Though I'll bet you'll be a bit anxious if this is a Lan chapter, which might be precisely the effect Harriet aimed for by giving it this title. She's done that before... recently with The death of Tuon (and I can well imagine her laughing evilly when she saw the ruckus this made, all the complaints about a massive spoiler in the titles and all. Eh, eh...).



It seems a tad late for Morgase-Galad (unless something unexpected happens and it would really surprise me if Moiraine returns so early in the book (not so long before the climax of the book would rather me my guess)

My money would rather be on a reunion between Rand and one or all of his three women, or between the women, or perhaps Rand's return to Tear (reunion with Tam, or with Cadsuane etc.) or something like that. I expect Rand/Egwene to start reappearing by mid-book or so, at least for their scenes where they interact with one of the other storylines. They can have "intro chapters", but once they start crossing to other storylines, they'll have to wait for them to catch up. Let's say that Rand meeting Elayne in chapter 5 or Egwene sending women to Caemlyn in chapter 10 is most unlikely. When Rand and Egwene can show up again will depend massively how on much there is to tell before the events depicted or mentionned interact with the other stories, and which storylines they get involved in. Egwene might reappear earlier than Rand, because it's rather obvious some of her chapters will deal with what happened to the envoys to the BT. So this at least as to wait for Elayne and Mat to catch up to that timeline (they're much closer than Perrin), otherwise having events referred to in Caemlyn that have not already happened in the Elayne-Mat chapters would get massively confusing...

As for Rand, he can't really appear in the book before Tam leaves Perrin for Tear, otherwise it's gonna be very ackward and confusing... like that mention Brandon made in KOD by Perrin that Rand was at the manor in Tear. We managed it but that sort of thing is extremely confusing for the casual readers, and Jordan himself avoided that sort of thing, especially when it crossed books! That would have been exactly as if he hadf Rand appear at the beginning of COT, then have the Cleansing happen in the other storylines.

The way Brandon dealt with the timelines in TGS, jumping all over the place, is one of the book's major weaknesses. In many places it made no sense at all, with Tylee having a scene in the prologue set 20 days after Malden, then later Masema gets killed on the day of Malden giving everyone the impression he got killed weeks after Malden until the Perrin chapters corrected that notion (though I remember being confused at first and wondering a lot if Faile had just killed Masema, or if that was yet to take place). And Mat and Tuon's first POVs were way, way too far into the book considering they happen almost right after the Tylee scene and Rand's first scene. TGS was by a long shot the worst structured WOT book. Brandon sacrificed all coherence to get his "faster pace" and (too many) POV switches. That was one of the most "un Jordan-like" aspect of the book and I sure hope he gave that up in TOM and returned to a more chronological structure, and returns to the Jordan habit of giving us fairly clear timeline markers. The one exception with RJ was COT (and he described that aspect of it as a bad decision, as it happens) and even then it was very easy to catch up as each new storyline returned to the same starting day, and the Cleansing immediately situated the reader in the timeline, and synchronized the various storylines. In TGS, we rather had Egwene scenes taking place later, then a Tuon scene taking place earlier, and all this despite the fact Tuon was sending a strike at the WT in Egwene's storyline. A real mess, timeline wise. To this day people are still arguing what took place when, and for the first time, Steven Cooper's timeline doesn't have anywhere close to the definitive/reliable answers.

Brandon did very well overall, but not with that aspect.