A Dance with Dragons — Jaime I

In the riverlands Jaime folds Raventree Hall's last defiance into the king's peace — then Brienne finds him at Pennytree with a lie: Sansa, a day's ride, come alone.

The chapter retold

In the riverlands, Jaime Lannister finishes tidying up the last resistance to the crown’s peace, accepting Raventree Hall’s surrender from the stubborn Blackwoods and folding one more grudge into the fragile settlement he’s been building since Riverrun. He’s barely done congratulating himself on a war ended without more bloodshed when Brienne of Tarth finds him at Pennytree with news that upends everything: she’s found Sansa Stark, she says, a day’s ride distant, and Jaime must come alone.

The chapter’s closing lines are among the book’s most deliberately unresolved, and deliberately so — everything about Brienne’s manner, and everything the reader knows about who else might be waiting in these woods, suggests the offer is not what it claims to be. Jaime, who has spent this whole book slowly becoming a man who keeps his word, is handed a temptation built entirely out of oaths: rescue a Stark girl, honor Brienne’s quest, do the right thing — precisely the bait a smarter man might recognize as a trap.

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.