 400 new damane. How many hundreds of thousands could they kill in their long lives as slaves to the Seanchan empire? Perrin’s attack plan worked extraordinarily well, but what if it hadn’t? He could’ve gotten the men from the Two Rivers – men he knew and felt personally responsible for – killed just to save his wife.

In Mat’s case, most of what the Band did was necessary even without Tuon: they had to evade the Seanchan. I have a lot of respect for the Tuatha’an, but I’m not about to condemn the Band for killing people who would’ve killed them if given the chance. The key moment for Mat is when he reached the gap and made the decision to fight the mercenary army to protect Tuon.

Even here, I’m not saying that this is an evil act. The army wanted to kill Tuon. Ethics can’t be boiled down to merely comparing death counts. Changing tracks to kill once person instead of four is one thing, but what if those four people are driving the damn trolley trying to run down the one person on the tracks? Killing ten thousand people in self defense is kind of extreme, but hey, they didn’t need to attack. Just to make matters extra clear, these men weren’t being driven by threat of violence: they were chasing after a reward.

Nonetheless, Mat made the decision to risk the Band’s lives and slaughter a group of mercenaries all to save one woman. He can say that he doesn’t want to be a lord, but people without a title don’t have the privilege of sacrificing lives to save people they love.

This privilege also comes with an immense responsibility to make these decisions wisely. So far, I’m not really sure that we can say that Mat and Perrin have done this. Things worked out pretty well, but they were both thinking solely of the women they love. I wonder if this theme will come up in the Last Battle, perhaps by forcing them to make some hard decisions to sacrifice people they care for?

All the women Lan has been involved with

Alright, let’s talk about Lan for a minute. Or, rather, all the women that Lan gets involved with: Edeyn, Moiraine, and Nynaeve.

Last time, when discussing New Spring, I talked about how Lan’s life has mostly just been a long series of other people manipulating him. One of the very few choices Lan’s ever been offered was to join Moiraine to fight against the Shadow in a way that might actually work, rather than simply throwing his life away in the Blight by himself.

I hate to blame someone for lacking agency, but for Lan, I’m often torn on whether to feel sympathy for his being constantly trapped by tradition and the women who have control over him and just being kind of frustrated that, when given any agency at all, he almost always just tries to kill himself. As a child, Lan was raised by a group of knights who wanted to groom him to be king but really just prepared him for being a loyal knight. Since then, Lan’s life has been defined, largely, by which woman he’s taking orders from.

Edeyn, Moiraine, and Nynaeve. Each of these women has taken up control of Lan and each has directed Lan’s personal war against the Shadow, but they’ did’ve done it in very different ways. Throughout the series, we’ve often heard Lan assert that he will not lead the Malkieri into the Blight. Lan led men to their deaths in the Aiel War and he’s reluctant to do so again, particularly if it means getting his own people killed. Lan will never abandon his war against the Shadow, but he doesn’t want to get anyone else killed along the way. But, Lan’s culture and the oaths he makes often trap him: he was trapped by Edeyn because she was his first lover, he was trapped by Moiraine by their bond, and now he’s trapped by Nynaeve as his wife.

When Edeyn manipulated Lan, it was selfish. She wanted to use him to build a legacy for herself in a new Malkier. She never even seemed concerned with whether retaking Malkier from the Blight was possible, or how many would die in the process. She started grooming him when he was very young, becoming his first lover when she was more than double his age, and doing so specifically because, in Malkieri culture, this gave her immense power over him. In New Spring, she’s able to literally trap him in a room with a lock of his hair from when he was a boy. Edeyn didn’t care about doing something good for the world and she certainly didn’t care about doing anything good for Lan. She even planned to wrap her own daughter up in the scheme, despite her daughter’s vocal opposition. And it was only by chance that Edeyn’s scheme didn’t work.

