A Clash of Kings — Sansa VII

The tide turns: riders in green armor under a dead king's banners shatter Stannis on the shore — Tywin and the Tyrells, and the city is saved for the lion.

The chapter retold

The tide turns with trumpets rather than magic: riders in green and gold under Tywin Lannister’s banners — and, more startling still, under Renly’s dead colors, a piece of Littlefinger’s engineering meant to sow confusion — smash into Stannis’s exhausted forces from the rear. The Tyrells’ army, marched north under cover of secrecy, arrives at exactly the moment the battle hangs in the balance and shatters it decisively in the crown’s favor.

Stannis, defeated and stripped of the fleet and host he sailed south with, retreats to lick his wounds while King’s Landing celebrates a rescue it owes almost entirely to people who spent the whole battle nowhere near the walls being defended. The chapter closes the Blackwater’s arc on a bitter irony that will echo for the rest of the book: the city is saved for the lion by allies who arrive too late to share any of the actual suffering, and too early to miss any of the credit.

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.