A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Jon I
At the feast Jon sits below the salt with a wine cup and meets Tyrion Lannister, who teaches him what bastards must make of themselves.
The chapter retold
At the welcoming feast, Jon Snow sits below the salt with the lesser guests, exactly where a lord's bastard belongs by custom, and watches his trueborn siblings feted at the high table. Tyrion Lannister, the queen's dwarf brother, finds him there instead ÔÇö drawn, it seems, less by pity than by fellow feeling for anyone the room has already decided to overlook ÔÇö and offers him counsel no one else at Winterfell has bothered to give a bastard: wear the thing that makes people flinch like armor, because if you let it be a wound instead, it will kill you slower than any blade.
It's a small scene that quietly sets the terms for two of the book's most important character arcs at once. Jon's discomfort with his place in his own family ÔÇö loved by his father, tolerated at best by Catelyn, forever a half-step outside ÔÇö gets its first outside witness in Tyrion, whose own deformity has taught him the exact mechanics of being unwanted in a house that otherwise has everything. Neither of them knows yet how far their paths will run in parallel.
This movement: A Hand's Summons
- A prologue in the haunted forest: Ser Waymar Royce meets the Others, and only a deserter escapes to die at Ned Stark's block.
- Direwolf pups in the summer snows ÔÇö one for each Stark child, and an albino for the bastard.
- Robert comes north with the court to make Ned his Hand; Lysa's letter blames the Lannisters for Jon Arryn.
- Bran climbs, sees the queen and the Kingslayer entwined, and flies. Across the sea, Daenerys is sold to Khal Drogo.