Books The Wheel of Time Reading The Wheel of Time: Mat and Company Encounter a Terrifying Town in The Gathering Storm (Part 18) Mat visits a town that seems stuck in its ways, somehow… By Sylas K Barrett | Published on February 24, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back all to Reading The Wheel of Time! This week we are covering chapters 27 and 28, in which Mat goes to a very strange town to cheat at dice and win supplies for the Band, and gets a little more than he bargained for. In a scary, Dark One’s Touch sort of way. It’s a lot of fun to read, though no fun at all for Mat, or anyone else involved. Let’s get started on that recap. Mat leaves the encamped Band and heads toward a town, accompanied by Joline, Teslyn, and Edesina, their Warders, five soldiers, Talmanes, and Thom. Despite his lingering annoyance at being accompanied by the Aes Sedai, Mat is feeling less out of sorts, and more like himself. Mat catches Thom looking at Moiraine’s letter, and suggests he try to put it aside for now; he will keep his word to help Thom find the Tower of Ghenjei, but first they need to get the Band somewhere safe, and to get information. He bolsters Thom’s spirits and Thom even gets out his gleeman’s cloak. The Aes Sedai attract a crowd, as does Thom, but the mayor, Barlden, explains that they have little to trade; all the food they have has either spoiled or is needed to feed themselves. They are interested in cloth, however, and Mat notices that a lot of the villagers’ clothing seems like it has been torn and then carefully mended. There is also a curfew: All outsiders must be out of the town by nightfall, which is only a few hours away, even the Aes Sedai. Mat goes looking for a place to put his plan into motion and finds a tavern that caters to working locals. He asks to join a game of dice, offering to put up gold against the other players’ silver. But instead of using his luck to win coins, he uses it to intentionally lose. When Talmanes expresses concern, Mat assures him that this is part of his plan. As the time passed, more and more people began gathering around the table. Mat made sure to win a few tosses—just as he had to lose a bit when spending a night winning, he didn’t want to arouse any suspicions about his losing streak. Yet bit by bit, the coins in his pouches ended up in the hands of the men playing against him. As the game continues, Talmanes expresses a new concern: The villagers are a little too wrapped up in their revelry, and they are completely unconcerned about the larger world, even about the Seanchan and the Dragon Reborn.  Eventually the mayor arrives to see the fuss over Mat and his losing streak. When his purse is finally empty Mat has the other soldiers bring in the chest, and offers to wager the whole thing on one last throw. But even with their winnings, the villagers don’t have enough to even come close to matching the contents of Mat’s chest. As if the idea has just come to him, Mat suggests barter instead of coins. Again Barlden reminds him that he has to leave, but Mat insists that there is time for one more throw. Men in the crowd begin to make offers—a wagon and team, some casks of ale, grain and potatoes from people’s personal cellars. As the villagers go to collect the supplies, Barlden informs him that he knows Mat is cheating, using dice loaded to lose, setting himself up for a miracle win. The mayor declares that he will allow Mat to have one more toss, but he picks the dice for the toss, and Barlden himself will throw them. Mat doesn’t know how his luck will work if someone else makes the throw, but he agrees to the terms, shocking the mayor. As they wait for the villagers to bring back the supplies, Mat begins to feel guilty. He tells himself he has no reason to—he is betting fair, no loaded dice, and with his own luck, just like everyone else. When the mayor makes the throw, Mat watches with anxiety, as it’s been a long time since he has had to worry about the outcome of a throw of the dice, but it comes up a winning hand. Disgusted, Barlden tells Mat to take his winnings and get out. The mayor and the men with him, who seem to be acting as bodyguards or enforcers of some sort, make everyone go back inside until suddenly, eerily, the street is utterly empty. “Well,” Mat said, voice echoing against silent housefronts, “I guess that’s that.” He walked over to Pips, calming the horse, who had begun to shuffle nervously. “Now, see, I told you, Talmanes. Nothing to be worried about at all.” And that’s when the screaming began. Mat, Talmanes, Harnan, and the other Redarms with him are suddenly attacked by wild, howling villagers, who are also attacking each other. They aren’t interested in the supplies or Mat’s chest of gold, but Mat is forced to abandon both just to get away alive. There didn’t seem to be an ounce of humanity left in them. They spoke only in grunts, hisses, and screams, their faces painted with anger and bloodlust. Now the other villagers—those not directly attacking Mat’s men—started forming into packs, slaughtering the groups smaller than themselves by bludgeoning them, clawing them, biting them. Mat leads his men away towards the other inns, so that they can find Thom and the Aes Sedai. One of the Redarms, Delarn, is pulled from