Winter’s Heart was published by Tor Books in 2000. The novel’s central event — and one of the most important in the entire series — is Rand’s cleansing of saidin. Using the Choedan Kal (the most powerful sa’angreal ever made) and the evil of Shadar Logoth as a conduit, Rand draws the taint off the male half of the Source and channels it into Shadar Logoth, destroying the city utterly. The cleansing is witnessed by every channeler in the world and attacked by most of the Forsaken, making the climax one of the series’ largest set-piece battles.
The cleansing of saidin fundamentally changes the world’s dynamics: male channelers will no longer go mad, the Asha’man can exist as a permanent institution, and the central tragedy of the Age (men destroying everything they love as the taint corrupts them) is ended.
The Cleansing
The cleansing sequence is Jordan’s most ambitious magical set piece. The scale — two channelers wielding the most powerful objects in the world, thirteen Forsaken attacking simultaneously, the destruction of an entire cursed city — dwarfs anything in the previous eight volumes. Jordan’s description of channeling on this scale has an almost psychedelic quality: reality itself strains under the forces being deployed.
Mat and Tuon
The novel also develops Mat’s relationship with Tuon, the Seanchan Daughter of the Nine Moons. Their courtship — conducted under the constraints of Seanchan prophecy and Mat’s ta’veren nature — is one of the series’ most entertaining romantic subplots, played as comedy of manners within an epic fantasy framework.
Collecting Winter’s Heart
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2000): Boards with dust jacket.
Approximate market values:
- Fine in dust jacket (first printing): $25–$60
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation. The cleansing is a landmark event, but the novel’s pacing issues limit collector enthusiasm.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the cleansing of saidin really a big deal? It is arguably the single most important event in the entire series. The taint on saidin has been the world’s defining problem for three thousand years, and Rand solves it in a single desperate act.
Does the series pick up after this? The immediate next volume (Crossroads of Twilight) is even slower, but Knife of Dreams (volume eleven) is widely considered a return to the series’ best form.