A Dance with Dragons — Victarion I

The Iron Fleet limps into the Gulf of Grief, half its strength drowned; Victarion feeds his rotting hand to a red priest's fires and gets back something that frightens his crew.

The chapter retold

The Iron Fleet limps into the Gulf of Grief with barely half its original strength intact, battered by weather and desertion on the long voyage from the Iron Islands, and Victarion Greyjoy, its stubborn, humorless captain, finally lets the red priest Moqorro tend to a wound he’s let rot rather than admit weakness over — a hand gone black and foul, fed at last into the priest’s fires rather than a maester’s knife.

What Victarion gets back from the treatment is not simple healing but something closer to a bargain, and it visibly unsettles a crew that already half-fears their captain’s temper more than any storm. The chapter marks Victarion’s slow conscription into R’hllor’s designs, a blunt instrument of a man being sharpened by forces he understands only well enough to be useful to them, and sets his fleet’s grim, plundering progress toward Meereen — and toward the dragons he’s been promised — properly in motion.

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.