his horse by the mob. Talmanes calls for Mat to keep riding, but Mat can’t bring himself to leave the man. He fights through the throng in the dark, killing maddened villagers as if they were Shadowspawn, but he can’t reach Delarn. Mat is about to be overcome when Thom appears, and his knives take out Mat’s closest attackers. Mat manages to get an injured Delarn onto Pips. Everyone heads for the inn where they know the Aes Sedai went for food and baths. They see flashes of light coming from the upper windows—sisters channeling balls of fire. They leave the horses and Delarn in the stableyard, which is empty and quiet, and sneak into the inn past corpses of adults and children. There is fighting on the stairwell and those flashes of Aes Sedai fireballs, so they sneak up the servants’ stairs and are nearly incinerated when they appear behind Joline and the others. The Warders are there as well, along with quite a few tied-up servants, all struggling violently. The Aes Sedai insist on bringing the two young bathing attendants, not wanting to leave them to be slaughtered by the mob trying to get up the stairs. The Warders carry the girls and everyone hurries back the way they came. Edesina is able to heal Delarn and Harnan and everyone follows a path that leads straight out of the village. Later, camped up in the hills, Mat worries that he somehow caused the violence by overstaying and breaking the curfew. Thom shows Mat a drawing he obtained from a drunk man. It is a picture of Mat; apparently a woman in a nearby village has been passing them out and offering a reward for information about Mat’s whereabouts. Suddenly the two serving girls disappear right from under the Warders’ noses. Nobody can figure out what happened to them, but Mat is certain that the answers lie in Hinderstap. He and Thom set off for the village. They are shocked to find all the villagers alive, including some Mat saw die, and some he killed himself. Barlden arrives, and explains that the phenomenon began a few months ago. No matter where any villager is when the sun sets, they wake up in the morning in their own bed, with no memory of what happened the night before. Everyone has a vague sense of nightmares and disturbed sleep, but no one dies and there is no evidence of blood or killing—and indeed, Mat spotted bloodstains in the place where Delarn was wounded but nowhere else. However, damage to clothing or objects does stay. Barlden goes on to explain that no one can leave the village; no matter where they are come nightfall, they wake up back in Hinderstap. Some people even committed suicide during the day and were buried, but they, too, woke up back in the town the next morning. All visitors who stay the night also wake up in empty beds, trapped in the same cycle and unable to leave. Except for Mat and his companions. Mat offers to send word to the White Tower, but Barlden insists they don’t want Aes Sedai studying them, and that they know how to manage their situation now, with their rules and their repair work. Barlden urges, almost begs, Mat to leave, and Mat agrees, but first he asks about the woman who is looking for him. Barlden reports that rumor says that one can earn a little coin if one brings word of Mat, or the other one with the beard and golden eyes, to some woman in the town of Trustair. Mat’s gold and his winnings are packed in the wagon and waiting for him as he and Thom leave. Mat confirms to Thom that they are going to go find whoever is looking for him. He estimates how much the goods are worth and leaves payment on the doorstep, along with a little extra. Thom asks if they are really going to take anything from these people, but Mat reminds him that they need the food. He also points out that the people of Hinderstap don’t need the wagon and team. They won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Well, that was certainly an adventure. “Nothing to be worried about.” Really Mat? You might as well have said, “What could go wrong?” or “Things can’t get any worse.” The man may have learned a lot since he left home (I particularly enjoyed the bit where he reflected that Hinderstap is a small town, then realized that he once thought of Baerlon, which is about the same size, as a huge city) but he’s fundamentally still the same kid who thought it was a good idea to take a creepy dagger from a cursed Evil city. He’ll always be a little bit chaotic, our Mat. Maybe that’s why he has powers that affect the odds—it’s to balance out the chaos of his being. I appreciated how visual and cinematic these chapters were. It’s something that Jordan excelled at, so seeing it here in Sanderson’s work is really nice. Plot-wise, not much happens: We get the setup for whoever is looking for Mat and Perrin (a Darkfriend working for the Forsaken, presumably, though it’s possible that it could be be an ally) and some discussion between Mat and Thom about Mat’s feelings around his fate and ta’veren nature, which may pay off in further character development. But mostly, this chapter exists just to be an experience, and to show us yet another way in which the Dark One’s touch is affecting the world and the people in it. It’s hard to say if what is happening in Hinderstap is a Bubble of Evil or the Pattern unraveling. Either