Moiraine wasn’t anywhere near as selfish as Edeyn. Depending on how you look at it, it’s debatable whether Moiraine was selfish at all. Everything she did was in service to her mission. You could say that, since it’s her mission, this still makes her utilization of Lan selfish, or you could say that since her mission is a selfless one, the worst she did was to convince Lan to join her in devoting their lives to a higher calling.

With Moiraine and Lan, there are really two key moments. The first is when she first convinced him to join her, rather than just walking out into the Blight. You might say that she manipulated Lan here… but I really think that she really gave him a choice. He could’ve said no if he wanted to. The second is when she compelled him – via the Warder bond – to pass the bond on to Myrelle upon her death. Here, even Lan is enraged, losing his composure for perhaps the only time in the entire series.

It was made entirely clear that even Moiraine herself saw this as a disgusting act, but she did it anyways, and she did it for Lan’s sake. If she hadn’t done this, Lan would’ve died and he would’ve died meaninglessly. I don’t think that she did this for the sake of her mission – to keep a strong soldier alive – I think she did it out of compassion for Lan.

But, we’ve already discussed all of that before. In Knife of Dreams, we get to see Nynaeve’s turn in manipulating Lan.

Nynaeve’s perspective in chapter 20, “The Golden Crane,” is really touching. She sees that Lan needs to go back to Malkier. She has to force the sadness out of her voice when she brings it up and Lan’s response is exactly what you would expect from him: “My place is with you, heart of my heart. Ever and always.” As always, Lan is trapped by oaths and tradition. He can pretend that he’s content with this, but Nynaeve can clearly see that he’s not. “No, she was not sure. She wanted to cry, to scream at him that he was a fool, that his place was with her, not dying alone in a futile private war with the Shadow. Only, she could not say any of that. Bond or no bond, she knew he was torn inside, torn between his love of her and his duty, torn and bleeding as surely as if he had been stabbed with a sword. She could not add to his wounds. She could try to make sure he survived, though.”

So, Nynaeve tricks Lan. She agrees to Travel him to the Borderlands on the condition that he accept anyone who wishes to ride with him. He doesn’t want to do it, but it’s the only way she’ll cooperate. What she doesn’t say is how far from Tarwin’s Gap she’ll send him… so, she sends him to the opposite side of the Borderlands, then Travels throughout the Borderlands herself, rallying support. “It was very hard dealing with a husband if you could not lie even when it was absolutely necessary” is kind of a telling quote from Nynaeve here.

This whole sequence was really fun, particularly the bit we see from the perspective of a Malkieri merchant. “‘Will Lan Mandragoran ride to the Last Battle alone?’ He was laughing, shaking with it. And yet, he could feel tears rolling down his cheeks. It was madness! Complete madness! But he could not help himself. ‘He will not, my Lady. I cannot stand surety for anyone else, but I swear to you under the Light and by my hope of rebirth and salvation, he will not ride alone.'”

So, once again, here’s a woman manipulating Lan. Like Edeyn, she’s manipulating him to lead men into battle. Like Moiraine, it’s for his own good. Unlike either of them, Nynaeve is doing it at great pain to herself and purely to help Lan. She could have just pretended that she didn’t know Lan’s heart or demanded, as his wife and Aes Sedai, that he stay by her side. Seeing him trapped by duty, she misleads him in order to free him. I think Lan even saw through it, when he asked her how far south she meant to put him in Salidar. He’s been around Moiraine long enough to know what it means when someone refuses to answer a question like that.

Cool Stuff

Alright, that covers the main themes for Knife of Dreams, but there’s still a lot of good stuff to cover.

Egwene and civil disobedience

I mentioned it before, but I think that “Honey in the Tea” might be the single best chapter of the series so far. It’s not just how far Egwene’s come or how it fits into the series, but also just the chapter itself.

“Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law.” If not for the word “man” there, this could’ve been Egwene, rather than Martin Luther King Jr. Egwene’s shown a remarkable ability for rediscovering lost arts and in “Honey in the Tea” we see her discover civil disobedience.

