A Dance with Dragons — Bran II
The hill of the three-eyed crow is found — and defended by the dead; Jojen fades, the children of the forest fling fire, and Bran goes down into the dark to meet a man grown into a tree.
The chapter retold
Bran’s company finds the hill they’ve been traveling toward — a cave mouth in frozen roots, guarded by something worse than weather. The dead attack in the dark, wights that do not tire and do not stop, and the children of the forest meet them with fire and old magic Bran has never seen used in earnest before. Jojen Reed, whose greensight has been warning of this moment for two books, goes down defending the group he was sent to guide, and Bran is carried the last steps into the earth by grief as much as by Hodor’s arms — down into a cavern where a man has grown, root and bone, into a weirwood throne.
This is the arrival the whole northern half of the book has been walking toward, and it costs exactly as much as a destination like that should: Jojen dies having done precisely what his visions always said he would, guiding Bran to this door and no further. What waits below — Bloodraven, the last greenseer, fused so completely with the tree that the line between man and wood has stopped mattering — reframes everything Bran has learned about his own visions as apprenticeship rather than accident. The children of the forest, thought extinct by every maester in Westeros, turn out to have been down here the whole time, guarding the one door that matters.
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.