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.

By the time they reach the aforementioned forest, their numbers have grown to admit a foul-smelling, distinctly ignoble-looking Night’s Watch brother named Yoren and his own group of recruits: rapists who chose the Wall over castration. Look, I know men are very attached to their penes, but if your choice is between never having sex while living in the relative warmth and civilization of somewhere Winterfell-adjacent and never having sex while living in the world’s frozen buttcrack and regularly venturing on dangerous scouting missions into the wildling-infested permafrost, is the choice with the penis intact really the more attractive one? Are they hoping that the Watch will change its mind about celibacy? If so, they obviously don’t know much about the pace of change inside the military bureaucratic machine.

Tyrion and Ben are having a Stark-Lannister pissing war, and I bet they both think they’re winning. Since Tyrion is useless when it comes to arranging campsites, he keeps out of the way with his second and third favourite thing for company — booze and books. One particular book is about dragons and their useful component parts: there are twelve uses for blood and heartstring can be put into wands… Sorry, wrong fantasy series. What it really says is that dragonbone is good for making weapons, because who cares about magic wands and elixirs when there are characters GRRM hasn’t killed yet.

Tyrion reminisces about visiting the skulls of the Targaryen dragons. In the HBO show, this scene was replaced with a scene of Viserys having sex with one of Dany’s slavegirls; luckily, we are not subjected to the inside of Viserys’s mind in the books. I can just as easily see Tyrion recounting dragon names while having sex with a prostitute, though. Alas, we are not made privy to the inside of Tyrion’s pants just yet, only his mind. The dragon skulls were terrifying and beautiful to behold: from the small, deformed pair of the last dragons to be born (one would think that Targaryens would take what happened to their dragons as a warning against incest) all the way back to the fearsome threesome who were the first that the Targaryen conquerors brought with them. Hundreds of years ago, two of the original seven kings tried to resist the Targaryen conquest, only to find their troops burned by dragonflame. The Targaryens like to burn their enemies, this is a trait they will pass down for generations.

Jon puts an end to Tyrion’s reverie and starts asking Tyrion about reading, but after having a long speech that boils down to a simple metaphor — books : minds :: whetstones : swords — Tyrion flips it around and starts getting into Jon’s head. Tyrion is cynical, so his assumption is that Jon has little love for his family, and when Jon protests, Tyrion mocks him with a sugary fake vision of unconditional family love. The truth is somewhere in between, of course, but Jon’s relationship with the rest of the Starks isn’t the point of this scene and conversation. It’s really about Jon and the Night’s Watch. It was simple enough for Jon to want to join up when he was using his uncle as a representative sample, but that’s a tiny part of the watch. For every younger son, how many thieves and rapists are conscripted to its ranks?

Jon gets really upset at Tyrion’s honest, maybe too honest, opinion of the Watch, and Tyrion feels guilty for taking a young boy’s hopes and dreams and crushing them into the dirt beneath his feet. When he tries to give Jon an apologetic pat, FYC comes charging into the scene and into Tyrion. Jon’s kind of an asshole about the whole thing, making Tyrion “ask [him] nicely” before telling FYC to chill and helping Tyrion up. Luckily, Tyrion’s too much of an adult to start a grudge match with sulking teenager. To be fair to Jon, he gets over his sulking a lot faster than most fourteen-year-olds, and after a few gulps of Tyrion’s wine, squares his shoulders and decides that things are what they are and he’ll deal with them. Tyrion’s is duly impressed by Jon’s resistance to denial’s seductive charms. They get back to camp where Jon draws first watch, giving him time by himself to stare broodingly into the campfire and ruminate on his fate.