A Clash of Kings — Theon I

Theon comes home to Pyke and finds contempt: his father plans to take the North with iron, not join it, and his sister has his ship.

The chapter retold

Theon comes home to Pyke expecting a hero’s welcome and gets contempt instead. His father Balon has spent ten years since his failed rebellion nursing a new plan — take the North by iron while its strength marches south — and has no use for a son raised soft in Ned Stark’s household, mainland manners scraped onto what should have been an ironborn heart. Worse, his sister Asha commands her own ship and her father’s confidence in a way Theon, despite a decade of waiting, has never been offered.

The humiliation lands exactly where it hurts most: Theon has spent his whole life split between two families, wanted fully by neither, and Pyke’s welcome makes the ironborn half of that inheritance feel just as conditional as the Stark half always was. What the chapter plants is the engine of everything Theon does for the rest of the book — a desperate need to prove himself worth more than the disdain his own father hands him on arrival, a need that will cost Winterfell dearly.

This movement: Wolves and Krakens

• Theon comes home to Pyke and finds his father plotting war on the North — and his sister Asha commanding the ships he wanted.
• Renly weds Margaery Tyrell and parades a hundred thousand swords through the Reach at tourney pace.
• Dany leads her khalasar out of the red waste to the gates of Qarth, three dragons her only argument.
• Yoren's column is broken at a lakeside holdfast; Arya frees Jaqen H'ghar from a burning barn.