A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Areo I

The Sand Snakes come to Sunspear demanding vengeance for Oberyn, each with her own war; Prince Doran cages his nieces and watches, and waits, and aches.

The chapter retold

Areo Hotah, Prince Doran Martell's Norvoshi captain of guards, watches Sunspear absorb the shock of Oberyn Martell's death in King's Landing ÔÇö killed, skull crushed, by the Mountain in trial by combat, with Tyrion Lannister's guilt still unavenged in Dornish eyes. The Sand Snakes, Oberyn's eight bastard daughters by as many mothers, arrive furious and united in exactly one demand: blood, now, for their father. Doran, prematurely old and crippled by gout, does the opposite of what Dorne expects of him ÔÇö he has three of the eldest Sand Snakes confined rather than armed, and endures their contempt and his own household's suspicion that grief has made him a coward.

This is the reader's introduction to Doran as a character defined entirely by the gap between what he shows and what he plans ÔÇö a gap so wide that even his own family reads it as weakness. Hotah's outsider perspective, watching without fully understanding, lets the chapter plant Dorne as a court playing a much longer, much stranger game than open war, while making clear that the anger in Sunspear is real and combustible regardless of what its prince intends to do with it.

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.