Well, I noticed that Rand's timeline seemed further progressed than the timeline of his two friends. He mentions Mat's presence in Caemlin while Mat is still on the road as far as his chapters are concerned. There is also the tedious length of time required for the locating, capturing and retrieving of the members of the merchant council. And then there is the gathering of starving people into the city which takes time. I believe several weeks were mentioned a couple of times. He keeps complaining about how long this is taking him. So I'm assuming that Rand spent more than a month there.

And Graendal is not ignorant about Rand. We are told repeatedly how extensive her spy net is. Not keeping an eye on the most important player in the world is unthinkable. She also has the tales she received from Sammael and the rest of the forsaken and I would guess she talked to Darkfriends in his service like Elza and others. The plan I presented does not require information that is hard to acquire. For example it didn't involve using Tam against him. Rand's distrust of Aes Sedai has been shouted from the rooftops as loud as Rand could make it, Semiharge's ability to cause pain is well known to Graendal, the need for True Power to break free of the male adam would be easy to deduce from its basic function (controling a channeler) and the negative effects of the True Power on its wielders would be well known to one of the Chosen.



And yet he did. The thing with the True Power is that it has someone on the other side watching what you do with it. It works more like being granted wishes than like tapping a source of power. If the Dark One didn't like what Rand was planning to do with it he would have taken the True Power away from Rand.



We'll just have to wait and see. And you know, Graendal has a life insurance. An Asmodean caliber Life Insurance.



The plan wasn't that clever. It was mainly built on Rand becoming hard enough to wipe out that entire mansion. And I would think it would be an appropriate lesson that such a dark and reckless plan would turn out to be useless. Why would we need yet another example of how Rand can beat the forsaken? We had plenty of those already. If she lives she doesn't need to be THAT prominent in the rest of the series. She can have a cameo or two showing her for example dying meaninglessly in the Last Battle or or any number of other things.



Why redundant twist? You just said it would yet another one in a monotonous list of forsaken failures. And I would say that it wouldn't reduce the significance of Rand's act but to the contrary show how reckless and wrong it really was. As it now stands he's done something wrong but the justification that he killed the evil Graendal and that anyone else killed was a mindless robot makes it not so big a wrong.




This whole discovered spy twist in the story smelled fishy to me as I said in the original post. He was staying for a considerable length of time near Rand in an easy to find place doing things that would inevitably draw the Dragon's attention to him. And then we have the fact that he knows the name of Graendal's mansion. Care to explain that?

If Graendal wanted to insure spies she sent wouldn't be able to tell things about her the solution wouldn't have been to make them flee when discovered but to immediately kill themselves, for example by swallowing their tongue. This whole plot doesn't make sense unless you assume there's more behind the scenes here.