A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Tyrion VI
Tyrion and Bronn walk out of the Vale alive; around a clan fire, Tyrion buys the mountain tribes with the promise of the Vale itself.
The chapter retold
Tyrion and Bronn ride out of the Vale alive, the trial behind them and the whole ordeal reduced, in retrospect, to a story Tyrion can dine out on. Around a clan fire on the way down from the mountains, Tyrion makes good on the promises he'd started extending back in the ambush chapters, offering the assembled hill tribes ÔÇö Shagga, Timett, Chella and their fellow clansmen ÔÇö something no lowland lord has ever bothered to give them: a real stake in the Vale itself, land and standing in exchange for their swords.
It's the payoff of Tyrion's transactional instincts from earlier in the journey, and it demonstrates something the book will keep proving about him: he wins loyalty other Lannisters can only buy, by actually understanding what the people he's negotiating with want and are owed, rather than simply assuming gold solves everything. The clansmen he recruits here will matter a great deal once real war reaches the riverlands ÔÇö an army raised not through House Lannister's gold but through Tyrion's own read of human motivation.
This movement: The Wine and the Boar
- Ned tells Cersei what he knows and gives her time to run ÔÇö mercy with a body count.
- A boar opens the king; Robert dictates a will naming Ned Protector; Ned edits one word: heir.
- A wineseller's poison misses Daenerys; Drogo promises his son the iron chair across the poison water.
- Renly flees south; Littlefinger promises the gold cloaks; the trap in the throne room closes.