Elayne and Nynaeve arrive in Tanchico and immediately run into Bayle Domon. At the inn, Elayne gets blackout drunk and assaults Thom’s mustache until he admits he was Queen Morgase’s “special friend” back in the day. Nynaeve takes a World of Dreams nap to provide us with two pages of thinly-veiled foreshadowing. The chapter ends with Elayne nursing a hangover and realizing that the “Rand-leash” artifact is no longer just a theory.
Elayne, Nynaeve, Thom, and Juilin debark the Wavedancer in Tanchico. On the docks they run into Bayle Domon, whom the women haven’t seen since Falme near the end of The Great Hunt. Domon feels bad that he had to cut and run when all hell broke loose in Falme, so he uses his local connections to get them set up with room and board.
Over a meal, Domon learns that they’re hunting the Black Ajah. He doesn’t like the sound of that, but he still pledges to help them if he can. As long as Tanchico doesn’t turn into a repeat of Falme, that is. When Domon departs, Nynaeve goes off to lie down, and Juilin decides to head out into the night to see what trouble he can get into. Elayne follows Thom down to the common room and watches him perform, but she still can’t figure out where she has seen him before. I can appreciate a little dramatic irony, but aren’t we taking this whole thing with her and Thom a bit too far?
Elayne drinks more wine than she intended. She stumbles her way upstairs to Thom’s room and pulls his mustache, demanding to know why she has memories of him. He admits to being Court-bard for Queen Morgase, and she figures out that the relationship ran a bit deeper than that. With the revelations finally out of the way, Thom sends her back to her room.
It seems like nobody likes a drunk Elayne. Thom has kicked her out, and now Nynaeve is waiting, ready to castigate her for being such a sloppy drunk. Nynaeve plunges her head into a bucket of water and literally makes Elayne puke. With her buzz now thoroughly ruined, Elayne stands watch as Nynaeve enters the World of Dreams to look for Egwene.
The dream is barely worth a paragraph, and certainly not the two pages Jordan devotes to it. Egwene isn’t there. Nynaeve teleports to the Aiel Waste and sees some dude poking and prodding at the fog surrounding Rhuidean. Birgitte shows up to warn Nynaeve away from the man. Nynaeve teleports to Emond’s Field and gets shot at by a man who looks like Lan. Yawn. The end.
In the morning, Elayne has a nasty hangover. Juilin comes back from a night away and reports that a couple people claim to have seen a woman fitting the description of Rianna, one of Liandrin’s accomplices. Thom joins in, offering to use his skill in politics to ferret out nobility who fall under the Darkfriends’ sway. Listening to all the talk, Elayne has a disturbing thought: if Liandrin really is in Tanchico, that means the artifact — the thing that poses a danger to Rand — is real.