A Storm of Swords — Catelyn I

Catelyn waits at Riverrun for judgment for freeing the Kingslayer, sitting at her father's deathbed as he calls a name no one knows: Tansy.

The chapter retold

At Riverrun, Catelyn Stark sits a deathwatch and a punishment in the same chair. Her father Hoster Tully is fading by the hour, and her son Robb has not yet decided what to do with a mother who freed the Kingslayer on her own authority — a decision the whole castle treats as a betrayal even though Catelyn made it to buy back her daughters. Hoster drifts in and out of the fever, calling for people long dead, and once for a name nobody in the room recognizes: Tansy — a stray thread from a young lord's life that Catelyn cannot place and does not get to ask about before he sinks again.

The scene does two things at once: it establishes the emotional cost of Catelyn's gamble with Jaime — isolation from her own son, disapproval she cannot argue her way out of — and it humanizes Hoster Tully in his last competent hours, planting an unanswered mystery that will surface again at his funeral. Underneath both is the book's opening argument: the war has made honorable people do compromised things for good reasons, and nobody around them is inclined to grade on the curve.

This movement: Wolves at the Crossing

• Brienne rows the Kingslayer downriver under a flag of lies; the banter starts sharpening into respect.
• Robb returns to Riverrun with a Westerling bride and a broken treaty; the Freys go home cold.
• Beyond the Wall, the survivors of the Fist stagger to Craster's; Sam earns the name Slayer with a dragonglass dagger.
• Dany sails for Astapor, where an army that feels nothing is sold by men who feel less.