A Clash of Kings — Prologue · Cressen

On Dragonstone under the red comet, old Maester Cressen tries to poison Melisandre with the strangler; she drinks first, smiles — and only he dies.

The chapter retold

The book opens not with a Stark or a Lannister but with an old man dying by inches, which tells you at once what kind of war this will be. Maester Cressen has served two lords of Dragonstone and outlived his usefulness to a third; Stannis Baratheon has a red priestess now, and priestesses do not consult maesters. Cressen watches Melisandre work her court like a conjurer — the fires, the shadowbinding, the certainty that never once flickers — and decides, in the quiet, desperate logic of a man with nothing left to lose, that the realm would be safer with her dead. He hides a pinch of the strangler in a cup of wine at Stannis’s welcoming feast and drinks his own poisoned half first, so she must drink the rest to keep up appearances.

She does. She smiles through it and lives; Cressen chokes and dies at her feet, and nobody in the hall quite understands what they’ve just watched. It is the book’s founding lesson about magic and its skeptics: a lifetime of careful, rational service counts for nothing against a woman who does not play by the maester’s rules, and Cressen’s murder-suicide fails so completely it barely registers as an attempt. The comet overhead that everyone will spend the next seventy chapters arguing about first burns red above this scene — an old man’s last, futile rebellion against a new and stranger age.

This movement: The Comet

• A red comet splits the sky; five would-be kings each read their crown in it.
• On Dragonstone, Maester Cressen tries to poison the red priestess and drinks first; Stannis proclaims Joffrey a bastard born of incest.
• Tyrion takes the Hand's chair with Bronn at his back and starts removing his sister's men.
• Beyond the Wall, the Old Bear leads three hundred swords north into silence.

The fallen — spoilers

• Maester Cressen — Drank his own poison to kill the red woman; the red woman finished her cup.