The Great Hunt

What's inside (9 sections)

1. Winter in Fal Dara
2. The hunt begins
3. The Portal Stone
4. Cairhien and the Game of Houses
5. Falme and the damane
6. Five ride forth
7. What works and what drags
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I came to this one nervous. The first book had won me over by the end, but I had heard the second Wheel of Time book was where people either commit to the series or walk away. It starts slower than I wanted and then, somewhere around the middle, it grabbed me harder than the first book ever did. The ending at Falme is the reason people keep reading these books.

Winter in Fal Dara

The book opens a few weeks after the Eye of the World. Rand has stayed in Fal Dara, the fortress city in Shienar, up near the Blight. He told everyone he planned to run as far from Aes Sedai as he could. Instead he is still there, practicing the sword every morning with Lan and trying to pretend his life is normal.

It is not normal. He can channel, though he barely admits it to himself. Mat is wasting away because of the dagger he took from Shadar Logoth, which ties him to an evil hunger no healing has fixed. Perrin keeps hearing wolves in his head. Egwene and Nynaeve are preparing to travel to Tar Valon to train with the Aes Sedai.

Then the Amyrlin Seat herself arrives. Siuan Sanche, the most powerful woman in this world, rides into Fal Dara with a party of Aes Sedai including the Red Ajah sister Liandrin. Rand hides with Egwene's help, terrified that the Aes Sedai will gentle him, which is their way of cutting a man off from the Power, a process that usually kills or breaks him. What follows is one of my favorite early scenes in the series. Moiraine and Siuan, old friends from their novice days, meet in private, and we learn they have shared a plan for years concerning the Dragon Reborn. They already know what Rand refuses to accept about himself.

That night everything breaks open. Trollocs get inside the keep with Darkfriend help. They free Padan Fain, the peddler turned creature of the Shadow who has been locked in the dungeons, and they steal two treasures: the Horn of Valere and Mat's dagger. The Horn is legend made solid. Whoever sounds it calls back dead heroes to fight for them. Its loss is a disaster. The dagger matters just as much, because Mat will die without it, and the link between him and Fain keeps growing stranger.

Before the hunt even starts, Rand is brought before Siuan, Moiraine, and the Brown sister Verin. They tell him plainly that he was born on the slopes of Dragonmount at the end of the Aiel War, that Tam al'Thor found him there, and that he is the Dragon Reborn. Rand denies it to their faces. Moiraine gives him the banner of the Dragon and sends him after the Horn with a Shienaran company, telling him that keeping the Horn from the Shadow matters more than anything, and that Mat needs the dagger back.

The hunt begins

Lord Ingtar Shinowa leads the hunting party south with Rand, Mat, Perrin, the Ogier Loial, and a tracker named Hurin. Hurin is a sniffer. He can literally smell violence, and he follows Fain's trail of killing across the countryside. Perrin quietly realizes something during these chapters. He sees the Dragon banner Moiraine gave Rand, and he puts together that his friend can channel. He says nothing, but the knowledge sits between them.

Meanwhile the story splits. Egwene and Nynaeve sail for Tar Valon with the Aes Sedai. Egwene becomes a novice and Nynaeve, older and already strong in the Power, is raised to the Accepted, which is the rank between novice and full sister. They meet Elayne Trakand, the Daughter-Heir of Andor, and Min, the young woman from Baerlon who sees visions around people. The White Tower chapters show a different kind of danger. Nobody swings a sword here. Instead there is hierarchy, testing, and the quiet menace of sisters like Liandrin and Elaida, who clearly have their own plans for the girls.

Back on the trail, Perrin is forced to lean on the wolves to track Fain after the party gets separated. The wolf Hopper guides him, and these chapters deepen the whole wolfbrother thread. Perrin hates the gift. He is afraid it will swallow who he is. But without the wolves they would lose the trail completely. Verin catches up with Perrin's group, claiming Moiraine sent her, and from here on I kept one eye on Verin in every scene. Jordan writes her as scatterbrained and harmless. She is neither.

The Portal Stone

The strangest part of the book comes early in the chase. Rand, Loial, and Hurin take shelter near a standing stone and wake up somewhere else. The Portal Stone, a remnant of an older age, has dropped them into a mirror world, a version of their own land where the Shadow seems to have won long ago.

This section gave me chills. The land is empty of animals. The sky feels wrong. They find a monument describing a Trolloc victory over Artur Hawkwing, the great king of legend, which tells them everything about which way this world bent. And they are being stalked by grolm, frog-like Shadowspawn beasts they have never seen before.

