A Clash of Kings — Catelyn II

At Bitterbridge Renly plays at war amid tourneys and peaches; a woman in blue armor wins the melee and asks only to guard her king — Brienne of Tarth.

The chapter retold

At Bitterbridge, Catelyn finds Renly’s court playing at war the way other courts play at a tourney — silk pavilions, peaches, a hundred thousand men treated as a backdrop for pageantry rather than an instrument of it. The centerpiece of the chapter is a melee won, astonishingly, by a woman: Brienne of Tarth, huge and homely and better with a sword than every knight who mocked her before the bout, unhorsing Renly’s own champion. Her prize request is not gold or glory but a place in Renly’s Kingsguard, guarding the one king she has chosen to believe in.

Renly grants it, delighted by the novelty as much as the merit, and the chapter introduces one of the book’s most important loyalties almost sideways — a request nobody in that glittering camp takes quite seriously enough. Catelyn, watching Renly’s court spend its enormous strength on entertainment while Robb’s war grinds on without allies, comes away with a diplomatic mission that looks less promising with every peach eaten in her presence.

This movement: Kings in Every Corner

• Stannis besieges Storm's End; the brothers parley with a peach between them and part as dead men.
• Catelyn watches a shadow with Stannis's face open Renly's throat inside his own pavilion.
• Tyrion trades princess Myrcella's hand to Dorne and ships Cersei's spies to the black cells.
• At Winterfell, Bran dreams with wolf's teeth; the Reeds of Greywater come to teach him what it means.