A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Samwell V
Sam reaches the Citadel at last and spills his story to Archmaester Marwyn: glass candles burning, prophecies curdling ÔÇö and a familiar-looking novice called Pate takes him in hand.
The chapter retold
Sam reaches Oldtown and the Citadel at last, the long, storm-battered voyage of the Cinnamon Wind behind him, Aemon buried at sea, Gilly and the babe settled safely nearby. He is granted an audience with Archmaester Marwyn ÔÇö bearish, unorthodox, one of the few men in the Citadel who takes glass candles and prophecy as seriously as ravens and arithmetic ÔÇö and pours out everything he has seen: the wights, the Others, Coldhands leading Bran's party through dead villages, a Wall that may not hold forever. Marwyn listens without the polite disbelief Sam braced for; he has his own portents to report, glass candles burning in locked rooms after centuries of dormancy, a sign he reads as confirmation that something old in the world is waking up whether the Citadel's comfortable skeptics credit it or not.
In the chaos of arrival ÔÇö trunks, ravens, a maester's bureaucracy utterly indifferent to what Sam has just survived to reach it ÔÇö a novice steps forward to help him settle in, and gives his name easily, kindly, as Pate. It is offered and accepted as the most ordinary courtesy in the world.
It should not be. The book's very first chapter closed on a nameless stranger murdering the real Pate in an Oldtown alley and walking off wearing his face ÔÇö a scene forty-five chapters and several hundred pages behind the reader by now, easy to have half-forgotten amid kingsmoots and queens. A Feast for Crows ends by handing that thread back without comment: Sam, grateful and exhausted, has just been personally welcomed through the gates of an institution built to hoard the realm's secrets by something that is very likely not a novice at all. Nothing else is resolved either ÔÇö not Brienne's rope, not Cersei's coming trial, not the identity wearing Pate's smile ÔÇö because this half of the story was written to run beside A Dance with Dragons rather than to conclude before it, and the book's last move is to remind the reader, one final time, that faces in this story are rarely load-bearing.
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.