Jordan, Robert (James Oliver Rigney, Jr.): Winter’s Heart. New York: Tor Books, 2000. Approx. 680 pages. Bound. $29.95.

(I picked this up from a display rack at Borders when I went to lunch yesterday, for about $22. My afternoon was wasted — I had to work, and so couldn’t read. But I finished it off in the evening, though I didn’t get to sleep until well after midnight …)

Well, it looks like Jordan may actually be starting to wind down this series. After A Crown of Swords, I figured that with some effort it would take him three more volumes to finish it off. Now, two volumes later, I believe that he will only need two more.

The book, for once, is about equally divided between Rand, Mat (our favorite trickster / gambler, who did not even appear in “The Path of Daggers”) and Perrin. Perrin is still down in Ghealdan, attempting to rein in the Prophet, when he discovers that his wife Faile, Queen Alliandre of Ghealdan and the serving woman Maighdin have been captured and carried off by Sevanna’s Shaido; on the minus side, that’s how the book leaves him, but on the plus side he now has the Prophet’s rag-tag army at his beck and call (though Perrin himself leaves us with the impression that he considers that a minus). Berelain is still attempting to “borrow” him from Faile, too, and not hesitating to leave the impression with others that she might already have done so…

Rand has fled Cairhien with Min after his attempted assassination by the rogue asha’man, and is now engaged in two projects: track down and destroy Dashiva and his renegade cohorts, and find out how to cleanse the taint from saidin. He succeeds in both of these by book’s end, and along the way manages to resolve his romantic problems with Min, Elayne and Aviendha in a way that leaves him, as Mat once remarked about Rhuarc, “either the luckiest man in the world or the biggest fool.”

After a one-volume hiatus, we finally come back to Mat, my own favorite character, who is recovering after having a wall fall on him during the Seanchan invasion of Ebou Dar. Mat is not a Seanchan captive (as some anticipated he would be), and is hanging around Valan Luca’s menagerie (from The Fires of Heaven) which is now playing Ebou Dar, in the hope of convincing the itinerant illumnatrix Aludra — who gave him those fireworks he used to breach the walls of the Stone of Tear in The Dragon Reborn — to help him find some way to use her skills to develop a weapon against the Seanchan; in the process, they seem to be inventing cannon, just as, at Rand’s new academy in Cairhien, someone else has just invented the Stanley Steamer. Queen Teslyn, still on her throne as a Seanchan quisling, has reinitiated her relationship with Mat, to his ongoing dismay (pink ribbons???), which does bring him into the Seanchan sphere, where he meets both the High Lady Suroth (we have all know she’s a Darkfriend of the worst stripe, ever since The Great Hunt!) and a new arrival, a Seanchan commissioner of some kind, the High Lady Tuon, who, to Mat’s practiced and experienced eye, looks like your basic jail-bait, and who seems to take some sort of bobby-soxer interest in him; he’d vomit bricks if he knew what her real title was (spoiler: he’ll find out in the chapter called “What the Aelfinn Said,” and those who remember his trip through the redstone gateway under Tear in The Shadow Rising will remember exactly what the snaky people, the Aelfinn, told him; what, after all, is the first question Mat asks any women with whom he strikes up a relationship, the one that helps him decide whether to hang around or flee for his life and sanity?). And, meanwhile, the gholam is still out there somewhere, working out how to “harvest” Mat for whoever is pulling its strings now that Sammael is at least hors de combat. Oh, yes, and Mat has got a new companion, an elderly but apparently very competent street-fighter and raconteur named Noal Charin — does that surname ring a bell from a mention in an earlier book of the real name of perhaps the most popular adventure-book character in Randland?

The book brings in a number of old acquaintances, particularly on the Seanchan side. Egeanin is back to being a Seanchan ship captain again, and — as was to be expected — she’s accompanied by her so’jhin, the sometime riverboat-captain, sometime smuggler Bayle Domon. Bethamin, the sul’dam she captured and then freed in Tanchico, has a role to play, as does the same seeker who troubled her in that city in The Shadow Rising. Even Renna and Seta, the two sul’dam we last saw hoist by their own a’dam in The Great Hunt, are back and playing a more sympathetic role. And Amathera, the one-time Panarch of Tarabon, is now fleeing Ebou Dar with Juilin Sandar, the Tairen thief-catcher. Ah, and that special man-controlling a’dam from the Panarch’s Palace, the one that was supposed to go to the bottom of the ocean, is still around.

On the other hand, we are left hanging over several other things. We get only a glimpse of the Black Tower and the currents flowing there; those who insist that Mazrim Taim is really the Forsaken Demandred (and those who insist that he is not) are going to have to wait at least one more book for a final answer to this question, though there are indications that he is not, and is playing his own unpleasant game. ⁽¹⁾ Though Egwene makes a couple of cameo appearances, she still seems to be stepping through the gateway from Murandy to Tar Valon that she created at the end of The Path of Daggers. And alhough Elayne has negotiated with them, we still don’t know what role the four Borderlander armies moving south into Andor are going to be playing. Except in the (as usual, overlong) prolog, the White Tower plays no role, either. And I really would like to see Nynaeve play a more obvious role in these later books (she could hardly be playing a more important one).

As sometimes happens in books, Jordan introduces a couple of new slants to channeling just at the moment he needs them; no foreshadowing here, but a good example of dei ex machinas. It turns out that an Aes Sedai can mask her warder bond; this is useful when your warder is engaging in activities to which it would be more polite to turn a blind eye (e.g., when he is horizontal but not alone), and also if you are a Black sister and your warder is not a Darkfriend, and you want to shake him. Also, there seem to be a class of ter’angreal known as “Wells”, which allow the owner to store up saidar (and maybe saidin?) against a rainy day — for instance, if the plot-line requires her to channel in a protected area such as an Ogier stedding or the city of Far Madding.

For those who have been annoyed by the way the series is going, I would say that this is definitely the best of the most recent three books, though certainly not up to one or two of the earlier ones (The Shadow Rising comes immediately to mind). Read it and enjoy it. (But if you haven’t read the others in the series, you’ll want them first: The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising, The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, A Crown of Swords, The Path of Daggers.)

⁽¹⁾ Jordan does reveal a couple of other identities. We now know for sure that Moridin is Ishamael reembodied, and Cyndane would definitely appear to be Lanfear reembodied — which, since she disappeared with Moiraine (The Fires of Heaven), gives us a lot of hope that the diminutive Cairhienin Aes Sedai can be recovered later, as well, probably — as an earlier seeing would suggest — by Mat and Thom Merrilin. And we now know where Osan’gar has been hanging out since Lord of Chaos — and, hopefully, we won’t have to worry about him any more.