A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Arya III
Chasing cats through the Red Keep, Arya overhears two men in the cellars plotting delay and war ÔÇö Varys and Illyrio, though she cannot name them.
The chapter retold
Arya, chasing one of the Red Keep's many cats through a warren of unused passages for sport, stumbles into the castle's forgotten understructure and overhears two men in conversation about plots, delays and a coming war ÔÇö conspirators speaking with the kind of freedom people only allow themselves when they're certain no one is listening. She can't put names to the voices, though the reader who's been paying attention can guess: Varys and the magister Illyrio, weighing exactly how much chaos serves their purposes and how long to let it brew.
It's a small, almost accidental scene that quietly widens the book's aperture ÔÇö Arya's private game of cat-and-mouse through the castle's guts turns out to be brushing up against forces operating on a scale she has no way to comprehend yet. The half-overheard conversation is never explained to her or to the reader in full, and that incompleteness is the point: the book is reminding its audience that the visible war between Stark and Lannister is not the only game being played in this city, just the loudest one.
This movement: The Eyrie and the Heart
- In the Eyrie's sky cells Tyrion confesses to everything but the crime ÔÇö and buys a trial by combat. Bronn fights; Ser Vardis falls.
- Robert orders Daenerys killed; Ned throws down the Hand's badge; Jaime's men kill Jory in the street.
- In Vaes Dothrak, Dany eats the stallion's heart; Viserys draws steel in the sacred city and is crowned in gold.
- Robert, dying breaths away from a boar, restores the badge and rides to hunt.