A Dance with Dragons — Tyrion III

Aboard the Shy Maid Tyrion needles the crew: a septa, a knight, a boy called Young Griff with blue-dyed hair — and hair that blue hides silver.

The chapter retold

Aboard the Shy Maid, Tyrion gets his first good look at his traveling companions and can’t stop needling them for information: a septa named Lemore who prays with a swordswoman’s calm, a hedge knight called Duck who looks built for exactly one purpose, the scarred captain Griff who answers every question with another question — and a beautiful, guarded boy called Young Griff, whose dyed-blue hair does nothing to hide silver roots underneath. Tyrion, half in his cups and wholly incapable of leaving a mystery alone, starts doing the arithmetic that anyone raised on Targaryen genealogies would eventually do.

This is the chapter where the book lets its cleverest character start assembling the secret at the center of its eastern half without quite saying it aloud — Young Griff’s hair color is a costume, not a fact, and costumes exist to hide something worth hiding. Tyrion’s wit, so often a weapon turned on other people, becomes here an instrument of unwanted discovery: he is being carried toward the middle of a Targaryen restoration plot he was never meant to see the workings of, and every joke he makes buys him a little more of the crew’s wary attention.

This movement: The Lost Lords

• Tyrion drinks his way across the narrow sea in a wine cask, bound for a queen with dragons — 'wherever whores go' ringing in his ears.
• Jon Snow rules the Wall: he sends Mance's son away in secret, gives Slynt one last order, and takes his head personally.
• Dany rules Meereen in a tokar while the Sons of the Harpy paint the bricks red by night.
• Bran travels north beyond the Wall with cold hands guiding — toward a cave, a weirwood throne, and a thousand eyes.