A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Catelyn VI
Up the mountain road to the Eyrie, through the Bloody Gate ÔÇö where Lysa's welcome is madness, and Tyrion is given to the sky cells.
The chapter retold
Catelyn brings her prisoner up the last dangerous stretch of the mountain road to the Eyrie, through the Bloody Gate where a handful of Vale knights could hold off an army, and delivers Tyrion into the hands of her sister Lysa Arryn ÔÇö only to discover that Lysa's welcome is not the ally's relief Catelyn expected but something closer to madness. Lysa, still nursing Robert's boy Sweetrobin at an age well past weaning and consumed by paranoia since her husband's death, seems less interested in justice than in performance, and Tyrion is thrown into one of the Eyrie's infamous sky cells, open to a seven-hundred-foot drop and howling wind, to await a trial that increasingly looks like theater rather than law.
The chapter recasts Catelyn's earlier triumph at the crossroads inn in a much colder light: the ally she rode to for justice turns out to be unstable, self-interested and frightening in her own right, and Catelyn realizes, too late to undo it, that she has delivered her prisoner into a court with even less regard for due process than the one she avoided. Lysa's household ÔÇö sky cells for punishment, a boy-lord who should have been weaned years ago, a castle build for isolation rather than governance ÔÇö becomes its own quiet warning about what unchecked grief and fear can do to power.
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.