A Dance with Dragons ÔÇö Reek III
Winterfell hosts a wedding in the snow: Ramsay Bolton takes ÔÇ£Arya StarkÔÇØ ÔÇö Jeyne Poole in a stolen name ÔÇö and Reek gives the bride away into horror.
The chapter retold
Winterfell hosts a wedding staged entirely for northern eyes: Ramsay Bolton marries the girl the whole North believes to be Arya Stark, though she is in truth Jeyne Poole, the stewardÔÇÖs daughter, dressed and drilled into a dead queenÔÇÖs daughterÔÇÖs likeness by people who need the North to believe the Boltons have married into the old blood legitimately. Reek, hollowed out and obedient, is made to give the bride away ÔÇö the last of Theon GreyjoyÔÇÖs old name spent on delivering another captive into a horror he knows intimately.
This is one of the bookÔÇÖs cruelest set-pieces, staged as a celebration and functioning as a public act of psychological and physical violence, all the more horrifying for how procedurally the text handles it ÔÇö a wedding night the narration will not look away from, filtered through ReekÔÇÖs own broken, self-protective flatness. The chapter cements exactly why RamsayÔÇÖs marriage matters politically ÔÇö a fabricated Stark bride to launder Bolton rule ÔÇö while making unmistakably clear how much human damage that fabrication is being paid for in.
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.