Welcome back to Reading the Wheel of Time! This week we’re covering Chapter 41 and 42, in which Rand is a very important man who has a tower, Lan gets sneaky, and Mat protests entirely too much. Oh, and he does some cool battle planning stuff too.
Chapter 41 opens with Rand standing on a hilltop and surveying the three camps below him. One is Tairen, while the other two are Cairhienin, separated into cavalry and infantry. They are all the Tairen and Cairhienin forces at his disposal, and too many are not actually soldiers.
The city of Cairhien itself lay little more than five miles to the west, some of the fabled “topless towers of Cairhien” visible above the intervening forest. The city sprawled across hills hard by the River Alguenya, encircled by Couladin’s Shaido and those who had joined him.