A Game of Thrones ÔÇö Bran II
Bran climbs the broken tower and finds the queen and her twin entwined; Jaime pushes him from the window ÔÇö ÔÇ£the things I do for love.ÔÇØ
The chapter retold
Bran Stark, forbidden by his mother to climb but constitutionally unable to stop, scales the abandoned tower behind Winterfell's armory the way he's climbed a hundred other walls ÔÇö quietly, competently, for the sheer physical joy of being somewhere he isn't supposed to be. What he finds through the window stops him cold: Queen Cersei and her twin brother Ser Jaime Lannister, entwined in a way no brother and sister should be. For one suspended moment the three of them simply look at each other, the boy in the window and the incestuous lovers he's just caught, and the silence is worse than any shout.
Jaime Lannister's solution is immediate and horrifying in its calm: he takes the boy by the wrists and, with an almost gentle apology ÔÇö the things I do for love ÔÇö pushes him from the window to the ground far below. It's the single most consequential accident of violence in the entire book, delivered without raising his voice, by a man the story has not yet told us anything redeeming about.
Structurally, this is the hinge the whole plot turns on: everything from Catelyn's assassin hunt to the war that follows traces back to a seven-year-old boy seeing something he wasn't meant to see. Thematically, it's the first time the book shows its hand about what golden, celebrated people are capable of protecting ÔÇö and the ease with which Jaime commits an act that will define him for the rest of the series is the exact opposite of the labored, deliberate violence Ned dispensed with Ice two chapters earlier. One house swings the sword and owns the killing; the other pushes a child from a window and calls it love.
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.