A Storm of Swords — Jaime III

At a bridge Brienne and Jaime finally cross swords — interrupted by the Brave Companions; the Goat takes them, and takes Jaime's sword hand for sport.

The chapter retold

The uneasy peace between captor and captive breaks at a bridge crossing, where taunts finally tip into an actual duel — Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth cross swords for the first time as something closer to equals, testing each other in earnest rather than trading insults over an oar. The fight ends not in a winner but in an ambush: Vargo Hoat's Brave Companions, the mercenary company known as the Bloody Mummers, fall on both of them and take them prisoner, ending the duel's question of who is better with a far crueler one about who is more valuable.

The Goat decides Jaime's value is worth more disfigured than whole, and has his sword hand struck off — not for ransom, not for strategy, but for the pleasure of humiliating the Kingslayer's most famous asset, delivered with the casual cruelty of men who have stopped pretending war has rules. Ser Cleos Frey, caught in the same ambush trying to flee, is killed by outlaw arrows on the road. Jaime's identity, built for thirty years around a sword hand, ends this chapter in the mud, and the book spends the rest of its length rebuilding him around what is left.

This movement: Dracarys

• In Astapor Dany trades Drogon for the Unsullied — 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 — the children object; the Hand doesn't care.

The fallen — spoilers

• Ser Cleos Frey — Feathered with outlaw arrows on the river road.