A Dance with Dragons — Tyrion X

Sold to Yezzan zo Qaggaz's grotesquerie, Tyrion and Penny joust on pig and dog for slavers' laughter while the pale mare rides the siege camps — and their master — down.

The chapter retold

Sold at auction to Yezzan zo Qaggaz, a slaver who collects human oddities the way other men collect coins, Tyrion and Penny are put to work as entertainers — jousting on the backs of a pig and a dog for the amusement of Yezzan’s household while, outside the walls, the pale mare rides unchecked through the besieging camps and finally reaches Yezzan’s own tent. Yezzan dies of the bloody flux mid-siege, and in the confusion that follows his death, his hoarded ’treasures,’ Tyrion and Penny included, find themselves suddenly, dangerously unowned.

The chapter is deliberately, painfully undignified — a Lannister, once Hand of two kings, reduced to a comic mount for a slaver’s dinner guests — and the book leans into the humiliation precisely because it’s earned: this is what happens to people the world decides are cargo rather than characters, however important they know themselves to be. Yezzan’s death by plague rather than by any deliberate hand is another of the book’s flat, indifferent cruelties, and it hands Tyrion, for the first time in a long while, something like an opening.

This movement: The Harpy's Bargain

• Dany weds Hizdahr zo Loraq to still the knives; the fighting pits reopen with a queen presiding.
• In Daznak's Pit the locusts are poisoned and the crowd screams — for Drogon, descended on the sand. Dany mounts him and is gone.
• Quentyn Martell tries to steal a dragon with a whip and burns for the family words.
• Barristan Selmy takes the city in hand, arrests Hizdahr, and readies Meereen for the Yunkish war outside the walls.

The fallen — spoilers

• Yezzan zo Qaggaz — The slavers' bloody flux took the master of the grotesques; his treasures walked free in the confusion.