Catelyn is feeling poetic about the view from her window. It sounds very pretty, but Tyrion’s fate is hanging in the balance, so maybe we should hurry this along, hm? I will say this about the picturesque beginning to the chapter: it’s about a waterfall named Alyssa Arryn after a woman who’s been dead for six thousand years. Now, it could just be me, but six thousand years seems like an awfully long time for one family to still be ruling this one patch of land. I don’t think any dynasty on Earth ever cracked the thousand-year mark, and I’ve done extensive research, a phrase which here means spending five minutes on Wikipedia. Forget ruling dynasties, is there even a family, any family, that can be traced back that far? How politically stable would a region have to be for allow for that kind of longevity not to mention records-keeping? Look up 4000 BC, we certainly don’t know much about it.

Ser Rodrik is filling Catelyn in on the latest ground-level news. If I were an denizen of the Eyrie, I think I’d feel very remote and disconnected from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. Who cares about the squabbles of the people on the ground when you live in a fortress in the sky? The squabbles currently stand thusly: Tywin Lannister is gathering a military force and Catelyn’s brother Edmure is preparing a defensive force in response, having received no response to a message demanding a declaration of intent.

Quick geography primer: Vale, ruled by House Arryn from the Eyrie, is on the east coast; The Westerlands, ruled by House Lannister from Casterly Rock, are on the west coast; land-locked between them are the Riverlands, ruled by House Tully from Riverrun. A straight line from Casterly Rock to the Eyrie will go through Riverrun, which is why the Tullies are now a kind of shield between the pissed-off Lannisters and the Tyrion-capturing sisters. The Riverlands, by the way, are the only southern realm to share a border with the North (that’s actually what it’s called, no fancy name, just “the North”). In fact, Ned oversees a realm that’s as big as all of the southern lands combined.

And because a picture is worth a thousand words (or in this case: 121), here you go, a political map of the Seven Kingdoms:

Catelyn is worried that her brother is taking charge, it’s an indication of her father’s ailing health. She wants to put a stop to the trial-by-combat thing, still going on about Tyrion’s being her prisoner (her italics, not mine), and to set off to Winterfell, going by sea since Kingsroad will probably be a battlefield soon. See, the Tully words put “family” first; to Catelyn, Tyrion is still just a piece in the puzzle of the assault on Bran. She seems a blind to the fact that she’s started a civil war in the realm.

On her way to see her sister, she runs into her uncle, who’s smoking from the ears due to his own recent conversation with Lysa. Lysa Arryn is one of those characters whose sole purpose is to suck. She’s necessary to me as a reader because it’ll make me feel good when horrible things will happen to her, which will be a nice break from feeling sad on behalf characters I actually care about. The specific sucking of which she’s currently guilty is her refusing to give Uncle Brynden soldier so that he can ride to Riverrun and protect her from the Lannisters. So Uncle Brynden quit his job as the Knight of the Gate, and I think this is a quitting that’s going to stick, unlike the neverending see-saw of “I quit/You can’t quit” between Robert and Ned. Catelyn proposes that he should go with her to Winterfell and then she’ll give him the soldiers he needs to boost Tully numbers.

Lysa and her entourage, comprised largely of unmarried lords hoping to get their hands on the Vale by marrying her, presumably only until Ickle Bobbikins comes of age. A six-thousand-year-old family line has tapered down to this one sickly kid, which is of course the point of him as a character. It’s a wonder Jon Arryn didn’t turn into a mixture of Blue Beard and Henry VIII under the weight of such a legacy, although he did have two wives before Lysa, I don’t think there was ever anything murky about their deaths. The scheduled combat to the death is, of course, a merry affair, with wine, music, and other entertainment. Catelyn makes a bit of a scene in an attempt to make Lysa see the value of Tyrion alive and the danger of executing him, but Lysa insists that Tyrion poisoned Jon Arryn and will be rightfully thrown off the mountain for it. (Assuming Bronn loses, a fact only Catelyn doubts.) Even Catelyn notices this curious certainty of Tyrion’s guilt in Jon Arryn’s death. She attributes it to Lysa’s inability to make any other Lannister pay. I enjoy knowing things the characters don’t in general, but I particularly enjoy being more in the know than Catelyn. To be honest, I sometimes almost forget about the whole “who killed Jon Arryn” mystery. It was a catalyst to the events, sure, but how important in the grand scheme of things? Then again, a murder is a murder and GRRM is a devious man, who knows when it will come back to bite everyone involved in the ass?

Catelyn is informed by the castle’s drunk maester that Jon Arryn planned to send his son away to be fostered by Stannis Baratheon at Dragonstone, a small tidbit of information that contradicts what she’s been told: that Lysa fled King’s Landing to avoid her son being sent away to be fostered at Casterly Lock as a post-Arryn-death Lannister plot.

Time for some combat! Ser Vardis, armored by steel and experience, not-a-ser Bronn, in possession of youth and a longer arm reach. There are some pre-combat rituals and then they fight, but honest, we’re only just over half-way through the book and there are several Tyrion chapters still to come, it’s not exactly a suspenseful moment. Well, it could be suspenseful, because GRRM, like Shakespeare, will kill anyone, but not if you’ve seen the Table of Contents. How funny would the books be if Tyrion died here and spent the rest of the series snarkily narrating events from beyond the grave? He’d haunt Cersei and hang out in brothels listening to the prostitutes gossip about their clients.

Catelyn herself isn’t even paying attention, she’s reminiscing about Littlefinger’s duel with the late Brandon Stark. At the time, Littlefinger was actually little, Catelyn herself was only a young teenager, but she both honoured her father betrothing her to this man she didn’t know and tried to protect the boy she did know by giving her lady’s favour to Brandon and pleading with him to be merciful; unable to make Littlefinger yield when he was still standing, Brandon had to seriously injure him to end the battle. That was the last time Catelyn saw him before her recent visit to King’s Landing; Lysa helped nurse him to health and he was then sent home to the Fingers.

I feel a little sorry for Ser Vardis, he seemed like a descent enough man and it certainly wasn’t fair to have him fight crippled by Lysa’s idiocy (she had him wield a decorative sword for its symbolic value instead of letting him fight with his own), but he’s dead and Tyrion is free to go. Sullenly, Lysa gives him horses and supplies, and orders him and Bronn gone from her lands by the high road. The one infested with highwaymen that Catelyn’s group had to fight off on the way here. This is Lysa’s petulant revenge and though he doesn’t show it, it makes Tyrion nervous. That’s just because Tyrion doesn’t know the depths of his own awesomeness yet, but I do, and I am looking forward to this.