You know what it’s like when you hate camping but have to go anyway? There’s always the one guy who’s all, “Get up! Let’s go greet the sun and pee in the bushes and be one with nature!” And all you want to do is curl up in your sleeping bag and pretend you’re in your bed and there’s running water and electricity for your laptop within your reach. The royal court, now including some Starks, is trekking back south and Robert Baratheon is that nature-loving asshole. He wants Ned to get up and go pre-dawn riding with him.

Robert leads Ned off the kingsroad into the open plain and away from the main party. Are they going to have a Dothraki wedding? There aren’t enough bells in Robert’s hair and Ned doesn’t have a dress made of mice. In any case, Robert wants to run away from marriage and all his other duties. This is not a sentiment Honourable Ned shares, obviously. Robert grumbles that Ned’s always been a party pooper except that one time he cheated on his wife. What was her name? You know, the bastard boy’s mother? Her name, as it turns out, is Wylla and Ned doesn’t want to talk about it, so he changes the subject by pointing out some ancient graves.

Robert actually has a political reason for being a camping sadist this morning, he’s had a message from his spymaster, Varys the eunuch. It’s important: a thin thread that connects Dany in Essos to the rest of the story, and that thread’s name is Jorah Mormont. Mormont was Ned’s bannerman, so when he broke the law by selling poachers as slaves, it was Ned’s responsibility to punish him, but Mormont fled overseas before Ned could get to him. Now he’s trying to buy a pardon by spying for Varys. Does it surprise anyone that no sane man would actually mean a pledge of fealty to Viserys? The news of Dany marrying Drogo worries Robert, who wants to send an assassin as a wedding gift. Robert is obsessed with making the Targaryens as extinct as their dragons. Ned recalls being upset with Tywin Lannister murdering Rhaegar’s wife and children, while Robert was pleased that more “dragonspawn” were dead.

Ned and Robert play tug-of-war. On Ned’s team are the atrocity of murder and Dany’s childhood and innocence. On Robert’s — the Targeryen’s murder of Ned’s father and brother and rape of his sister. It’s a draw and anyway, a moot point. Jon Arryn, during his tenure as the hand, has successfully kept Robert from making Dany and Viserys’s assassination a priority. Now that Dany is surrounded by Drogo’s khalasar and headed to Vaes Dothrak, tradition dictates that Drogo present his new wife there, Robert’s assassins can’t get to her.

Robert’s not being completely unreasonable, though. It’s not just about hating the Targaryens. He conquered his throne and the rightful heirs of the king he overthrew now have access to a vast army and probably enough money to pay for its transportation. It’s not so comforting to have a sea between himself and said army when the sea’s name is Narrow. The sea and Essos across it are to the east of Westeros, and with Jon Arryn’s death there is no Warden of the East. Ned refused the title not wanting to take it away from his wife’s nephew; before the news of Dany’s marriage it seemed simply a ceremonial matter. Now he proposes that one of Robert’s brothers should take on the duty. Robert reacts to the proposal with unease and Ned guesses that he’s actually already promised the title to Jaime.

Ned’s unhappy, not just because Jaime is the Kingslayer, but also because he’s the heir to the Warden of the West, and that’s a lot of power to put in one man’s hands. I’m actually a little confused, because Jon Arryn’s duty as the Warden didn’t automatically pass to his son, so why should Tywin Lannister’s? Unless the implication is that when unlike in the Arryn case, Robert won’t have any legitimate excuse to give the Warden of the West job to anyone else when Tywin dies and probably won’t want, or have the guts to, quarrel with his brother-in-law about it.

Ned starts whining about Jaime’s lack of honour and this is where he loses me. Ned’s position is that Jaime killing king Aerys when he was a member of the Kingsguard is not honourable whereas Robert and Ned’s rising up in a rebellion against Aerys when they were his sworn vassals is. Ned also doesn’t like that after spending the year during which the civil war was waged being Switzerland, the Lannisters finally put an end to the whole thing by showing up in King’s Landing, pretending to be there to join Aerys’s side, only to take the city in the name of the rebellion once the city gates were open to them. Robert is as annoyed with the Ned’s point of view as I am. You’d think that Ned would take his sister’s death as close as heart as Robert has, hm? HMMM? But the death Ned has taken to heart is Aerys’s. When he finally arrived in King’s Landing, Aerys was dead on the floor of the throne room and Jaime was sitting on the throne, a bloody sword across his lap. Ned thinks it was in very bad taste for Jaime to let his ass experience the discomfort of the Iron Throne. Good thing Ned hasn’t seen the promos for the TV show, everyone’s sitting on the throne in them! Robert has a good sense of humour about Jaime’s antiques (we learn that Jaime was only seventeen back then, which means he and Cersei are thirty-two now) and has had enough of Ned’s bitterness, so he takes off galloping. Ned wants to go home, but has no choice by to follow his king.