I almost feel like I don’t even need to go into further detail. The whole chapter is practically a guide to civil disobedience, even including some of Egwene’s thoughts on how to go about it practically. Her goal is to reform the White Tower and she wants to accomplish this without violence and without any more coercion than is necessary. Ideally, she’ll convince enough of Elaida’s followers to reject Elaida and embrace the changes she’s made that they can depose Elaida legally, move the rebels into the White Tower, and codify Egwene’s changes to Tower law.

She recognizes that she needs to comply to at least some extent, or else they’ll come down on her so hard that she won’t be able to make any difference, but she also recognizes that making things difficult for her captors can help achieve her goals. So, she doesn’t go limp in the hallways, as being carried would hurt her rhetoric, but she won’t run either, as walking calmly projects the image that she is not less than she is. She won’t attack anyone, but she’s willing to disrupt classes and make a scene to flip the humiliation her tormenters meant for her back on them. It’s key to her demonstration that she always accepts punishment and cooperates with her torturer willingly.

Egwene is even careful to ensure that her supporters don’t know her exact location so they can’t attempt a bloody rescue. She’s still able to communicate with her Hall via “Night Hall” in Tel’aran’rhiod. I think there’s actually an intentional parallel here with King’s “Letter from Brimingham Jail,” both in that Egwene is continuing to communicate with her followers while incarcerated and in the actual content.

Note that King’s letter was a response to an open letter written by eight white clergymen entitled “A Call for Unity,” which argued that activists should abandon protest and make their points via local negotiations and courts. They also criticized King for being an outsider to their community, to which King famously responded “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea.”

Again, I think there’s a real connection here with Egwene. Egwene could fit into the Tower if she wanted. She wasn’t planning on joining the Blue Ajah, she’s not a Wilder, and she’s not too old. If she joined Elaida, or simply stayed out of the conflict altogether, she would do extremely well. In fact, the new novices Egwene’s brought to the Tower actually give her a lot of competition, as some of them are stronger than she is. When Egwene was first made Amyrlin, she had been studying with the Wise Ones and fully expected to be severely punished for having impersonated an Aes Sedai: she didn’t ask for her title.

In a sense, Egwene is an outsider to this conflict, only looped in incidentally via Siuan, which is exactly the point Elaida tries to make in restoring Egwene as an Accepted. I’m sure Elaida would prefer that the dissidents return to the Tower, accept their penance, and try to make their arguments through official channels (which would certainly fail to change anything, given that the Hall of the Tower is now stacked with Elaida’s supporters.)

Egwene’s greatest opponents now aren’t Elaida and her followers, but those rebels who are beginning to question whether it’s past time for “a call for unity.” It’s the Aes Sedai who agree with Egwene’s changes and the injustice of Elaida in abstract, but are growing fearful that, with Tarmon Gai’don approaching, this may not be the best time for such changes. Perhaps I’m stretching the similarity a bit too far here, but consider another quote from King’s letter: “I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.”

Even Egwene’s changes map, if you squint a bit, towards ending segregation. She aims to integrate the Kin and those deemed unsuitable to become Aes Sedai into the Tower. If possible, she’ll even find a way to build a relationship between the Aes Sedai and the Aiel Wise Ones. This doesn’t map perfectly to racial segregation, but I think it’s close enough to support this reading of the chapter.

I also like that we can see that even Romanda is starting to come around, just a bit. She’s still not happy with all the changes Egwene is making, but Egwene’s demonstration isn’t only working on the people she encounters in the Tower, it’s also spreading to hearten the rebels.

Rand’s YA moment, defused

Rand’s secret – that Lews Therin is in his head – is finally out! It feels like we’ve been waiting for this moment forever, but it finally happened, and it was…. actually, not at all what I expected. It actually completely surpassed my expectations, but before I get into that, let’s briefly consider how it could have gone, if this were an anime or YA adventure.

