A Dance with Dragons — Tyrion VI
Chained to Ser Jorah in Volantis, Tyrion meets the widow of the waterfront, who sells passages and prophecies — and a dwarf girl named Penny, who does not want to kill him. Much.
The chapter retold
Chained to Jorah Mormont on the long road to Volantis, Tyrion talks his way into an unlikely bond with the widow of the waterfront — a woman running a trade in ships, secrets and forged papers for anyone with coin and the right introductions — and into an even less likely friendship with Penny, a dwarf performer traveling with her own small troupe, who takes an immediate, unshakeable liking to a fellow little person she has no idea just killed his own father.
The chapter softens Tyrion just enough to matter: Penny wants nothing from him but company, the first relationship in the whole eastward journey not built on leverage, and it costs Tyrion visibly to accept kindness he can’t immediately turn into an angle. Jorah watches the two of them with the flat patience of a man who has already decided what Tyrion is worth to him in Meereen, and the tension between Penny’s warmth and Jorah’s transaction sets up exactly the kind of moral discomfort this stretch of the book specializes in.
This movement: The Griffin and the Rhoyne
- Aboard the Shy Maid, Tyrion unmasks his companions: Jon Connington, exiled griffin lord — and 'Young Griff', a blue-haired boy who may be Rhaegar's son Aegon.
- Stone men attack on the Bridge of Dream; Tyrion pulls Young Griff from the river; Connington comes up with greyscale he tells no one about.
- Quentyn Martell crosses half a world with a marriage pact signed in old ink, to court a queen who's never heard of him.
- Tyrion is snatched in Volantis by a knight in a merchant's skin: Jorah Mormont, buying his way home with a dwarf.