A Storm of Swords ÔÇö Epilogue ┬À Merrett Frey

Merrett Frey rides to ransom a captive from outlaws and finds a hooded judge instead: dead men hang for the Red Wedding, and the woman under the hood was once Catelyn Stark.

The chapter retold

Merrett Frey, a minor son of the vast and now-notorious House Frey, rides out from the Twins hoping to ransom a captive kinsman from outlaws operating in the riverlands ÔÇö a small, self-interested errand in a family that has just committed the single most infamous atrocity of the war and does not yet seem to grasp how thoroughly the rest of the realm will remember it. He finds, instead of a negotiation, a tribunal: the Brotherhood Without Banners, or what remains of its purpose, has already strung up several Frey men along the road, hanged for their part in the Red Wedding.

The judge presiding over this rough, traveling justice wears a hood that Merrett assumes belongs to some outlaw lord ÔÇö until it comes off, and he is looking at a face he recognizes despite the ruin the years and a slit throat have made of it. It is Catelyn Stark, dead and somehow not finished, her wound never healed, her memory apparently intact enough to know exactly which Frey stands in front of her and exactly what his family did.

Merrett Frey is hanged like the kinsmen who went before him, and the book's epilogue closes A Storm of Swords on the coldest possible note: the Red Wedding's dead are not finished being avenged, and the woman avenging them is one of its own victims, returned in a form the story declines to explain or name outright. It is the single image the book leaves the reader with ÔÇö mercy exhausted, guest right's betrayal answered in kind, and a mother's love curdled by death into something that only knows how to hang Freys.

This movement: Gold, Ice, and the Hanged Woman

• Jaime frees his brother; Tyrion detours through the Tower of the Hand: Shae in the bed, Tywin on the privy, a crossbow for both.
• Lysa Arryn flies from the Moon Door screaming about tears and dark words; Littlefinger blames a singer.
• Jon Snow is elected Lord Commander of the Night's Watch on Sam's clever tongue.
• Epilogue at the Twins: the Brotherhood hangs Freys for a hooded woman whose throat gapes ÔÇö Lady Stoneheart remembers.

The fallen ÔÇö spoilers

• Merrett Frey ÔÇö Hanged by the brotherhood; his judge was a corpse with her throat cut, and she remembered him.