A Clash of Kings — Davos III

The Blackwater becomes green fire: the trap closes on Stannis's fleet, and Davos loses his ship, four sons, and nearly the sea itself.

The chapter retold

The Blackwater becomes a wall of green fire as Tyrion’s wildfire trap detonates beneath Stannis’s advancing fleet, and the chapter delivers the battle’s cost in full to the one man who has spent the whole book waiting for the sea to take everything from him. Davos loses his ship, watches the wildfire’s bloom take four of his sons in a single stretch of burning water, and very nearly loses himself to the bay as well, blown overboard and left fighting the current alone.

It’s the single most devastating chapter given to any point-of-view character in the book — Davos’s entire identity, built patiently across a lifetime of smuggling turned respectability turned knighthood, is reduced in minutes to a man drowning amid burning wreckage that used to be his family’s future. The wildfire that saves King’s Landing does so at a cost the city itself will never see or reckon with — paid instead, invisibly, by the men on the water.

This movement: The Battle of the Blackwater

• The bay goes up in green fire; Stannis's fleet burns between a chain and a trap.
• Tyrion leads the sortie when Joffrey is pulled from the walls — and a Kingsguard's sword opens his face to the bone.
• Sansa keeps the highborn women singing while Cersei drinks and plans their deaths.
• Tywin and the knights of Highgarden take Stannis in the flank; ghost-Renly's shadow rides in the vanguard of gossip.

The fallen — spoilers

• Matthos Seaworth — Davos's son, burned on the Blackwater with three of his brothers when the wildfire bloomed.