A Dance with Dragons — Barristan IV

Dragons loose over a burning bay, ironborn sails on the horizon, the city at war on every side — Barristan the Bold holds Meereen while its queen's fate decides itself far away.

The chapter retold

Meereen finishes tearing itself apart on every front at once: dragons loose somewhere over the city, an ironborn fleet’s sails showing on the horizon exactly when nobody needed one more army in the equation, and Ser Barristan Selmy still holding the line between all of it and total collapse, an old knight doing the unglamorous, exhausting work of keeping a city alive while its absent queen’s fate is being decided somewhere out in the grass, far beyond anyone’s ability to help her.

The chapter is a wide-angle survey of a city at the exact center of the book’s converging catastrophes, and Barristan’s steadiness is deliberately the calmest thing in it — everyone else is reacting to forces beyond their control, while he keeps doing the one job in front of him with the discipline of a man who has outlived several kings by refusing to panic on schedule. Meereen’s survival, at this point, looks less like triumph and more like sheer stubborn refusal to fall, which the book suggests may be exactly what these people have left to offer it.

This movement: For the Watch

• The Pink Letter reaches Jon — Ramsay claims Stannis is dead and demands his bride and his Reek. Jon calls the free folk to march on Winterfell.
• "For the Watch." Bowen Marsh and his officers put their knives in the Lord Commander, weeping as they work.
• Barristan rides out to break the Yunkish siege as the second Battle of Meereen begins; Victarion's Iron Fleet enters the bay.
• Epilogue: Varys kills Kevan Lannister and Pycelle by candlelight — to keep the realm bleeding for Aegon's landing.