A Dance with Dragons — Davos III

A dead man dines well in the Wolf's Den: the head on White Harbor's spike wore another face, and Lord Manderly's grief has been playing a longer game.

The chapter retold

Held in the Wolf’s Den beneath White Harbor, Davos gets his answer to the riddle of the mismatched hands on the gatehouse spike, delivered obliquely, the way everything in Manderly’s city seems to be delivered: the man executed and displayed wasn’t the true culprit, and the feast the visiting Freys were served with such lavish hospitality carries an implication the text lets the reader assemble rather than states outright. Manderly’s grief for his murdered sons, so loud and public it read at first as simple bluster, turns out to have been a longer, colder game than Davos gave him credit for.

This is the chapter where House Manderly’s true loyalties come into focus without ever being spoken aloud — a lord too clever to declare himself against the Freys openly instead engineering a private, unprovable reckoning and letting his enemies dine on it in ignorance. Davos, brought in as a prisoner and treated with strange courtesy, is being tested rather than punished, and the North’s long memory for the Red Wedding is shown to run through channels far more patient and far more frightening than open war.

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.