A Dance with Dragons — Barristan II
The Kingbreaker: Ser Barristan, who never broke an oath, arrests his queen's king at sword-point — Hizdahr, whose peace smelled too much of poisoned locusts.
The chapter retold
Ser Barristan, watching Hizdahr’s peace curdle in front of him, does what an oathbreaker never could and an ordinary knight rarely would: he arrests the King of Meereen at swordpoint, in his own throne room, on suspicion that the poisoned locusts meant for Daenerys came from closer to the crown than anyone wanted to believe. It’s the act that earns the chapter its blunt title — the Kingbreaker — a label Barristan accepts without flinching, because the alternative is letting a possible murderer keep the throne his missing queen left behind.
The chapter is the sharpest character study yet of Barristan Selmy’s particular code, distinct from Jaime’s — where Jaime broke an oath and spent years being punished for the story around it, Barristan breaks with form rather than substance, choosing his queen’s actual interests over the technical loyalty a Kingsguard owes a crowned king. It’s an old knight’s most decisive act in years, and it leaves Meereen with no king, an absent queen, and an army of enemies outside the gates who now have every reason to think the city is theirs for the taking.
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.