Verin didn't have much of a choice but to take the risk if she had doubts that less than thirty days would be enough for her to either be dead or freed of the oaths. Mat was ta'veren, there was a fair chance the Wheel would find a way to make him open the letter earlier if that was meant to happen (it wasn't, Mat was meant to go Ghenji).

Those oaths are very restrictive and much better designed than the AS oaths (Ishamael was victim of his love for the overdramatic and ponderous language... the hour of my death instead of a plain until I die and so on), keep that in mind. Verin was already very clever to find on her own ways around them.

The intent was also that Verin would be forced to play it too tight, because her whole plan rested on striking at the Shadow at the last hour, not to let it time to recover from the blow. She was bound to make some miscalculations.


That said, for issues like this, also keep in mind that Brandon has altered the chronology of events planned by RJ, and his new chronology is quite messed up, with quite a few inconsistencies. It's really hard to synchronize Mat's storyline with Egwene's, and it's only made harder by the fact Elayne's storyline kept going back and forth in time in TOM. 30 might have been RJ's number. There seems to be a chronology mistake involved. We have to assume Verin thought she needed 30 more days to reach her endgame. Mat left Caemlyn not long after the 30 days were over, supposedly, so this should more or less be around the time of the Seanchan attack on TV, before news of that event reached him. However, Brandon had Rand give Egwene a full month before Merrilor takes place, and it appears that Mat went to rescue Moiraine not long before Elayne and co left for Merrilor (and he's still not back when some like Perrin arrive there). There seems to be a month unaccounted for somewhere... either Verin met Egwene way too early (which makes no sense) or Mat left Caemlyn much too close to Merrilor to make any sense.


It sounds like some of the chronology facts in TOM/TGS probably takes RJ's original plans into account (such as Verin's 30 days, maybe), but that Brandon chose to extend the time between Rand's meeting with Egwene and Merrilor, to have room to deal with elements he had cut from TGS or has moved later on the timeline. It's not fully consistent. Aviendha for instance appears to have been gone for a LONG time, way too long. It also makes it appear that it took forever before Egwene and co. even started worrying about their embassy at the BT. There are many more little oddities like that following Brandon's changes.

Based on all sort of evidence, my personal theory is that RJ planned Mesaana to strike at Egwene with the BA the night after the Seanchan attack, not weeks later It was supposed to happen as Rand came to Dragonmount. Perrin would have bumped into Egwene in his chase of Slayer then see Rand's epiphany. Egwene would have met Rand the next day, and Merrilor would have be set to happen not a month (there was no need, and Rand see matters as urgent...) but something like a week later. That way, Mat's timeline (and with it Verin's letter) would make a lot more sense. She would have met Mat around the time Rand met Tuon and moved back to Tear. She reached Egwene between 20-30 days later, very shortly before the Seanchan attack, not so long before the 30 days were over and Mat left for Ghenji, right before Elayne learns of Merrilor, is joined by Perrin and decides to make her move for Cairhien then go north. The mistake then became that Mat didn't open Verin's letter after 30 days as Verin expected, and he left Caemlyn. Not only him, but Elayne too.

Brandon's mistake seems to be that he put the meeting of Mat and Verin on the wrong date. It wasn't around 40 days but over 60 days before Merrilor. We know those TGS chapters are "prequels" invented by Brandon (Perrin's have similar timeline and other inconsistency issues - for one thing it was the Seanchan that remained behind at Malden, awaiting the other clans that had been spotted heading that way and Perrin who moved north, not the other way around!). My theory is that Jordan likely never intended to show the meeting of Mat and Verin. That's not much his style. I think he planned to surprise us and have Mat reappear in Caemlyn, and then proceed to explain how that happened (this is far more in the vein of how he did such things in earlier books). I think that scene in a tavern was his first planned scene for Mat in AMOL. It's then that we would have learned, by the end of the chapter, he had a mysterious letter from Verin, what he had promised her and that Elayne was not answering his messages. Brandon seems to have moved the meeting of Verin and Mat to a much earlier date, without realizing he needed to alter the content of the letter accordingly, and this seems to have been overlooked by the editors at the time of TGS (Brandon himself admits freely he's almost entirely clueless regarding RJ's chronology. He even said even Maria found it hard to find her way in RJ's file for the timelines and she often relied on the fan-made chronology instead. And let's add to that that Brandon/Maria had merely the outline/notes to go by when Brandon wrote those scenes, he had not written anything for Mat at the time. I suspect in the rush to publish TGS, they simply didn't realize having Verin and Mat meet when they did created timeline problems.)