A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Arya I
Arya botches her stitches and flees the sewing circle to watch the boys spar, counting all the ways the world is unfair to girls with skinny arms.
The chapter retold
Arya Stark is exactly as bad at needlework as her septa despairs of, and this chapter catches her fleeing the sewing circle ÔÇö and Sansa's effortless, infuriating competence at it ÔÇö to go watch her brothers spar in the yard instead. She counts up, with a child's blunt arithmetic, all the ways the world hands her brothers swords and lessons and her a needle and a lecture, and the unfairness of it sits in her like a stone she can't put down.
It's a short chapter doing important groundwork: establishing Arya not as a tomboy archetype but as a girl who has correctly noticed that the categories offered to her ÔÇö lady, wife, mother ÔÇö fit her the way Sansa's old dresses would, several sizes wrong in every direction. Her fascination with the yard, with what her brothers get to be good at, is the seed of a wholly different relationship to violence and competence than anyone else in her family will develop, and Ned's later indulgence of it will change the whole shape of her war.
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.