A Dance with Dragons — Tyrion I

A kinslayer crosses the narrow sea in a wine cask: Tyrion drinks his way through Illyrio's manse asking one question of every silence — where do whores go?

The chapter retold

Tyrion Lannister crosses the narrow sea the way a piece of luggage would, folded into a wine cask by a smuggler in Illyrio Mopatis’s pay, and arrives in Pentos drunk, filthy and still furious enough to insult everyone who tries to help him. Illyrio’s manse is all silk cushions and honeyed peaches, a magister’s idea of comfort draped over a dwarf who killed his father on a privy seat and still can’t decide if he regrets it. Illyrio talks of queens and destiny; Tyrion mostly wants wine and an answer to the one question that has followed him out of Westeros — where do whores go? — his father’s last words to him, worn smooth from repetition like a stone in a pocket.

It is a chapter about a man trying to drink himself back into not caring, and failing, because Illyrio’s hospitality is never free — the fat magister is laying out a Targaryen restoration in installments, and Tyrion, whether he admits it yet or not, is being fitted for a role in it. The riddle about whores matters more than it sounds: it is Tyrion turning his father’s cruelty into the only philosophy he has left, that everyone ends up sold somewhere, and that the trick is figuring out to whom. Nothing is settled here except the shape of the road ahead — east, toward a queen he has not yet decided whether to serve or to hate on Cersei’s behalf.

This movement: The Lost Lords

• Tyrion drinks his way across the narrow sea in a wine cask, bound for a queen with dragons — 'wherever whores go' ringing in his ears.
• Jon Snow rules the Wall: he sends Mance's son away in secret, gives Slynt one last order, and takes his head personally.
• Dany rules Meereen in a tokar while the Sons of the Harpy paint the bricks red by night.
• Bran travels north beyond the Wall with cold hands guiding — toward a cave, a weirwood throne, and a thousand eyes.