A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Eddard V
Jon Arryn's trail: Pycelle's evasions, a heavy book of lineages, and Littlefinger's careful hint about an armorer's shop.
The chapter retold
Ned begins retracing Jon Arryn's final weeks in the capital, and finds the trail deliberately obscured at every turn. Grand Maester Pycelle offers vague, unhelpful recollections about the late Hand's failing health, more interested in cataloguing symptoms than in anything useful; a heavy, ancient book of lineages that Jon Arryn had apparently been poring over in his last days turns up in his old chambers, its purpose opaque. It's Littlefinger, characteristically, who supplies the one lead that actually moves the investigation forward ÔÇö a careless, seemingly offhand mention of an armorer's shop that Jon Arryn had visited more than once before he died.
The chapter is a quiet study in how badly Ned is suited to this particular kind of warfare: a life of northern plainness has left him without the instinct to doubt convenient information, and Pycelle's practiced evasiveness sails past him precisely because Ned expects a maester's counsel to be honest. Littlefinger's hint, dropped so casually, will turn out to be the loose thread that unravels the whole succession crisis ÔÇö proof that in King's Landing, the truth is never given away for free, only traded at a markup Ned doesn't yet know he's paying.
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.