A Dance with Dragons — Connington II
The Golden Company takes Griffin's Roost, Jon Connington's stolen home, in Aegon's name; the greyscale on the exile's hand climbs while his prince's war begins ahead of schedule.
The chapter retold
The Golden Company, sworn now to Aegon Targaryen’s restoration, seizes Griffin’s Roost — Jon Connington’s own ancestral seat, lost to the crown when he was exiled decades ago — and claims it in the young prince’s name as the invasion of Westeros begins in earnest, ahead of the timeline anyone had planned for. Connington gets his childhood home back at the exact moment his body starts failing him: the greyscale he picked up brushing against a stone man in the Sorrows is climbing steadily up his arm, and he knows, better than anyone, what that slow grey spread eventually means.
The chapter yokes triumph to a ticking clock with real cruelty — Connington’s life’s ambition, restoring a Targaryen to the Iron Throne, is finally in motion just as his own body starts the countdown to killing him, and he has to decide how much of his failing strength to spend on a war he may not live to see finished. Aegon’s invasion beginning early, before Daenerys or Dorne are ready for it, quietly threatens to unbalance every careful plan laid earlier in the book, Quentyn’s included.
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.