A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Brienne I

Brienne rides the Duskendale road with Oathkeeper and a vow, asking every traveler after a highborn maid of three-and-ten with auburn hair.

The chapter retold

Brienne of Tarth rides the Duskendale road with Podrick Payne, wielding Oathkeeper, the Valyrian steel blade Jaime gave her along with a vow: find Sansa Stark and Arya Stark, and keep them safe. She interrogates everyone she passes ÔÇö innkeeps, septons, drovers ÔÇö after a highborn girl of three-and-ten with auburn hair, and gets nothing but blank looks, rumor and the general devastation of a riverlands scoured flat by years of war. The search is less a plot than a texture: starving villages, broken bridges, orphaned children, the wreckage the War of the Five Kings left behind once the armies moved on.

This chapter sets Brienne's questline in motion as the book's spine ÔÇö a knight-errant's quest structure laid directly over a devastated countryside, so that every failed lead doubles as a tour of what five kings' worth of war actually cost the people who never held a crown. Her literal-mindedness about her vow (a highborn maid of three-and-ten, auburn hair, exactly) will be both her integrity and her blind spot for the rest of the book, since the girl she is describing is not the girl she will eventually need to find.

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.