Skirting the Oath Rod, which may be entirely possible due to information we don't know, seems a bit....weird...to me. It's been demonstrated in a pretty straight-forward manner that applying Oaths is significant, and once applied they are not simply disregarded on a whim. This leads to thoughts of the binder...which I'm a bit hazy on at the moment...but even the Forsaken seemed to think that a binder would work on them, IIRC. I don't know.

But as for Egwene, yeah I agree with you. This will be one of the points of contention for Egwene-haters....there are a few of them for those of that mindset....to use against her. For me? Meh. I tend to feel that the level of hatred speaks volumes about the depth of the character, and given that it's a fantasy series this should be celebrated, but to each their own. I thought that overall, Egwene shines in this book...extraordinarily so. More so in this book than others, I see her as the antithesis to Rand...by that I mean the path Rand is going down and the path Egwene is going down. Rand is losing himself, losing faith, losing heart, fighting every step of the way....basically falling apart. Egwene is gaining faith, gaining confidence, surrendering to "fate" as it were....she's accepting the path befor her. Rand cannot...yet. Even though he has tried to convince himself he has or can, he hasn't. But maybe the events of DM have changed that...we'll see.



Well, there were a number of letters and I'm sure Mat was not the only one to receive one from her. I think we can assume that the contents of those letters, no matter what plan of Verin's they are attached to, carry less significance overall than the BA book. That was her creme de la creme, so to speak. She'd rather not have left those plans to others via letters, but she had to.

I think the only reason she felt sure he would open the letter is because...well...he's Mat!



It's an idle thought. 90% of me says she is good and gone, but hey it's WoT, and so you never know