A Dance with Dragons — Daenerys IV
Hizdahr zo Loraq courts the queen with flowers and a suspiciously perfect peace; Daario Naharis returns from the field to tempt her with everything Hizdahr is not.
The chapter retold
Hizdahr zo Loraq, a Meereenese nobleman of old blood and careful manners, presses his suit on Daenerys with flowers, patience, and a peace plan almost too convenient to argue with — reopen the fighting pits, marry into the city’s ancient families, let old wounds scar over instead of reopening them nightly. Daario Naharis returns from campaigning against Yunkai’s mercenaries at exactly the wrong moment to make Hizdahr’s careful courtship look as calculated as it is, all swagger and violence and an offer of exactly the war Hizdahr is selling her a way out of.
The chapter stages Daenerys’s central dilemma as a literal choice between two men, which is also a choice between two theories of rule — Hizdahr’s incrementalism, patient and humiliating, against Daario’s appetite for decisive, spectacular violence. Neither option is honest with her about its costs, and the queen who once burned a khal’s body to hatch dragons is left choosing, for the first time in the story, not between right and wrong but between two flavors of compromise, neither of which particularly wants what’s good for Meereen so much as what’s good for the man offering it.
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.