First, we have the battle. If this were a shōnen anime, like Naruto or Bleach, we would have seen it from outside of Rand’s perspective. From that vantage point, it would look badass. Facing an army of Trollocs that means certain death, Rand quickly jumps into action, weaving destruction in forms not seen in three thousand years, annihilating the Trollocs almost single-handedly. With the battle complete, we’d see him struggle to contain the dark power within him, as Lews Therin rages and threatens to create a second Dragonmount.

But, we don’t see it that way: we see it from inside Rand’s head. From there, it’s not really cool at all. The Deathgates and Blossoms of Fire are cool, but Rand has to split his attention between moving his hands to direct Lews Therin’s weaves and simply staring in terror as Lews Therin completely ignores the men about to burn to death. In what could be Rand’s coolest moment yet, he’s just as impotent as he was at Dumai’s Wells. He’s not physically trapped in a box, it’s actually worse than that: he’s trapped in his own body, watching a madman wield saidin on his behalf.

Then, some chapters later, we have the moment where he loses his hand.

In a story more based on being a power fantasy, it would have been made clear to everyone there that Rand only lost his hand because he was fighting Lews Therin while trying to protect Min. We see that this is the case from Rand’s perspective, but nobody comments on it. He doesn’t heroically jump in front of Min, he just stays where he is until he’s knocked to the ground.

If this were a YA-focused series, I guarantee that Rand would have either formed a new hand out of random junk or he would have used the power to pick up Semirhage while extending his ruined arm towards her. It would’ve looked rad as hell.

When Semirhage revealed his secret, he would have doing something dramatic in response. In a Whedon-esque series, he would have quipped “crazy as a fox” and laughed until tears came out of his eyes while everyone looked on in horror. When Luke lost his hand and got a revelation in The Empire Strikes Back, he tearfully rejected it even as we saw that he knew it was true, then he threw himself off the bridge.

I tried to think if we’ve ever seen a character react like Rand did here, and then it hit me.

Yeah, the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is pretty much what we got. Rand just shrugs it off. The only real drama we get from him is via Min and Nynaeve’s pity.

Both the battle and the scene with Semirhage were perfect for some youthful power-fantasy moments. We could’ve finally seen the reactions of everyone around Rand when they learned just how hard and badass he is. He can shrug off losing a hand and he’s been fighting Lews Therin in his mind for almost the entire series. It could’ve been so cool.

Which would have run completely contrary to the entire point of Rand’s character.

Rand’s a farmer who was forced into a position of importance by destiny, which has some strong similarities with random chance on the individual level. That’s not to say that Rand isn’t an impressive person! He’s made it through some truly horrifying situations and pulled off some amazing feats. But, what’s impressive about him isn’t his ability to ignore pain or the knowledge he’s taken from Lews Therin. He’s clever, empathetic, and determined.

Even while trying to save the world and fight back against enemies on all sides, he founded schools and expanded peasant rights. The steamwagon we saw was only possible because Rand wanted to leave something good behind. The agreement in Tear is maintaining the changes to the law that he made. Rand thought to provide food to people who needed it and they were grateful for it. Lews Therin didn’t defeat Ba’alzamon in the sky above Falme, that was all Rand’s skill with a sword. A skill that was all his but he’s now lost along with his hand. That was the one bit of mourning we actually saw from Rand: he knows he doesn’t have the time to relearn how to use a sword with only one hand, and even if he did, he’d never be as good as he was with two.

Also note that cleansing saidin was all Rand: Lews Therin didn’t come up with that. Rand may have leveraged Lews Therin’s memories, but he’s been making his own decisions. Lews Therin really isn’t all that different from when the women used Moghedien to rediscover some old weaves.

Rand couldn’t have made it this far without Lews Therin, but he’s been as much a burden as a help. Rand has a lot of be proud of and his life is worth preserving. Yet, he spends all of his sorrow on the women he’s failed to save and he keeps none for himself.

