A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Samwell II

The Cinnamon Wind is still far off: storms batter the small ship south while Maester Aemon fails a little more with every league of salt water.

The chapter retold

Aboard the Cinnamon Wind, Sam's sea voyage toward Oldtown continues to be an ordeal rather than an adventure ÔÇö storms batter the small ship, seasickness and cramped misery dominate the days, and Maester Aemon, ancient and blind, visibly weakens with every league of salt water put between him and the Wall he served for most of a century. Gilly tends both Aemon and the baby with a competence Sam keeps failing to match, while Sam himself frets, apologizes, and generally proves that his appointment to this mission was about protecting him more than trusting him.

The chapter is transitional in the way sea-voyage chapters often are ÔÇö measuring out distance and attrition rather than incident ÔÇö but it is doing real work underneath: Aemon's decline is now visibly a countdown, not a background detail, and the reader is being prepared for a death that the voyage's slow, grinding hardship makes feel inevitable rather than sudden. Sam's ongoing inadequacy against real danger, contrasted with his genuine tenderness toward Gilly and the child, keeps reinforcing exactly what kind of use the Citadel ÔÇö and not a sword ÔÇö is meant to make of him.

This movement: The Kingsmoot

• On Old Wyk the drowned god's captains vote: Asha offers peace, Victarion strength ÔÇö and Euron Crow's Eye offers dragons.
• The Crow's Eye takes the driftwood crown with a horn said to bind dragons, and sends Victarion to court Daenerys.
• Cersei's small war on Margaery begins: spies, whores, and a walking corpse under Qyburn's care.
• The Sand Snakes are locked away as Dorne seethes over Oberyn; Arianne plots a queen of her own.