Nynaeve’s group ambushes a Seanchan named Seta and frees her damane, who punches her before running off. The plan was for Nynaeve to put on her clothes while Elayne pretends to be her damane, but Nynaeve tests it on Seta and is so disgusted that she decides Seta herself will do, with a quite satisfying Oh, Crap! moment when she realizes the collars will work on anyone, not just Aes Sedai, helped with a killer "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Nynaeve. About time she got another really likable scene.
After briefly checking in with Domon, who’s just waiting on his ship, Rand’s group arrives in town and after a pretty funny tease of them crossing paths with Nynaeve and Seta, Mat senses the dagger in Turak’s house. They sneak in through the back garden and find both the Horn and the dagger, but it’s a trap by Turak. Mat stabs one of the soldiers with the dagger, resulting in him appearing to burn to death; we’ll probably be seeing that a few more times. Then everyone runs off until it’s Rand versus Turak, who has his own heron sword, and what we get is basically the climax of the lesser known Jackie Chan film The Young Master, with all of Rand’s training not doing much good, so finally he just goes Attack! Attack! Attack!, not worrying about his technique at all as long as he’s moving forward. And with that, he quickly kills Turak in another Crowning Moment Of Awesome. Luckily, the Seanchan servants are no trouble at all and some even kill themselves, and everyone gets away, though Rand has spotted Egwene and swears to return.
You know, I enjoyed the whole fight a lot while reading it, but looking back now, it seems a lot less satisfying than Rand’s climax from book one. Unlike his showdown with the Dark One, he had no previous relationship with Turak, so what we get is just a standard brawl with no emotion behind it, and after Turak made such a good first impression, it’s a huge letdown that this is all he gets to do. On the plus side, Nynaeve’s scheme is off to a very promising start, enough that I’d say the order of the scenes should probably have been switched.
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