Leavetakings! They’re all taking their leave! Bye bye, now! Wave and smile, you’ll never see any of them again!

Ingtar, Fal Dara’s main muscle, leads Rand’s group. This would be Ingtar, Uno, Masema, Ragan, Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Loial. Rand apologizes to his buddies and they are all receptive to his sheepish tail-between-the-legs blatherings after a fashion. Rand is wearing really formal clothes, though, which is still causing his group to SNOOT and SNORT at him. At some point, Lan pulls Rand aside and teaches him about “Sheathing the Sword”. It sounds like a sex euphemism, but I’m pretty sure Lan was talking about killing oneself when the going gets rough. Chew a cyanide tablet like a normal person.

As Siuan and her group tries to leave, an arrow whisks along out of nowhere and clips Siuan. The lone gunman in the grassy knoll! She waves it off like this assassination attempt was a whole bunch of nothing because she believes the bowman was aiming for Rand, not her. And Rand is, like, waaaay over there! Poor shot!

Ingtar’s men take their leave and meet up with a man named Hurin, a “sniffer”. He smells the air and he can tell you how many turds Loial pooped six hours ago. He can also track Darkfriends like a hound, because he is able to “smell violence”. His nose knows to head south, so south they go.

The last half of the chapter focuses on Bayle Domon, the captain of the ship, the Spray, who saved Rand, Mat, Perrin, and Thom Gleeman Merrilin after Shadar Logoth in The Eye of the World. He’s hanging around Illian (where Rand’s group will be headed AFTER they find the Horn of Valere) and not particularly reveling in the festivities. At an inn, Domon is approached by three men who instruct him to deliver a person and a sealed envelope to the eastern ports of Illian, and that they will pay HANDSOMELY for the effort. Domon is like “pah!” but decides to do it for the HANDSOME sum, staying wary that someone is paying him a lot of money to go east…

One of Domon’s crew informs him that a man of his was killed. His men have been dying in droves, but usually it’s because Domon keeps declining jobs. Weird that a man died after a job was accepted, no? At any rate, they start working on setting sail. Domon unseals the letter with a little bit of heat, a knife, and some semen, and reads the letter. It’s from the King of Cairhien, reporting that Domon is a nogoodnik and that he should be arrested and hanged for his Darkfriend crimes! Domon is spooked! He instructs his crew to start sailing west, opposite the direction he was paid to travel.

Intrigue! Suspense! Characters I don’t care much about! But maybe that will change as I keep reading this brick.