To make this point, it was necessary for Rand’s YA moments in Knife of Dreams to fall flat. When Semirhage reveals his secret, he doesn’t give a speech, still her, laugh maniacally, or anything dramatic like that.

Were they looking at him differently? Logain’s face was a carved mask, unreadable. Bashere looked as though he still could not believe. Nynaeve’s mouth hung open, and her eyes were wide. The bond. . . . For a long moment, the bond was full of . . . numbness. If Min turned away from him, he did not know whether he could stand it. If she turned away, it would be the best thing in the world for her. But compassion and determination as strong as mountains replaced numbness, and love so bright he thought he could have warmed his hands over it. Her grip on his arm tightened, and he tried to put a hand over hers. Too late, he remembered and snatched the nub of his hand away, but not before it had touched her. Nothing in the bond wavered by a hair.

Chapter 27, A Plain Wooden Box

When Rand finally speaks, it’s just to say that he’s sending the sul’dam and damane back to Ebou Dar. Still focused purely on his mission.

It was really done perfectly. I mean, in a sense it was really disappointing. I’ve replayed the scene in my head a dozen times, each with a different bad-ass ending. Part of me wants it to be that way, but again, that’s the whole point. Rand’s angsty YA drama is really seductive, but it’s fake and it’s hollow. That I, as a reader, want it to be cool just indicates that I might need to learn the same lesson as Rand.

Tuon’s nothing like them

Mat and Tuon’s parts in Knife of Dreams were fantastic, but I think most of it really speaks for itself. What I want to talk about today is a single quote from Tuon regarding marath’damane.

“I am nothing like these women, Toy. Nothing like them. Perhaps I could learn, but I choose not to, just as I choose not to steal or commit murder. That makes all the difference.”

Chapter 9, A Short Path

We could look at this as a pure ethical or religious question about the nature of sin and determinism. Do people who sin make a choice to sin, or is it predetermined? Do the circumstances matter? Does upbringing? Should we punish crimes equally regardless of situation, or should we take context into account?

It might seem like a minor point, but it actually has some significant consequences. If people who sin in a specific way are inherently different from those who don’t sin in that way, then it changes how we should think about that sin. If someone can’t help but do something, then is it ethical to call it a sin? Stealing to feed your starving family is clearly different from stealing for the pure thrill of it.

It might even change whether the action counts as a sin. If we consider certain actions to be the necessary result of biology then how is punishing someone for those actions any different from punishing them for the color of their skin or for their gender?

To speak directly to Tuon’s point here: if everyone can either choose to channel or choose not to channel, then it’s really no different from any other action that may be prohibited by society. We could debate whether we should allow people the freedom to channel because of the good it can do or out of respect for individual freedom, but channeling can be dangerous, so it could be reasonable to regulate it.

Even if this isn’t a choice everyone can make, if it’s the case that anyone who can channel can just as easily choose not to channel, then it’s pretty much the same thing. If anything, this might make regulating it even more important, as some people can’t choose to channel and thus need to be protected from those who can.

We happen to know that the reality here is more complicated than Tuon would like it to be. Some people are born with the spark and have no real decision to never channel. Without instruction, they’ll likely die and even if they survive they’ll likely channel without even realizing it. Nynaeve was clearly channeling for a while before she learned anything about the Aes Sedai. For other women, the ability isn’t innate, but they can be awoken to it by someone else or by an extreme situation.

In all cases, once someone starts to channel, they’re made aware of a pleasure so great that being deprived of it is worse than death. We’ve seen that even mentioning stilling around Aes Sedai is enough to make some women vomit in disgust. Note that even Rand didn’t still Semirhage after she took his hand. He stilled a few women while escaping from the box at Dumai’s Wells, but I’m not even sure that was intentional. To someone who has embraced the True Source, being deprived of it is unthinkable.

Which contradicts Tuon’s worldview, so she tries to avoid that reality by forcing the issue into a simple matter of choice. After all, a person who can channel can certainly choose not to channel at any individual moment, so why can’t they just do that forever? If Tuon can learn to channel and hasn’t struggled not to her entire life, then she must just not be a filthy person, unable to help themselves from channeling. Never mind that she wasn’t born with the spark and hasn’t ever channeled by accident.

