A Feast for Crows ÔÇö Jaime I

In the sept over his father's stinking corpse, Jaime keeps vigil; Cersei asks him to be Tommen's Hand, and the refusal opens the first true crack between them.

The chapter retold

Jaime Lannister keeps vigil over his father's rotting corpse in the sept, sword hand gone, identity in freefall, watching mourners file past a man he both feared and, in his own complicated way, respected. Cersei corners him with a request that should be simple ÔÇö take the Handship, rule beside her as they always imagined a Lannister regency might work ÔÇö and Jaime refuses. He has sworn to the Kingsguard, he tells her, and he means to actually be what the white cloak claims he is for the first time in his life, guarding the king rather than running the kingdom from behind him.

It is a small scene with enormous consequences: the first real fracture between the twins who have spent the whole series as functionally one person in two bodies. Jaime's refusal is not spite ÔÇö it's the first visible fruit of his road with Brienne, his growing discomfort with being merely Cersei's sword and voice. Cersei reads it as betrayal, or worse, rejection, and the chapter plants the seed of the estrangement that will define both of their arcs through the rest of the book, as each sibling starts making decisions the other would never have sanctioned.

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.