A Dance with Dragons ÔÇö Davos IV
Manderly's price for White Harbor's knights is a smuggler's errand: Rickon Stark lives, on an island of cannibals and unicorns ÔÇö bring the boy home, and the North rises.
The chapter retold
Manderly names his price for backing House StarkÔÇÖs cause openly, and it is not gold or fealty but an errand fit for a smuggler: word has reached White Harbor that Rickon Stark, the last trueborn Stark son thought lost since WinterfellÔÇÖs sack, is alive on Skagos, an island the mainland regards as home to cannibals and worse. Davos is to sail there, find the boy, and bring him back ÔÇö the single act that could rally the North behind something more solid than grief and rumor.
The chapter turns ManderlyÔÇÖs earlier theater into strategy at last: a lord too shrewd to commit openly is instead spending Davos, an expendable and deniable envoy, on the one mission that could actually change the NorthÔÇÖs arithmetic. For Davos it is a return to what he has always been best at ÔÇö an impossible, unglamorous errand undertaken out of loyalty rather than ambition ÔÇö and it sends him, and the readerÔÇÖs hope for the Starks, toward the edge of the map on the strength of a fat lordÔÇÖs rumor and a dead kingÔÇÖs memory.
This movement: The Griffin and the Rhoyne
- Aboard the Shy Maid, Tyrion unmasks his companions: Jon Connington, exiled griffin lord ÔÇö 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.