A Storm of Swords ÔÇö Tyrion III
Tywin plays matchmaker with other people's children: Sansa Stark for Tyrion, and for Cersei ÔÇö though she does not know it yet ÔÇö whatever serves the Rock.
The chapter retold
Tywin Lannister continues distributing his family like currency, and this time the coin lands on Tyrion: Sansa Stark, still nominally married to no one, is to become his wife, cementing Lannister claim to Winterfell through Robb's sister whether Sansa or Tyrion have any say in the matter, which they do not. Cersei, listening with growing horror, slowly understands that she is being fitted for a second marriage of her own ÔÇö to a Tyrell, unnamed as yet, arranged with the same indifference to her feelings that has governed every match Tywin has made this book.
The scene is Tywin's household governance at its most brutal because it dresses coercion up as family business as usual ÔÇö no raised voices, no villainy performed for the reader, just a father allocating his children like Casterly Rock's other assets. Tyrion's marriage to Sansa becomes the axis around which the book's cruelest ironies will turn: two people who never wanted each other, bound together by a man who wanted neither of their happiness in the ledger at all.
This movement: Dracarys
- In Astapor Dany trades Drogon for the Unsullied ÔÇö then speaks Valyrian, and the whip changes hands: Dracarys.
- Jaime loses his sword hand to Vargo Hoat's Brave Companions and learns what he is without it.
- Arya falls in with the Brotherhood Without Banners and watches a dead man rise from his seventh death.
- Tywin re-arranges the realm at his table: Tyrion to Sansa, Cersei to Willas ÔÇö the children object; the Hand doesn't care.