A Dance with Dragons — Quentyn III
The spurned suitor will not go home empty-handed: Quentyn Martell buys the Windblown's renegades and a madman's plan — steal a dragon from under a pyramid.
The chapter retold
Quentyn Martell, having deserted the Windblown at last, spends what coin and persuasion he has left buying the loyalty of a handful of the company’s renegades — including his own friends Gerris and Archibald — for a plan so far past reasonable that he can barely explain it without sounding mad even to himself: steal a dragon out from under Daenerys’s absent throne, before anyone with more sense can talk him out of it.
The chapter is a portrait of desperation dressed as resolve — Quentyn’s whole errand to Meereen has been quietly failing for chapters, the queen he was promised to has flown off on a different, more famous dragon entirely, and rather than accept the mission’s collapse he doubles down on the single most dangerous version of it available. Every reader who’s been tracking this book’s dragon lore can feel exactly how badly this plan is going to go; the tragedy is that Quentyn, dutiful to the last, can’t see it, or won’t let himself.
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.