A Dance with Dragons — Tyrion V

In Selhorys Tyrion buys an hour with a sad-eyed whore and walks out into Ser Jorah Mormont's fist: “I'm taking you to the queen.”

The chapter retold

Tyrion, cut loose from Griff’s company at Selhorys under circumstances the chapter lets slip past almost accidentally, spends an unhappy hour with a sad-eyed whore and walks straight out of the brothel into the fist of Ser Jorah Mormont — exiled knight, disgraced spy, and, as it turns out, a man with his own desperate plan to buy his way back into Daenerys’s good graces by delivering Tywin Lannister’s murderer to her in chains.

The reunion is the book’s darkest joke: two men running from ruined lives collide by accident in a river town, and the one with slightly more leverage claims the other as cargo. For Tyrion it’s a demotion from guest to captive again, this time explicitly, and for Jorah it’s the first real hope he’s had since Daenerys exiled him — a hope built entirely on treating a person as a gift rather than a man, which the book has already spent several chapters demonstrating rarely ends the way the gift-giver expects.

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.