A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Jaime VII

At Pennytree a rider comes through the rain with a face half-eaten and a lie ready: Brienne says she's found the girl ÔÇö a day's ride, and Jaime must come alone.

The chapter retold

At Pennytree, a rider arrives through pouring rain bearing a half-eaten, greyscale-ravaged face and a message crafted to sound like salvation: Brienne, the rider claims, has found the girl at last ÔÇö Sansa ÔÇö just a day's ride away, and Jaime must come immediately, and alone. The offer is transparently, ominously suspicious, dangling exactly the resolution Jaime has spent the book half-dreading and half-hoping for, wrapped around instructions no careful man should follow.

The chapter sets a trap whose bait is calibrated with real precision: Jaime's genuine, complicated loyalty to a vow he made to a dying Catelyn Stark, his growing respect for Brienne, and his need to believe something in this rotten war can still be resolved honestly, all pulling him toward a summons that every reasonable instinct says is a lie. Coming right after Brienne's own unresolved hanging and Lady Stoneheart's blood price on Jaime's head, it deliberately scrambles the reader's sense of what's actually waiting for him at the end of that ride ÔÇö hope and dread arriving in the same letter.

This movement: The Walk of the Lion

• The Faith turns on Cersei: her own scheme's whore-witness recites her sins, and the High Sparrow's cells gain a queen.
• Cersei's letter begs Jaime to be her champion; he reads it in the rain at Riverrun and burns it.
• Sam reaches Oldtown to find Pate at the Citadel's door ÔÇö a Pate who died in the prologue, wearing a smile.
• Brienne meets the Brotherhood's new lady: hooded, hanged-throated, unforgiving. Her choice: the noose, or Jaime.