A Dance with Dragons — Jon XII
Queen Selyse and her court roost in the King's Tower with red priest and fool; Jon plans the Hardhome rescue by sea over every objection Bowen Marsh can spell.
The chapter retold
Queen Selyse arrives at the Wall with her strange, diminished court in tow — Patchface the fool, a red priest of her own, a retinue thinned by a king who took the fighting men and left her the ornamental ones — and roosts in the King’s Tower while Jon tries to plan a rescue mission to Hardhome by sea, against the loud, principled objections of Bowen Marsh, who considers spending Watch resources on wildlings a betrayal of everything the order stands for.
The chapter stages Jon’s authority as under siege from two directions at once — a queen’s court demanding deference he has no patience to spare, and his own First Steward arguing, not unreasonably by the Watch’s oldest logic, that Jon has stopped serving the realm of men and started serving free folk instead. Every argument Marsh makes is coherent and defensible on its own terms, which is what makes the mounting confrontation genuinely dangerous rather than simply villainous — Jon is not fighting fools, he’s fighting men convinced, with reason, that he’s the one in the wrong.
This movement: The Dragon's Peace Breaks
- Cersei walks her penance through King's Landing, shorn and naked, while her champion waits: an eight-foot silence in white armor.
- Kevan Lannister steadies the realm as regent — competence the realm can't be allowed to keep.
- On the Dothraki sea, Dany — fevered, alone but for Drogon — meets Khal Jhaqo's riders in the grass.
- Asha, Stannis's prisoner, watches the northmen prepare a battle in the snow that the book leaves unfought.