You believe Graendal was making these efforts to prevent Rand from finding her.

I don't think it's what she was doing at all. I don't think she had fears he could trace her agents back to her hiding place. I think she was totally confident in her Compulsion. Even Semirhage wasn't pleased to be asked to remove a Compulsion net. Graendal was not foolish to assume Rand had no one who could do it succesfully. Assuming otherwise would mean being shy/overcautious and by this lack of confidence deprive herself of much of her toolbox.

It didn't matter that Kerb knew her hiding place. He wasn't supposed to be able to reveal it. It's a big strike of sheer luck that the man hated Graendal so deeply that a part of his mind was able to spit this information out before he died, because Rand mentionned he could stop her if he knew where she was.

Graendal didn't fear that Rand found out some of her agents like Kerb - anyone who can delve could figure out she's compelled this or that person.

Graendal was under orders to frustrate Rand and increase his despair.

She let him catch a Councilor. He thinks he can track down the others and have them elect a new King, but she gets a few assassinated. Not all of them - he would have abandonned this solution immediately and think of something else. No, she killed just a few so he expanded the efforts to find them and it's in the end fruitless, more and more frustrating for him, more and more a waste of time and effort. Wherever he turned, Graendal seemed everywhere and more and more he would have gotten paranoid, wondering if there was a point in attempting anything, since anyone could be one of her pawns... Before long, he would have started wondering if he could actually trust Ituralde and his men. Had he delved some of them, including Ituralde, he would no longer have trusted these men...

She let him catch Milisair and get useless clues about the King, then she made Milisair vanish. Before long Rand would have tried to locate her, and it would have lead to a dead end: she's been assassinated (only to convince Rand she could have revealed something, but he lost her before she could). Then there was Kerb, but even if he tracked him down as Milisair's assassin, this would have lead nowhere, or on yet another false trail. Rand would have lost his time.


And the "big glitch" of Graendal's death aside (a course of events she could not foresee for all sort of reasons, including that Rand suddenly changed and did something that days ago would have been unthinkable to him and out of character), her plans worked, and in the typical Graendal way it was all extremely economical as far as the level of active efforts from her was concerned). Rand did get totally frustrated with the Domani situation, gave up and left. A success, if not for the little bug that thanks to Semirhage Rand suddenly started playing the game like the Forsaken themselves, with none of the usual restraints of Lightsiders, and he used a tactic even the Shadow abandonned during the WOP as too dangerous... The last thing Graendal would have expected is LTT to make massive use of balefire, with the Pattern already weakened.