A Dance with Dragons — Victarion II
The Iron Fleet burns its way up Slaver's Bay taking prizes; Moqorro promises that the hellhorn Dragonbinder will bind a dragon — for the price of a blooded man's lungs.
The chapter retold
Victarion’s Iron Fleet burns and plunders its way up Slaver’s Bay, taking prizes and provisions wherever the coalition’s attention is fixed elsewhere, while Moqorro presses his advantage over the captain further still — promising that Dragonbinder, the ancient horn Euron once handed Victarion with a warning about its cost, can truly bind a dragon to its blower’s will, provided the ritual is paid for correctly: with the lungs of a man already marked for sacrifice.
The chapter is the clearest look yet at how thoroughly Moqorro has gotten inside Victarion’s plans, turning a straightforward raiding campaign into something closer to a religious mission with a dragon as its promised reward. Victarion, never subtle and never particularly self-aware, is being maneuvered by forces well above his understanding, and the horn’s blood price — someone else’s death purchasing his triumph — is exactly the kind of bargain this book likes best: cheap for the man making it, ruinous for whoever else ends up paying.
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.