way, the effects in the village seem to be lasting longer than we’ve seen so far, except for the village Perrin encountered that kept seeing ghosts of dead relatives and townspeople. I’m trying to decide if waking up uninjured (and with only vague nightmare memories of what happens after sunset) is a blessing or a curse. Despite Barlden’s insistence their lives “aren’t so bad” now that they “know how to deal with” their situation, it is clearly taking a huge toll on the populace. Talmanes notices how tense and desperate everyone seems, and Mat notices how tired everyone is, tired with something more than a normal day’s work. The town will probably also be dealing with the same deprivation that the rest of the world is experiencing due to the delay of spring and the spoilage of both crops and stores, a deprivation that may well be exacerbated by their relatively restricted ability to trade and interact with outsiders. Also, it seems like even the vague memories of nightmares are pretty horrific. I initially thought that Mat and company didn’t end up trapped in the cycle because of Mat’s ta’veren influence, but it actually seems to be that it’s because none of them died. The telling detail is given when Barlden explains how the cooper’s relatives became trapped after spending the night in the town. We found blood on the walls of his home the next morning. But his sister and her family were safely asleep in the beds he’d given them.” The mayor paused. “Now they have the same nightmares we do.” But in the beginning of the conversation, Barlden tells Mat that the blood vanishes. Mat makes a point of how there is no blood anywhere except in the spot where Delarn was wounded. If Sammrie’s relatives also left bloodstains the first time, perhaps that is why they were caught up in the cycle: They were killed by the villagers (as of course they would be, being normal people and not warriors, ta’veren, and Aes Sedai) and then became part of the reset. Perhaps the initial bubble of evil only lasted one night, but everyone who died was infected by it. Now they are passing it on like some kind of contagion. In which case, Delarn is very, very lucky that they were traveling with Aes Sedai. In any case, the situation in Hinderstap is a terrible fate for its people, but perhaps things aren’t quite as bad as it was for the people of So Harbor, who seemed both much more afraid and much more despondent than the Hinderstapians. The denizens of So Harbor have no memory loss to hide the worst from them, after all. Then again, maybe the difference is leadership. Barlden seems like he is doing a good job keeping people together and working as a community, while Cowlin abandoned his people as soon as the ghosts started appearing. I continue to love Talmanes and Mat’s dynamic. They’re like a more serious version of Miguel and Tulio from The Road to Eldorado. Talmanes, who seems very logical and smart, wanting to have a nice time and drink good wine, and Mat, equally clever but also a scamp, coming up with wild schemes and getting them both into trouble. When Talmanes was yelling at Mat in the beginning of chapter 28, I kept thinking of that bit in the The Road to Eldorado, when Miguel tells Tulio not to blame him, and Tulio just responds “I blame you.” Funnily enough, that moment in the movie was a gambling scene involving loaded dice and a final hail Mary toss with non-loaded dice, and which seems to have worked out for the protagonists purely as a matter of fate. Personally, I think Mat should feel guilty about using his luck ability this way. Until chapter 27, I hadn’t realized how much control Mat actually had over the fall of the dice. While he mentions to Talmanes that he can lose on purpose if its advantageous (ie. lucky) to do so, it does feel like he is exerting conscious will over the outcome of the dice. He also says that he “makes sure to win” a little at the game, just as he “makes sure to lose a little” at other games. So it’s not quite as simple as him just throwing the dice and knowing that the best possible outcome will always be his; Mat is doing something, making some kind of choice to control an outcome that is supposed to be random. Even if Mat wasn’t exerting some kind of will, the fact that his abilities alter chance makes his gambling inherently cheating. Which, in my personal opinion, doesn’t matter too much in ordinary circumstances, but he was knowingly taking advantage of being able to manipulate the Pattern to get his desired outcome, even after being told that the people of the town had no food to spare. He tells himself that it’s the same as a gleeman using his talents to make money, but Mat isn’t performing, and he isn’t really offering anything of value in exchange for his manipulations. He himself, in an earlier chapter, called using loaded dice “cheating honestly” because the other players have the ability to catch the cheater. But Barlden figured out exactly what Mat’s plan was, and knew he was cheating, yet never in a million years could he have figured out how, or been able to prove it. Even taking away every opportunity for cheating he could think of, Barlden couldn’t stop Mat from controlling the outcome of the dice throw. Which isn’t to say that I think Mat’s a bad person. He does end up