A Dance with Dragons — Areo I

Ser Balon Swann brings the Mountain's skull to Sunspear; Doran smiles at the gift, deflects a summons — and sends his Sand Snakes to King's Landing, each with a task.

The chapter retold

Ser Balon Swann of the Kingsguard arrives at Sunspear bearing, as ransom for his own failures elsewhere, the skull of Ser Gregor Clegane — grim proof that the Mountain who murdered Oberyn Martell is finally, definitively dead. Prince Doran receives the grisly gift with courtly warmth, deflects the crown’s none-too-subtle demand that Myrcella Baratheon be sent home to King’s Landing, and reveals, once Swann is safely gone, the piece nobody in the capital saw coming: he has already dispatched his brother’s vengeful daughters, the Sand Snakes, to the capital, each with her own private task.

The chapter, filtered through Doran’s stone-faced captain of guards Areo Hotah, finally lets the reader see what years of Doran’s apparent passivity have actually been covering — a plan patient enough to wait out a war, precise enough to weaponize his own nieces’ grief without ever raising his own voice. Doran’s smile over the Mountain’s skull is the tell: Dorne’s revenge for Oberyn was never abandoned, only delayed until the pieces were exactly where he wanted them.

This movement: The Winterfell Knot

• Winterfell fills with Bolton banners and murdered guests; someone is killing Freys in the dark and the walls whisper 'Theon'.
• Abel the bard and his washerwomen — spearwives — recruit a broken creature to steal 'Arya' out of the castle.
• Theon remembers his name jumping from the battlements with a weeping girl in his arms, into the snow.
• Jon lets the free folk through the Wall by the thousand and lends Val, loans wildlings, and writes letters lords burn.