A Game of Thrones — Prologue · Will

Beyond the Wall, Ser Waymar Royce mocks the cold until pale shapes with burning blue eyes rise out of it; Will watches his lordling die — and rise.

The chapter retold

The book opens past the edge of the map the rest of the story will live on: three rangers of the Night's Watch, sent to find a missing wildling band, find them all dead in a clearing that should not be so cold. Ser Waymar Royce is young, lordly and contemptuous of Gared's forty years of experience, and his pride keeps the party in the open after dark instead of riding for the Wall. What comes for them out of the trees is not wildlings — pale, silent shapes with eyes like burning blue stars, moving in a stillness that human beings do not move in. Royce dies first, cut to ribbons by a blade of what looks like ice.

It is a strange, sideways door into a story that will spend most of its length on courts and castles hundreds of leagues south of here, and that is exactly the point — Martin opens with the one truth that outranks every claim, betrothal and murder to follow, then lets the whole realm ignore it for a very long time. Will's report reaches Winterfell as a deserter's tale, believed by no one who matters, and the man who hears it responds the only way the North knows how: with a headsman's block. The reader alone starts the book knowing what the characters spend it forgetting.

This movement: A Hand's Summons

• A prologue in the haunted forest: Ser Waymar Royce meets the Others, and only a deserter escapes to die at Ned Stark's block.
• Direwolf pups in the summer snows — one for each Stark child, and an albino for the bastard.
• Robert comes north with the court to make Ned his Hand; Lysa's letter blames the Lannisters for Jon Arryn.
• Bran climbs, sees the queen and the Kingslayer entwined, and flies. Across the sea, Daenerys is sold to Khal Drogo.

The fallen — spoilers

• Ser Waymar Royce — Cut down by the Others in the haunted forest — the first in eight thousand years.
• Will — Strangled by the dead thing that had been his commander.