A Dance with Dragons — Jon XI

Tormund's thousands pass the Wall in a long cold line, giants and mammoths and all; Jon counts eight thousand mouths, three thousand spears — and one letter from Hardhome that curdles the blood.

The chapter retold

Tormund’s host finally crosses through the Wall, a slow, cold parade of thousands — spearwives and children, giants leading mammoths, old men who remember a version of the free folk that predates Mance Rayder’s crown — and Jon counts them as they pass with the flat, exhausted precision of a man who knows exactly how thin his margins have gotten: eight thousand mouths to feed against three thousand spears he can actually field. A letter arrives from Hardhome in the middle of the counting, and whatever it says curdles the moment entirely.

The chapter delivers, at last, the payoff of Jon’s whole wildling policy — thousands of lives saved, an alliance made real rather than theoretical — while simultaneously undercutting any sense of triumph with the letter’s unspecified horror, a device the book uses expertly to keep dread ahead of relief. Whatever happened at Hardhome, it’s bad enough that even Jon, hardened by a book’s worth of grim news, needs the chapter to end before the reader learns exactly what it says.

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.