We see, with Bethamin and Seta, that once a sul’dam finally gives in and starts channeling, they start to see things differently. They were just as fervent as Tuon until they felt it for themselves, but then they couldn’t deny it any longer.

Of course, this line isn’t just about marath’damane or even ethics in abstract. It’s pretty blatantly a reference to debates over choice in homosexuality.

It’s not just Tuon’s specific wording here that makes this clear, Robert Jordan has been working in this theme for a while now. Watch my coverage of New Spring if you want a lot more on that, but even in Knife of Dreams, we also have an explicit reference that Arrela doesn’t like men “that way.” It’s subtle, but given how much RJ has to say about gender, it’s not really a surprise that he also has some things to say about orientation.

Again, I’m trying not to dig into interviews or other extratextual information until I finish the series, but I am really curious what RJ’s motivation here was. Just skimming his Wikipedia page, he was a very religious man, but there have always been Christian allies of GSRM communities and causes, so this isn’t a contradiction. Still, I’m definitely curious if he spoke more about this.

Anyways, I’m not even sure that I need to really explain how Tuon’s statement maps to this debate, as it’s pretty obvious. I’d like to say that debates over choice and biology in homosexuality were more common seventeen years ago, when Knife of Dreams was published, but I don’t actually know if that’s true. For my part, I never really got why this debate mattered so much for the topic of regulation. Unlike the One Power, the argument that homosexuality can hurt people – particularly heterosexual people – is a real stretch. It seems to me that people should be able to do whatever the hell they want so long as it doesn’t cause significant harm to anyone else and if anyone doesn’t like it then, well, I don’t like that people enjoy the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I manage to get by.

But, that’s an overly optimistic stance. To someone who believes that homosexuality is harmful or sinful, debate over choice and biology is crucial. Like Tuon, a lot of people take the stance that if homosexuality is a choice then it’s no different from theft or murder and it’s therefore perfectly ethical to criminalize it. Like Tuon, the entire framing of the question is already a bit of a trick, as “choice” isn’t as binary as she’d like it to be. Asking a person to quit being queer for an hour is different from asking them to quit being queer forever. Asking a person to give up something more important to them than life itself isn’t reasonable simply because they technically have the ability to comply. A person can survive without sight, but if someone tried to put out my eyes, I’d fight back just as viciously as if they were trying to kill me.

At least Faile doesn’t have anything to hide from Perrin

Light, the scene where Perrin is finally reunited with Faile was rough.

Throughout Faile’s imprisonment, we’ve seen her slowly warm up to Rolan. I’m actually really not sure whether we should call this Stockholm Syndrome or just some legitimate attraction. Mind you, Faile never betrays Perrin and she only intended to as an absolute last resort, but her appraisal of Rolan just kept improving. At first, she didn’t like him at all, but by the end he was “beautiful.”

It’s not like he was a particularly good guy. Sure, he protected Faile, but he only stopped harassing her for sex after more than a month of rejection. He was the one who took her gai’shain in the first place, even though Aiel culture holds that Wetlanders can’t be taken gai’shain. His group ambushed and killed all of the men with Faile’s group before enslaving the rest. Rolan was momentarily distracted by Faile saying Perrin’s name, but would he have let Perrin leave with Faile if Perrin had given him the chance?

But… Faile, really Saldaeans as a whole as far as we’ve seen, have some peculiar tastes in men. It seems that Faile’s biggest problem with Perrin is that he’s not willing to slap her around when she gets out of line. So, I honestly can’t tell whether Faile warming up to Rolan is Stockholm Syndrome or just Faile kind of liking violent men. Again, she never actually acted on it and she would’ve hated having to hide it from Perrin if she had.

