A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Samwell I

Jon commands Sam south: Maester Aemon, Gilly, and a babe that is not quite the babe everyone believes ÔÇö bound for Oldtown and a maester's chain.

The chapter retold

Jon Snow, now Lord Commander at Castle Black, gives Samwell Tarly an order dressed as an honor: sail south with Maester Aemon, with Gilly, and with the infant everyone believes is Gilly's son by Craster ÔÇö though the reader knows, even if the wider Watch does not, that the babe in question is not quite what he seems. Sam is bound, ultimately, for Oldtown and the Citadel, to earn a maester's chain and become the trained mind Castle Black desperately lacks. He accepts with his usual mix of terror and loyalty, aware that Jon is protecting him from a war he is unsuited to fight and sending him toward a different, quieter kind of usefulness.

The chapter is a hinge for two of the book's throughlines at once: it launches Sam's long sea voyage toward the Citadel prologue's mystery, and it quietly seeds one of the series' most consequential swaps ÔÇö the identity of the child traveling under Gilly's name ÔÇö without spelling it out. Jon's authority here is still fresh and untested, a Lord Commander making hard calls about who serves the Watch best where, a theme the reader has already watched cost him popularity among his brothers.

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.