A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Tyrion III

Tyrion says his farewells at the Wall, pisses off the edge of the world, and promises Maester Aemon he will send help that never comes.

The chapter retold

Tyrion's promised visit to the Wall reaches its punchline: he stands at the edge of the world and, in his own words, pisses off it ÔÇö a joke on every romantic notion of the Watch's grandeur, delivered by the one visitor clear-eyed enough to see both how absurd and how genuinely necessary the whole ancient institution is. Before he leaves, he sits with the blind, ancient Maester Aemon and promises to tell the realm's lords how undermanned and forgotten the Watch has become, a promise made in good faith that the political chaos to come will make impossible to keep.

It's a chapter that lets Tyrion be simultaneously the funniest and the most clear-sighted character in the book: he alone among the southern visitors actually listens to what the Watch's officers tell him about the things stirring beyond the Wall, without either mocking it as superstition or getting swept up in mysticism. His unkept promise to Aemon becomes one of the book's quieter tragedies ÔÇö not a betrayal, just a decent intention crushed under the weight of everything else about to happen to his family.

This movement: The Hand Investigates

• Ned retraces Jon Arryn's last weeks: a book of lineages, an armorer's shop, a black-haired bastard.
• The Hand's tourney: Ser Hugh of the Vale dies on the Mountain's lance; the Hound saves Loras and wins the crowd.
• Bran wakes, broken; the wolf dreams begin.
• Word of Tyrion's arrest reaches the capital, and lions begin to gather in the west.