Here they meet Selene. She is beautiful, calm, and far too knowledgeable. She claims she fell into this world by accident while dreaming, says she is a noblewoman from Cairhien, and attaches herself to Rand with flattering talk about glory and greatness. She urges him to reach for power, to stop running from who he is. Every compliment she pays him has a hook in it. I did not know her true identity on my first read, and I still felt uneasy about her.

Rand escapes this world by doing the thing he swore he would not do. He reaches for saidin, the male half of the Power, and channels to work the Portal Stone. During a dream encounter around this time, Ba'alzamon brands his palm with the heron mark, the same crest carried on his sword. Selene guides them to a second stone, and they cross back into their own world, only to find they have arrived ahead of Fain's party. Time and distance run crooked around the Stones.

Rand and Loial sneak into Fain's camp and take back the Horn and the dagger. It is a genuine triumph. It does not last.

Cairhien and the Game of Houses

The recovered Horn is carried to Cairhien, a city famous for politics as a blood sport. The locals call their scheming the Game of Houses, Daes Dae'mar, and Rand blunders straight into it. Because he carries himself like a lord and burns invitation after invitation unread, every noble house decides he must be someone important playing a deep game. The more he ignores them, the more invitations arrive, until they come from the King himself and from Lord Barthanes Damodred, the King's great rival.

Two things happen in Cairhien that I loved. First, Rand finds gleeman Thom Merrilin alive, working under a new name with his young apprentice Dena. Thom was thought dead since Whitebridge in book one, and Moiraine had hinted he survived. Their reunion is warm and awkward, two people who owe each other their lives and do not know how to say it. Second, Rand and Loial flee Trollocs through the Illuminators' chapter house, the guild that keeps the secret of fireworks, and the whole place goes up in flames. Rand's luck as ta'veren, a person the Pattern bends around, keeps saving him and wrecking everything nearby.

Then Fain strikes again. His people attack Hurin at the inn, burn Rand's lodgings, and steal back the Horn and the dagger. When Ingtar's group finally reaches the city, Hurin traces the trail to Barthanes' manor. The party talks its way into Barthanes' feast, and there the threads pull tight. Barthanes, a Darkfriend, tells them Fain has taken the Horn through a Waygate to Falme, on the coast of Toman Head, and that Fain left a message: he will wait for Rand there. The Waygate in the manor is blocked by Machin Shin, the Black Wind that eats travelers in the Ways, and Verin insists it cannot be reasoned with. The next day Barthanes is found torn apart, likely by a creature called a gholam. Thom's apprentice Dena is murdered by the King's men because of Thom's connection to Rand, and Thom answers by killing the King. Cairhien ends in ash and grief.

With two Waygates blocked, including one near the Ogier stedding at Tsofu where Loial meets the Ogier girl Erith, Rand takes the desperate option. He uses a Portal Stone to move the whole group to Toman Head. The journey goes wrong in a way I found haunting. Each traveler lives flashes of other lives they might have led, and in every one Rand hears the same words as he dies at Ba'alzamon's hands: I have won again, Lews Therin. They arrive months late, in autumn instead of summer.

Falme and the damane

While the men chase the Horn across the map, the women's storyline turns dark. Liandrin tells Egwene, Nynaeve, Elayne, and Min that their friends are in danger and lures them through the Ways to Toman Head. It is a trap. Seanchan soldiers meet them on the far side, and Liandrin hands them over. This is the reveal that Liandrin belongs to the Black Ajah, the secret order of Aes Sedai who serve the Shadow.

The Seanchan have invaded the coast around Falme. They are descendants of Artur Hawkwing's armies, returned with strange beasts and stranger customs. Worst of all is how they treat women who can channel. A channeler fitted with the a'dam, a silvery collar, becomes damane, a leashed one, controlled completely by her sul'dam, the woman who holds the bracelet. Egwene is collared and given to a sul'dam named Renna. Min is kept as a hostage servant. Nynaeve and Elayne escape capture and spend chapters hiding, planning, and trying to find a way to free Egwene.

I want to be honest here. These chapters are hard to read. Egwene's training as damane, the way the collar turns pain and obedience into habit, and the slow breaking of her resistance upset me more than any battle in the book. Jordan does not look away from what this kind of slavery does to a person. Nynaeve's fury becomes the engine of the rescue. Her anger at the collars is so strong she can channel just by looking at them, and she and Elayne manage to capture a sul'dam with her own collar, which horrifies the woman, and then use that knowledge to get Egwene out. The rescue lands because we have suffered through the captivity with her.

