A Storm of Swords ÔÇö Samwell III
Sam and Gilly stumble south through the haunted forest until the dead find them ÔÇö and a cold rider on an elk with black hands finds the dead: Coldhands.
The chapter retold
South through the haunted forest, Samwell Tarly and Gilly stumble along half-starved and entirely lost, carrying her newborn son through territory that the reader ÔÇö if not the characters ÔÇö already knows is thick with the wights and worse things the Watch has spent the book failing to warn anyone about. The dead find them exactly as badly as expected, closing in with the patient hunger the book has established as their defining trait.
What saves Sam and Gilly is stranger than relief: a cloaked rider astride a great elk, his hands black as if frostbitten past any living man's tolerance, appears out of the trees and drives the dead off with an authority nothing else in the forest seems to command. He does not explain himself, and the chapter does not force him to ÔÇö Coldhands remains a mystery wrapped in immediate, life-saving usefulness, one more piece of the world north of the Wall that operates by rules the Seven Kingdoms have long since stopped believing in.
This movement: The Red Wedding
- Edmure weds Roslin Frey under the Twins' roof; the bread and salt are eaten; the music is wrong.
- Crossbows from the gallery, tent canvas cut over the feast outside, Grey Wind penned and shot.
- Robb dies with Roose Bolton's steel in his heart: "Jaime Lannister sends his regards."
- Catelyn opens her own face with her nails, and a Frey opens her throat. The North dies at a wedding.