A Dance with Dragons — Quentyn II
Quentyn serves as a sellsword in the Windblown, crossing the desert toward a war against the very queen he has come to marry; desertion, when it comes, must be earned.
The chapter retold
Quentyn Martell, having reached the war camps around Meereen under an assumed name, takes service in the Windblown, a mercenary company fighting on Yunkai’s side against the very queen he crossed the world to marry. It is a strange, humbling posture for a prince — mucking in with sellswords, hiding his name and his purpose from men who would kill him for either — and every day in the camp is a rehearsal for the harder problem waiting underneath it: defecting from a paid company, in wartime, without being hanged for it first.
The chapter measures the gap between Quentyn’s mission and Quentyn’s temperament with quiet, mounting dread — he is patient, careful, decent, none of which are qualities that reliably survive contact with mercenary politics or dragon queens. Desertion, the chapter insists, has to be earned rather than simply declared, and watching a prince learn the sellsword’s rules of loyalty from the bottom up is the book’s way of making clear just how far outmatched he is by everyone else angling for a piece of Daenerys’s war.
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.