A Dance with Dragons — Asha III

At a crofters' village three days from Winterfell, Stannis's starving host burns its cannibals; out of the storm come a broken man and a girl in a dead girl's name — Theon and Jeyne.

The chapter retold

Three days from Winterfell, Stannis’s starving, frostbitten host stops at a crofters’ village and burns men found to have turned to cannibalism during the retreat’s worst nights — grim, necessary justice by the king’s own account, and a measure of exactly how far the campaign has already collapsed before reaching a single Bolton sword. Out of the same storm stumble two more desperate travelers: a broken man and a girl wearing a dead girl’s name, and Asha Greyjoy, watching from her captivity, recognizes her own kin the moment Theon Greyjoy staggers into the firelight.

The chapter closes the loop on Theon and Jeyne’s leap from Winterfell’s walls, delivering them alive but ruined into the one camp in the North that might actually protect them, and gives Asha a reunion she surely never expected to survive long enough to witness. It also drives home, with the burnt cannibals as grim punctuation, exactly what Stannis’s campaign has cost before it’s fired a single arrow at Winterfell itself — an army eating its own discipline as thoroughly as the winter is eating its men.

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.