A Dance with Dragons — Reek I

In the Dreadfort's kennels a creature called Reek is brought up into the light; Ramsay has a use for what is left of the man inside — and Reek must remember his name to survive it.

The chapter retold

In the Dreadfort’s kennels, a broken thing called Reek is hauled up out of the dark and into candlelight, and it takes the reader longer than it should to understand that this ruined, flinching creature is Theon Greyjoy. Ramsay Bolton, who made him this way, has a use for what’s left — some errand requiring a man who once wore a Stark name convincingly, and Ramsay does not waste tools, only people. Reek’s interior voice is a catalogue of self-erasure: fingers gone, teeth gone, name gone, replaced with a rhyme he repeats to survive — Reek, it rhymes with meek — because remembering who he used to be is the one thing guaranteed to get him hurt worse.

The chapter is the book’s cruelest experiment in point of view: it asks the reader to inhabit a mind that has been trained, through sustained and specific torture, to prefer its own erasure to the truth. Theon’s arc, once a story about a hostage who chose ambition over loyalty and lost everything for it, becomes here a story about what survives torture and what doesn’t — and the answer, chillingly, is that just enough of Theon survives inside Reek to make what Ramsay does with him next possible at all.

This movement: Kings at the Wall

• Stannis takes the mountain clans and Deepwood Motte, gathering the North that hates the Boltons.
• Davos is sent to White Harbor to win fat Lord Manderly — and is reported executed, head and hands tarred.
• In the crypts of Winterfell, the Boltons stage a wedding: 'Arya Stark' — Jeyne Poole in a stolen name — given to Ramsay.
• Melisandre reads her fires at the Wall: snow, a wooden face, a girl on a dying horse. Jon listens with half an ear.