A Clash of Kings — Tyrion XIV

“Halfman! Halfman!” — Tyrion leads the charge along the riverfront until Ser Mandon Moore's sword opens his face; a squire's spear saves him.

The chapter retold

"Halfman! Halfman!" the sellswords chant as Tyrion leads the desperate charge along the riverfront, driving Stannis’s landing force back from the walls in the battle’s most chaotic close-quarters fighting. It’s the peak of his physical courage in the whole book — genuinely leading men rather than merely commanding them — and it ends in catastrophe: Ser Mandon Moore, a white-cloaked Kingsguard with dead, unreadable eyes, turns on Tyrion mid-battle and opens his face to the bone with a single stroke.

Only a squire’s spear — Podrick Payne, barely noticed before this moment — saves Tyrion from the follow-up blow that would have killed him outright. Mandon Moore’s attack reads immediately as what it is: not chaos, but an assassination attempt disguised as battlefield confusion, ordered by someone inside King’s Landing who wanted Tyrion dead before the battle even finished being won. He survives, badly maimed, but the chapter marks the exact moment his triumph curdles into vulnerability — scarred, half-conscious, and entirely at the mercy of a city that was never as grateful to him as it should have been.

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

• Ser Mandon Moore — A white knight with dead eyes, drowned by Podrick Payne mid-murder.