Ser Alliser Thorne is giving the Night’s Watch recruits an inspirational speech, a phrase that here means being emotionally crippled by deep-seated childhood trauma, stemming from the incident during which he witnessed his mother fellating a pony only to later find out that it was his father indulging a My Little Pony fetish, and therefore being able to express feelings towards men younger than twenty-five only by metaphorically jerking his dick and ejaculating a pile of abuse all over them.

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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.

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Ned is flying high on “milk of the poppy.” We all know what it means when a character is injured, unconscious, and medicated: it’s dream-sequence flashback time!

(The role of a dreamscape’s shimmery border is here played by italics.)
Ned is accompanied by six people, but the only name we need to bother remembering is Howland Reed. He’s facing three enemies, knights of Aerys’s Kingsguard, and we don’t really need to care about any of them except maybe Arthur Dayne. Even in his dreams, Ned is on top of his favourite high horse — honour and duty! — and questioning the knights about their absence from the Battle of the Trident, the slaying of Aerys in King’s Landing, the Siege of Storm’s End, and Ser Willem Darry’s flight to Dragonstone with the pregnant queen and little Viserys. The knights are fairly certain that Ned’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries. Ned apparently took offense, because a skirmish ensued, and at some point before, during or after, Lyanna was wailing her brother’s name and Ned was promising her something.

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The Eyrie’s jail cells are built in such a way that they double as a torture device: they have three walls, one drop to the death, and one mean, stupid jailer who’s been starving Tyrion by throwing his food off the deathly drop side for mean, stupid laughs. Tyrion reacts with a mixture of sarcastic disdain (Tyrion) and prideful fury (Lannister). A Lannister always pays his debts (that’s not the book, that’s just me, don’t drink), but as far as I’m aware, Mord is still being a Karma Houdini. I know he doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things and GRRM is busy cutting a swath through the major players, but I hope he doesn’t forget to balance the books on this one before the end.

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Bran’s new special horse is named Dancer. It would be a bit too on the nose for him to ride out of Winterfell with the cry “Now, Dancer!” I suppose. I’m choosing to believe it’s a hidden metaphor casting Tyrion as Santa; he did bring Bran a present, after all.

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Ned stands in a brothel, a pillar of chastity in a sea of debauchery; one of his men seems to be playing strip-checker with a girl and a squire was apparently having sex while waiting for Ned and Littlefinger to finish their business. Ned exchanges his high horse for a real horse and ruminates on his findings during the ride back.

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For someone who doesn’t want the throne, Robert sure is intense about keeping it. He’s raging up a storm about Dany being pregnant and demanding all the Targaryen heads on a silver platter, including the unborn one. Ned’s the only member of the council to point out the moral ambiguity of murder. Except that he keeps on calling Dany a child and it’s squicking me out. I mean, I’m generally squicked out whenever I think too much about her age, but even more so when the characters in the book don’t even consider her an adult by their own fucked up standards.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that every princess wants a pony for her sixth birthday. It is a heinous crime to butcher a princess’s pony! Except that Tyrion isn’t a princess, it was his twenty-third birthday, and it’s a full-sized horse, but that’s quibbling, the point is that Catelyn is evil!

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The great thing about GRRM is that even Sansa’s fairy tale lala-land chapters contain much more than just Sansa’s personality and views. All those things that ruined the fantasy for her — the young knight getting killed by the Mountain and the Hound ranting about how his brother did it on purpose just because he could — are now ruining Ned’s day too and not just because some young knight died at a tourney in his name. The knight just happened to be the late Jon Arryn’s newly knighted squire and Ned never got to speak to him because the man was arrogant and it apparently galled Ned too much to give in to his airs. Next time you really need information, Ned, get it first and get offended later.

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Catelyn and Ser Rodrik have reached Tully lands in their trek back homeward. While Rodrik bitches about the rain, Catelyn reminisces about the fun times one has as a child forcing your foster brother to eat enough mud to be sick for a week. The foster brother is Littlefinger, of course, because who else would scarf down mud just to satisfy Catelyn’s poisoning instincts.

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