Which was also kind of interesting. Faile’s really worried that she’ll need to hide sleeping with Rolan from Perrin, but when Perrin finds her he’s pretty sure that she’s already been raped: he comes across her being carried by an Aiel man, both looking like they’ve been rolling in the dirt. He smells the shame and guilt on her and assumes that it’s a response to being raped. His internal response is merely: “Well, the man was dead, and a woman had the right to keep her secrets if she wanted.”

But, of course, Faile actually does have something to hide from him: that Perrin killed a man who was helping her, a man she’d come to kind of like. Perrin’s a gentle person. I think he would’ve been angry if he’d discovered that Faile had to willingly sleep with a man because Perrin couldn’t save her, but he would’ve been mostly angry at himself. I think he’ll actually be hurt much deeper if he learns that he murdered someone that he might not have had to kill – someone who was helping Faile. I’m not sure whether Faile will ever tell him. It’s hard for me to really wrap my mind around that – I’m pretty open with my wife – but Faile would absolutely hide something from Perrin to protect him.

I’m also not sure whether Perrin’s going to tell anyone about Aram. I don’t know how a person could keep something like that to themself, but Perrin feels responsible for it. I’m not sure whether Perrin will keep Aram’s betrayal a secret in order to protect his memory, or if he’ll feel compelled to reveal his own guilt over it.

I’m not sure how all of this is going to resolve. Right now, it kind of feels like Perrin should have held on to his axe from the last book so he could use it to kill Aram and Rolan and then throw it away. Throwing the axe away over torturing a random Aiel seems less impactful than it would have after having to kill Aram then learning that he might not have had to kill Rolan. But, there’s also something very interesting and tragic in Aram being killed by Shaido without Perrin touching him. If Aram had just waited a few more moments for his betrayal, he might have died heroically by Perrin’s side. Like Rand losing his hand, I think that Robert Jordan sometimes likes to remind us that loss on a battlefield can happen randomly and suddenly. War isn’t like a story, where characters live and die according to the narrative. Remember Tam’s incredibly cliched death that he totally survived? Same deal.

Of course, we still have three more books for this to play out, so I’m really curious how it’ll go.

One character I really hope we don’t see any more of is Galina. I really, really hope that that’s it: she’s just being dragged off to the Waste to live as a slave forever. Harsh, but she really was the fucking worst.

Outro

Whew, alright, that was a lot! I’m currently 18,222 words into the script (before editing.) But, as I said a while back, Knife of Dreams is just packed with stuff.

There’s actually still a bit more that I want to get to, but I’ll just be really brief.

First off, I fucking knew that Moiraine was still alive. I was finally starting to lose hope, given how long it’s been, but just before I started reading Knife of Dreams, I had the thought: “I really hope that Moiraine gets a chance to see how Rand and Egwene have changed over the series.” Granted, we don’t actually know that she’ll be saved or that she’ll be able to meet Rand and Egwene, but damn, I really want to see her reaction to seeing Egwene as Amyrlin and seeing the Dragon Reborn, the man haunting her nightmares since she was a child, grown up into this scarred, miserable young man.

As for Rand’s wounds, I just keep going back to the Fisher piece in sha’rah, seen from Moridin’s perspective. Bleeding from one side, with a blindfold over its eyes. “On a white square, weak in attack yet agile and far-ranging in escape; on black, strong in attack but slow and vulnerable.” I wonder if Rand’s eyes aren’t going to get healed.

I also totally called it with Auldra’s need for a bellfounder. I mean, it was probably obvious, but still, it’s cool to finally see that starting to manifest. The grenades this time around were also pretty cool.

I also really liked seeing Tuon’s perspective on finally seeing “Toy” loose on the battlefield. It was just… incredibly satisfying, after seeing Mat get pushed around for so long. He’s really becoming the war god we’ve known him to be. It seems that he’ll be one of the Great General in Tarmon Gai’don.