Fain, meanwhile, has carried the Horn to High Lord Turak of the Seanchan, offering it as tribute, though he really only cares about keeping Mat's dagger. Bayle Domon, the smuggler captain from book one, is dragged before Turak too, along with a Seanchan woman named Egeanin who collects old things. The Horn sits in Turak's house like a lit candle in a powder room.

Five ride forth

The climax pulls every thread into Falme at once. Rand, Mat, Perrin, Ingtar, and Hurin enter the town to take back the Horn and the dagger, with Verin's warning ringing in their ears that the Seanchan can sense a man channeling. Rand faces High Lord Turak, a blademaster, in a formal duel, and kills him with the heron-mark sword Lan trained him to use. They recover the chest with the Horn and the dagger inside. Then Rand sees Egwene, newly freed, and refuses to leave without reaching her.

The escape goes wrong. Ingtar, who has led them faithfully for the whole book, confesses that he is a Darkfriend. Years ago he swore to the Shadow, and he has been trying to earn his way back to the Light ever since. What he saw in those alternate lives on the Portal Stone journey broke something open in him. He stays behind in the hallway to hold off Seanchan soldiers so the others can run, and dies fighting. It is one of the most moving redemptions I have read in fantasy, done in a few pages without speeches.

Then the trap closes completely. Between Rand's party and freedom stand two armies: the Seanchan pushing in from one side and the Whitecloaks under Geofram Bornhald attacking from the other. There is no way through. Mat does the only thing left. He sounds the Horn of Valere.

The dead heroes answer. Artur Hawkwing himself leads them, and they know Rand on sight and ask for the Dragon banner before they will fight. Perrin raises it. The heroes ride against the Seanchan and drive them back into the sea. Above the battlefield, visible to everyone below, Rand faces Ba'alzamon in the sky. Their duel plays out like a vision projected over Falme, and the fighting below seems to follow its rhythm. Rand wins by letting Ba'alzamon run him through with his staff so he can drive his sword through Ba'alzamon's heart in return. Both of them fall.

Rand survives, barely, and Min hauls him into a bed to heal. While he sleeps, Selene comes to him, touches him, and reveals herself as Lanfear, one of the Forsaken, before vanishing. When Rand wakes, Ingtar's soldiers stand under the Dragon banner and offer him their loyalty. The Dragon Reborn has been proclaimed, not by Aes Sedai decree but by witnesses in the sky over Falme.

What works and what drags

This book moves faster than the first one, and the split storylines help. Rand's chase, the Tower training, and the Seanchan invasion keep cutting against each other, so no single plot has time to stall the way the long walks in book one sometimes did. The ending is enormous and earned. Ingtar's confession, Egwene's rescue, Mat sounding the Horn, and the duel in the sky stack one on top of another until the last hundred pages feel like falling downhill.

Still, I had complaints. Rand denies being the Dragon so often that the repetition wore me down. I understand why a young man would refuse the role, since it means madness and death, but after the tenth refusal I wanted someone to shake him. The Cairhien politics confused me in places, with houses and lords I could not keep apart. And the gender friction that runs through these books sharpens here. Men and women misunderstand each other constantly, and some scenes between Rand and the women in his life read as stubborn rather than charming.

None of that stopped me turning pages. The Portal Stone chapters, the damane storyline, and the battle of Falme are strong enough to carry the slower stretches. If book one was about leaving home, this one is about being claimed by something larger, whether Rand wants it or not. I closed it knowing I would read the third book. After Falme, I do not see how anyone could stop.

FAQ

Does Mat blow the Horn of Valere?

Yes. Mat sounds the Horn when Rand's party is trapped between the Seanchan and the Whitecloaks at Falme. Dead heroes led by Artur Hawkwing answer and drive the Seanchan back.

What happens to Egwene in Falme?

The Seanchan collar her with an a'dam and make her damane after Liandrin of the Black Ajah hands her over. Nynaeve and Elayne free her during the battle of Falme.

Is The Great Hunt the second Wheel of Time book?

Yes, it is the second book in The Wheel of Time, following The Eye of the World. It was published in 1990 by Tor Books and ends with Rand proclaimed as the Dragon Reborn.