A Storm of Swords ÔÇö Davos III

Brought up from the dark, Davos expects the fire and speaks truth anyway; Stannis has questions the red woman cannot hear, and an onion knight's honesty to answer them.

The chapter retold

Hauled up from Dragonstone's dungeons to answer for a defeat he did not cause, Davos Seaworth does what has kept him alive and useful his entire life: he tells Stannis Baratheon the truth, plainly, without the flattery that would be so much safer to offer a humiliated king. Stannis, who trusts almost no one and respects fewer, has questions eating at him that Melisandre's fires cannot answer honestly because her answers are always, ultimately, in service of her god rather than his doubts ÔÇö and an onion smuggler's blunt honesty turns out to be the only counsel in the room not angling for something.

The audience does not free Davos, but it re-establishes him as indispensable in a way imprisonment cannot erase: Stannis needs one voice that will contradict him, and everyone else at court has learned not to be that voice. The scene quietly sets up Davos's eventual return to favor, built entirely on the stubborn, unfashionable habit of saying what is true instead of what is wanted.

This movement: The Bear, the Wall, the Bath

• In Harrenhal's bathhouse Jaime tells Brienne the truth of the Mad King and faints in her arms; later he turns back for her and jumps into a bear pit.
• Jon climbs the Wall with the free folk and breaks from them at Queenscrown, arrows in his leg.
• Dany takes Yunkai by night; the Second Sons change sides for a captain named Daario.
• Sam kills his second impossible thing rumor-wise; the Watch's remnants choose a fat man's courage at Craster's.