A Storm of Swords — Arya VI
The brotherhood turns bounty-keeper: Arya will be ransomed to her family — but the lightning lord's war of hedges and hollows keeps carrying her the wrong way.
The chapter retold
The Brotherhood Without Banners settles, at last, on a use for Arya Stark: not freedom, but ransom, a bounty to be collected from whatever family of hers can still be found to pay it. It should be good news — a plan with her name attached to an actual destination — but Beric Dondarrion's itinerant war of hedges and hollows keeps the band moving in directions that serve the war effort rather than Arya's interests, and every day spent skirmishing or raiding is another day she is carried farther from anyone who might redeem the bounty.
The chapter sharpens the specific cruelty of Arya's captivity: she is valuable enough to be kept alive and traded rather than harmed, which sounds like safety and functions, in practice, as an indefinite postponement of home. Her frustration compounds with every diversion, setting up the desperation that will drive her later attempt to simply run.
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.