I wonder if Galad will take Niall’s place as a Great General himself? Galad seems to have more experience lower in the ranks, but I could see it. It was also just really nice to finally see Galad do something awesome. Being lawful stupid is frequently frustrating, but it’s nice to see it actually work once in a while. Robert Jordan’s combat writing was also much better in this book than it was earlier in the series. That’s something I criticized early on and haven’t really gotten back to, but Galad’s fight with Valda really demonstrated how much RJ improved. It really is sad that this is the last book he could write himself – I really hope that his style of prose still comes out in the last three books.

Speaking of Elayne’s siblings, Gawyn didn’t really show up this book, but I think I have a new interpretation on his character. I’ll probably get a chance to dig into it more later, but just in case I don’t: basically, I think that Gawyn is a gender-bent Disney princess. He was trained since birth to fulfill a specific role that doesn’t require him to exercise any agency. When his life was thrown into disarray by Morgase’s disappearance and the split in the Tower, he really needed someone (like Egwene) to come and sweep him off his feet… but he didn’t get that. He was trained since birth that women don’t really like it when you say “no,” so he pretty much just whatever any woman tells him to do. Spineless and pathetic, but it’s kind of hard to fully blame him for it.

I should also probably at least briefly mention Elayne herself. I really, really liked her sections! The only reason I didn’t spend more time talking about her today is that I really thought her parts spoke for themselves. I’ve never really lived with anyone who was pregnant, so I can’t say whether her pregnancy feels real, but it felt well done to me. It seemed like RJ hit a good balance of treating it as something that’s impactful – something that actually makes a difference in day-to-day life – but not something completely debilitating. I definitely have a bullet-point on my whiteboard that reads “pregnant screaming” under Elayne’s section, but screaming aside, she managed to arrest several of the Black Ajah while winning the crown and defeating a siege. Birgitte certainly helped, but that’s her job and Elayne put her there, too. Elayne’s not nearly old enough, but I dunno, it seems like she’d make a decent president.

I also think it’s really interesting that Elayne has decided that Min’s viewing means that she’s invincible. This is literally the plot of a recent episode of Rick and Morty. It definitely seems a little bit foolish to test fate this hard, but it’s worked so far.

Oh, also, Taim saying “Let the Lord of Chaos rule” at the end of the book. I still can’t tell whether Taim is just Demandred in disguise, just a Darkfriend, or if he was forcibly turned to the Shadow by Myrddraal. It really feels like there’s at least some connection to Demandred – maybe he has Taim’s cour’souvra? At the very least, he’s definitely a goddamned Darkfriend. I think we can agree on that.

Damn, even this outro is getting a bit long now. Tam showed up and finally had it confirmed by Perrin that Rand is the Dragon Reborn. Sad. Tam also got to show off his bow skills. I just keep feeling the need to point out the incredible attention to detail RJ has in these books, calling out the difference in range that elevation makes and the fact that you don’t just draw and then hold for a long time because it’s exhausting.

I also really liked the little bit where the Aiel were pounding on their bucklers to intimidate Perrin’s forces and Tam loudly says “After the Aiel War, I hoped to never hear that again.” That’s just the perfect thing to say to reassure the soldiers. He acknowledges that it’s scary while simultaneously reminding the soldiers that he survived the last time he heard it. He’s a vet, he’s seen this before, and he knows what to do to survive it again.

Oh, yeah, there’s also the Ogier and the Book of Translation. My guess is that they plan on using either the portal stones or something very similar to them. It’s hard not to see the Ogier leaving the world as a reference to The Lord of the Rings, but Loial making a speech in favor of staying to fight makes it a lot more interesting. I’m really looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Alright, I should wrap this up – I can’t wait to get to the next book. Though, given that the holidays are here, I’m not sure how long it’ll take to get the next video out. My plan is to get it out before Christmas, but we’ll see how things go. As always, I definitely appreciate any feedback – good or bad – so please leave a comment if you have something to say. I hope everyone enjoyed my critique. I’m definitely looking forward to covering The Gathering Storm next time!