A Dance with Dragons — Jon X
Val returns down the kingsroad with word from the wild: Tormund Giantsbane comes with the last of the free folk, and the Wall must choose between two kinds of enemy.
The chapter retold
Val returns to Castle Black down the kingsroad with real news at last: Tormund Giantsbane is coming, leading the largest surviving mass of free folk south toward the Wall, giants and mammoths and all, fleeing not Jon’s invitation so much as what’s happening at Hardhome behind them. Jon has to decide, with his officers watching for any excuse to call it treason, whether the Wall’s gates open for this host the same way they opened for the last one — an army of refugees the Watch’s own sworn purpose exists to keep out.
The chapter crystallizes the choice Jon has been circling since the book began into something with a hard deadline: welcome Tormund’s people and confirm every suspicion Bowen Marsh has voiced about a Lord Commander gone soft on wildlings, or refuse them and hand thousands of desperate people, giants included, to an enemy that turns the dead into soldiers. There’s no version of the decision that doesn’t cost him something, and the book is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.
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.