A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Aeron II
The kingsmoot on Nagga's hill: Asha offers peace, Victarion strength ÔÇö and Euron Crow's Eye offers dragons, with a hellhorn from the smoking ruins of Valyria. The ironmen choose madness.
The chapter retold
The kingsmoot convenes on Nagga's hill, within the rib-cage-like driftwood halls said to be built from a sea dragon's bones, and the succession is decided in open assembly. Asha offers the captains peace and prosperity; Victarion offers strength and continuity. Then Euron Crow's Eye steps forward and offers something neither rival can match ÔÇö dragons, or the promise of them, and a horn he claims was salvaged from the smoking ruins of Valyria itself, capable of binding dragons to his will. The ironborn, hungry for glory beyond raiding fishing villages, choose Euron's madness over his niece's sense and his brother's steadiness.
Euron's pitch works because he tells the assembled captains exactly what they want to hear in exactly the ironborn's own register: not peace, which Asha offers and which reads to men raised on reaving as surrender by another name, and not mere strength, which Victarion offers and which only promises more of the same grinding raids the islands have run for generations, but conquest without precedent ÔÇö a horn pulled from Valyria's ashes, magic strong enough, he swears, to bind living dragons to an ironborn's will, and a fleet aimed not at fishing villages but at an empire. He invokes the Grey King's old paradise with Nagga's bones arched over his head as he speaks, and the theater is not incidental ÔÇö Euron understands, better than either rival claimant, that a kingsmoot is a performance as much as it is a vote.
This is one of the book's three pivotal chapters, and it reorders the entire Iron Islands plot at a stroke: Euron Greyjoy ÔÇö absent, mysterious, reputed a kinslayer and worse ÔÇö becomes King of the Iron Islands by force of rhetoric and a horn no one present can verify. Asha loses cleanly and honorably; Victarion is publicly outmaneuvered by his own brother and immediately reassigned to Euron's service rather than rewarded for his loyalty to their dead brother's memory. The chapter plants dragons as an ironborn ambition for the first time ÔÇö Euron intends to sail for Daenerys, horn in hand ÔÇö and turns what looked like a succession squabble into a plot with implications for the entire continent.
This movement: The Quill and the Quiet Isle
- Brienne's hunt crosses the Quiet Isle, where a limping gravedigger is taller than any brother has a right to be.
- Sam sails for Oldtown via Braavos, where a girl called Cat learns his name ÔÇö and Maester Aemon hears of dragons and weeps.
- Jaime brings the king's peace to the riverlands with words where his sword hand used to be; Riverrun yields without blood.
- Arya's nightly wolf dreams betray her to the kindly man; a girl must give up Arya Stark ÔÇö she hides Needle instead.