A Dance with Dragons ÔÇö Daenerys IX

Daznak's Pit roars for blood and gets a god's worth: Drogon descends on the sand, and Daenerys Stormborn climbs onto her dragon's back and is gone.

The chapter retold

DaznakÔÇÖs Pit is packed for the reopened fighting games, blood-hungry and roaring, when the afternoonÔÇÖs entertainment is interrupted by something no one in the stands, least of all Daenerys, is prepared for: Drogon, missing for most of the book, descends out of the sky into the sand mid-fight, drawn by blood and noise and whatever half-understood bond still ties him to his mother. A pit fighter named Barsena Blackhair, who chose to face a boar with nothing but tusks and her own courage rather than live in chains, dies in the same arena that afternoon, one more name lost in the chaos the dragonÔÇÖs arrival detonates.

What Daenerys does next is the moment this book, and arguably the whole story to this point, has been building toward without ever quite promising: she walks out onto the sand toward a half-wild dragon that has already killed a child, climbs onto his back in front of the entire city, and is carried up and away, leaving Meereen ÔÇö her marriage, her council, her war, her crown ÔÇö behind her without a word of explanation to anyone still standing in the pit.

The scene answers, spectacularly and unanswerably, every question the book has been asking about who Daenerys really is underneath the diplomacy and the compromise: the queen who spent chapters chaining her dragons for the sake of a farmerÔÇÖs murdered daughter is still, when it matters most, the woman who will get on the dragon. It costs her everything she built in Meereen in a single afternoon, and it leaves the city she conquered to be governed, defended, and fought over by everyone she left behind ÔÇö a vacuum this book spends its remaining chapters watching several different factions rush to fill.

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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö spoilers

• Barsena Blackhair ÔÇö A pit fighter who chose a boar's tusks over chains and got both.