A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Tyrion IV
On the high road to the Vale the mountain clans attack; Tyrion fights with a shield and his wits, and starts buying clansmen with promises.
The chapter retold
Escorting Tyrion's own path away from the story briefly overlaps here with Ned's larger drama: on the high mountain road toward the Vale, the clansmen of the Mountains of the Moon ÔÇö the same lawless raiders whose depredations no lord has ever bothered to stamp out ÔÇö fall on Tyrion's escort. Tyrion fights with nothing more than a shield and his considerable wits, surviving the ambush more through cleverness than swordcraft, and immediately begins turning captured or cornered clansmen to his own purposes, buying loyalty with the one currency he has plenty of: promises of what he can offer them once he's free.
The ambush is Tyrion's first real combat, and it's telling that he survives it not through martial skill ÔÇö he has none worth boasting of ÔÇö but through the same transactional intelligence that defines every other part of his life. Recruiting the very men who nearly killed him is a preview of the political method he'll use for the rest of the book: never mind who your enemy was five minutes ago, only what they might become useful for next.
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.