Bran is still falling. He’s remembering Maester Luwin’s lesson about what happens to clay when it’s thrown out of a window and thinking that what happens to flesh probably is probably similar enough. A voice is telling him to take the third option and fly. I would say that hearing voices in your head is a bad sign, but the inside of his head is all Bran has right now, so I’ll let him have this one without crying “loony bin.”
Sansa’s first ever point-of-view chapter. You know what, I changed my mind, give me Catelyn back. I’ll take an adult asshole over an adolescent girl any day. Sansa is nobody’s favourite Stark for a reason, at least this early on in the series.
I’d rather go camping with Robert than deal with Catelyn when she’s being both an asshole and a grieving mother. Unlike Jon, I’m not too proud to give into denial and pretend Catelyn’s chapters don’t exist. That would, alas, make me a very bad blogger and I would feel guilty, and it would all be Catelyn’s fault!
While the king’s entourage noisily lumbers its way south, the much smaller “dwarves and bastards” party makes its way north. According to Tyrion, it’s a very long and hard way, but as a Canadian, I scoff at his perception of the travel conditions. There’s an actual road, and stone bridges, and occasional villages, so how remote could it be? Tyrion’s just grumpy because the forest of howling wolves isn’t stocked with prostitutes and he’s not used to such a long dry spell.
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.
Summer snow swirls around the castle’s grey walls. Wind howls and its howls are answered by those of wolves. Inside the walls it is warm, but quiet. Too quiet. Jon Snow makes the climb as if it were for the last time. It is. There is danger waiting ahead for him. A monster with claws and teeth that tear at his very soul. His wolf won’t save him, no one will save him, and he would turn back, but for the love that motivates him in this quest. Continue reading
I can’t tell if GRRM is a kind old wizard who’s cheering me up with Tyrion after that Bran chapter or if he’s an evil genius cackling madly as he gives me emotional whiplash.
Tyrion is in the library, having spent the whole night reading, and is jerked back to the real world by the howling of Bran’s nameless wolf. He gives the septon (who is functioning as a librarian) instructions to take specific care with certain books. He’s a ninja and a geek, how is a girl to keep her panties on? Continue reading
We don’t get to see what Catelyn does to parent a kid who is neither perfect or beloved like Sansa and Bran nor forced on her by circumstance and her husband like Jon because some days have gone by and we’re back with Bran.
Oh. Continue reading
If I have to do another Catelyn, you have to promise me the next one will be Tyrion. (I checked, it’s not. Neither is the one after that. This is why I didn’t read the book in order in the first place!)
Catelyn has the hottest room in the castle, and that’s not a euphemism for sex, it’s just a statement to her innate southern wussiness when it comes to weather. Sex has been happening, though; it winds down in unromantic terms as the chapter opens. Catelyn hopes Ned’s “seed” inside her doesn’t go to waste and gets put to baby-making use. I gag because it’s gone from unromantic to slightly gross. Mercifully, the conversation is moving on to politics. Continue reading
Fourteen-year-old Jon Snow is drinking wine, as one does when one lives in a mediaeval fantasy world. Lest I mislead anyone into thinking that Jon is in need of an intervention and a twelve-step program, it should be said that this is happening during a feast. Jon is secretly gloating over the fact that his brothers and sisters — sitting with the adults at the hosts and royalty table — would only be allowed one glass, whereas he, being seated on the benches in the crowd, can keep on drinking while the young squires surrounding him do the mediaeval fantasy version of the “chug chug” chant. Ok, so maybe a small intervention.