paying for the food when it isn’t expected, and he himself is in the difficult position of  needing to provide for the people under his leadership, just as Barlden does for the townspeople. But it does seem important that Mat be honest with himself about what he does and how he does it, and that is something that the man struggles with from time to time. Like his feelings about Rand. I loved that Thom called him out when Mat said that Rand liked having all the ta’veren effects and Darkfriend attention coming his way. Mat had already reflected, in the previous chapter, about his feelings for Rand. He considers Rand a friend, and knows that they are fated to fight in the Last Battle together, but he contrasts that friendship with the “stupidity” of staying near someone who is fated to go mad and kill everyone he knows. And while he knows he will fight in the Last Battle, he hopes he will be as far away as possible from any “saidin-wielding madmen.” Of course, everyone feels this way about Rand to a degree, except maybe his three girlfriends. But Mat’s reaction to learning that Rand is the Dragon reborn has always been the most vehement of all his Two Rivers friends. He was the most willing to express, out loud, sentiments like the one above, while everyone else at least tried to temper their reactions. Everyone else thought, “but this is Rand, how could I see him in such a way?” even as they were filled with fear about what his identity meant. Mat can be a little nasty sometimes, especially when he is scared. We saw Talmanes call him out on exactly this when he was especially harsh and rude to Joline; Talmanes realizes that Mat is out of sorts because he is worried about Tuon. However, we also see time and again that his heart is in the right place. This reminds me of the fact that most people (Mat and Perrin included) still don’t know saidin has been cleansed. I wonder if they will disbelieve Rand, or whoever tells them about it. Will they be more likely than the Aes Sedai to believe it, since they aren’t experts (or as close as this Age has to that) in the One Power? Or will they be less likely, possibly for the same reason? I was also fascinated by Thom’s mentioning of the old song supposedly written by Doreille, an ancient queen of Aridhol. It brings Shadar Logoth and the ruby dagger back to Mat’s mind, and he feels the old desire for it again, even though the connection was severed by the Aes Sedai. It’s a reminder of how much Shadar Logoth and Padan Fain are inspired by The Lord of The Rings, specifically Mordor and Gollum. Fain, who is compelled to chase the main hero due to a connection not of his own making. The dagger, which corrupts the spirit of anyone who holds it, making them into something very like the original evil who wrought it. And it’s also a reminder of how fascinatingly weird Mat’s life is. He has both a connection to Shadar Logoth through the dagger and to Aridhol through the memories he was given by the Eelfinn. Both connections belong to men who are not him: Te Shadar Logoth connection belongs to Mordeth, the Aridhol connection to some long-dead man or men whose memories the Eelfinn gave him to fill the gaps in his own. I’m still mad that the memories weren’t all from Mat’s past lives, but it is interesting to see Mat have so many connections to pasts that are not his own. It makes you wonder if it is more than just his impulsive nature that leads him to grab spooky daggers in Evil dead cities and throw himself through mysterious portal doorways for unclear reasons. As a ta’veren, Mat manipulates the odds—but the odds can manipulate back. Mat seems increasingly aware of the idea of fate, too. We see this when he considers that returning to the land of the Eelfinn always felt a little inevitable. As he himself considers, both the snakes and the foxes got the better of him during their respective encounters. But Mat knows a lot more now than he did then, and I am excited to maybe see him win an encounter for a change. I also thought it was poignant that Mat was just thinking a few chapters earlier about how the next time he sees an Aes Sedai in trouble he is going leave her “weeping in her bonds,” and now not only is he preparing to save Moiraine, but he even considers that he will try to save Lanfear, too. And the Snakes and Foxes game teaches that you can only win if you break the rules. Does that sound like an encounter basically made for Mat to anyone else? I suspect that Olver will have a surprise role to play, too. Thom observes that the boy knows that he can’t be one of the three who go into the Tower of Ghenjei, but that he intends to accompany them to the tower and wait outside, and perhaps be available to mount a rescue if they need it. Mat and Thom agree that neither wants to be present when Olver is told he can’t come even that far. But I can’t help but wonder if Olver will surprise them somehow. After all, the only way to beat the Eelfinn and Aelfinn… is to break the rules. We won’t have a post next week because I will be on vacation, so I will see you all on March 10th with chapters 29 and 30. Rand and Gawyn. Fun![end-mark] The post Reading The Wheel of Time: Mat and Company Encounter a Terrifying Town in <i>The Gathering Storm</i> (Part 18) appeared first on Reactor.