A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Prologue ┬À Pate

In Oldtown's shadowed taverns the novice Pate trades a stolen Citadel key for a golden dragon ÔÇö and dies with the coin in his mouth while a stranger picks up his face.

The chapter retold

The book opens nowhere near a throne. A maester named Alleras and the drunk archmaester Pate stand watch over Oldtown's rooftops for a comet, and through them the reader gets its first glimpse of the Citadel as an institution ÔÇö a place of forging chains, hoarding secrets and arguing about the ravens' true purpose, run by old men who distrust magic even as glass candles start burning in locked rooms. A second Pate, a poor novice who has failed his exams and hates every fat, comfortable maester above him, meets a stranger in a tavern who offers a fortune ÔÇö a golden dragon coin ÔÇö for a stolen Citadel key and a night with a girl too pretty for the price. He takes the bait and dies for it, throat opened, the coin left cooling in his own mouth as the stranger walks off wearing a face that is not quite the one it started with.

The chapter is stitched from a single night's worth of overlapping vantage points ÔÇö Pate's fatal bargain, the older novice Alleras tracking the comet's omens across the rooftops with a friend, and the doomed boy's own dawning, too-late realization that the price of his stolen key was never going to be a coin. The stranger who pays him is sketched only in fragments ÔÇö a face that seems to shift in torchlight, a voice too pleasant for the errand ÔÇö and readers who have already met the Faceless Men through Arya's Braavosi chapters will recognize the method a full book before Oldtown's own maesters ever think to look for it.

It is a strange, sideways door into a book that will spend forty-five more chapters almost entirely in the south, and that is the point: A Feast for Crows announces from its first page that this is a story about institutions outliving the people who run them ÔÇö the Citadel, the Faith, the ironborn's driftwood crown, the Iron Throne itself ÔÇö and about faceless things wearing familiar skins. No one in King's Landing will hear about a dead novice in Oldtown, and the reader is meant to file the name Pate away and forget it, which is exactly the trick the chapter is built to pull.

This movement: The Crows Gather

• The war winds down and the scavengers move in: the riverlands starve, the Faith arms, the Citadel schemes.
• Cersei rules for Tommen and stuffs the council with flatterers; Jaime refuses to be one of them.
• In the Iron Islands, Balon's death calls a kingsmoot ÔÇö Aeron Damphair means to drown the succession in salt.
• Brienne rides out with Oathkeeper hunting a girl of three-and-ten with auburn hair.

The fallen ÔÇö spoilers

• Pate, the Citadel novice ÔÇö Paid a dragon for a key; the alchemist collected both, and his name besides.