The Great Hunt for the Horn departs Fal Dara with a sniffer named Hurin, someone tries to kill the Amyrlin (or maybe Rand), and Bayle Domon decides the best way to deal with trouble is to sail in the opposite direction.
Everyone gears up to ride out. Rand, Mat, and Perrin will accompany Ingtar’s men to chase after the Horn and the dagger. Rand tries to apologize to Mat and Perrin, but they just ignore him. Not that you can blame them — nobody ever reacts favorably to “I’ve got a secret, but I can’t tell you, and it’s for your own good.” Loial, on the other hand, is his usual magnanimous self. This dude is such a teddy bear that you could probably cut off one of his fingers on purpose, and he would be forgiving you in his next breath.
Then Lan shows up at Rand’s side. After that gooey, romantic exchange with Nynaeve, he must feel compelled to reassert his manly image as an emotionless slab of rock, so he imparts one final lesson: Sheathing the Sword. He says it’s when you allow the enemy to stab you “when the price is worth the gain.” Uh oh. Someone call Mr. Chekhov — we’ve just mounted a sword on the wall, and I don’t like where this is going.
Before anyone can get underway, an arrow zips in front of Rand’s face, grazes the Amyrlin’s arm, and you can almost hear the Wilhelm scream when it kills a soldier.
EVERYONE PRESENT: Gosh, I hate it when that happens.
It looks like a failed attempt to assassinate the Amyrlin Seat — but Siuan somehow believes Rand was the intended target.
On the way out of town, Ingtar introduces Rand to Hurin, who is a sniffer. This dude can literally smell death and violence, so he can track the Trollocs that stole the Horn. Now, Fain is with them, so arguably, anyone with an olfactory bulb and one working nostril should be able to track this crowd. But Hurin is actually sensing the latent spiritual energy left by acts of violence. Or something. It doesn’t involve channeling, but we’re given nothing else to help us understand the ability. Not unlike the X-Men, it’s just this “superpower” that he has. What shall we call him? The Sniffer? Poor Min and Perrin have been ignored to the point of being secondary characters at this point. I think we should get this Hurin guy together with Perrin “Wolf Dude” Aybara and Min “Future Girl” Farshaw so they can all fight crime together.
Then we’re ripped away from the Great Hunt and into the company of the good Captain Bayle Domon. We haven’t seen him since he dropped Rand and Mat off at Whitebridge in The Eye of the World, but I guess he finished making his way down the river to Illian. Domon was being chased by Trollocs when we first met him, and his life has not improved much since then.
Men from Cairhien meet him in a quiet pub and offer him a big bag of money. They want him to travel to Mayene and deliver a sealed letter to the Port Captain there, where he will receive additional funds and take on a passenger back to Illian. Despite being warned not to open the letter, Domon does it anyway. And yikes — it’s supposedly from the King of Cairhien, saying the bearer of the letter is a Darkfriend who should be killed immediately. So he does what any reasonable man would do, and instructs his crew to sail in the opposite direction, toward Tomon Head. He’s not certain what his enemy’s motives are… but my guess is it might have something to do with that unbroken seal on the Dark One’s prison nestled in Captain Domon’s collection of rare treasure.