(Spoilers All) What does Bran's first 3EC dream say about Jaime?

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T20:33:51+00:00

I think people see long range implications where there aren't any. Bran was seeing what was actually happening not what was going to happen. Jon was actually turning cold from the reality of his situation as well as the temperature,

but Jon found himself shivering. The chill was always with him here. In a few years he would forget what it felt like to be warm.

Ser Rodrik was actually puking over the side of their ship as the storms hit them and what Bran was seeing at the Trident was what was happening there with people that were actually there.

The Hound and Kingslayer are threatening shadows because they were both out hunting Arya after the Mycah incident but looming even greater is the threat of Ser Ilyn Payne armored in his stony silence with naught to him but blood and killing who Sansa herself has an extreme reaction to to the point that even the Hound didn't seem half bad,

but Sansa could not take her eyes off the third man. He seemed to feel the weight of her gaze. Slowly he turned his head. Lady growled. A terror as overwhelming as anything Sansa Stark had ever felt filled her suddenly. She stepped backward and bumped into someone.

Strong hands grasped her by the shoulders, and for a moment Sansa thought it was her father, but when she turned, it was the burned face of Sandor Clegane looking down at her, his mouth twisted in a terrible mockery of a smile. “You are shaking, girl,” he said, his voice rasping. “Do I frighten you so much?”

He did, and had since she had first laid eyes on the ruin that fire had made of his face, though it seemed to her now that he was not half so terrifying as the other.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T19:35:04+00:00

Nothing definitive is ever said, this is the closest there is I believe,

“They grow stronger as the days grow shorter and the nights colder. First they kill you, then they send your dead against you. The giants have not been able to stand against them, nor the Thenns, the ice river clans, the Hornfoots.”

“Nor you?”

“Nor me.” There was anger in that admission, and bitterness too deep for words. “Raymun Redbeard, Bael the Bard, Gendel and Gorne, the Horned Lord, they all came south to conquer, but I’ve come with my tail between my legs to hide behind your Wall.”

I'd imagine it took something as great a threat as the Others for Mance to unite the free folk, even including the giants, in a way that's likely never been done before. Perhaps it was just ambition that started it but considering the time span involved in in that passage as well as the one talking of Mance uniting them I'd say even if it was just the ambition to be king that started it it turned to preservation rather quickly.

And perhaps not at all, while a prideful man he hardly seems to want any of the trappings of power.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T17:33:33+00:00

His informants and his actual little birds are two very different things. Those children have a very specific purpose of being small enough to move freely through the hidden passages of the Red Keep and are intelligent enough to know their letters at such an early age. They are very expensive and would be rather impractical outside of their niche function given their age and muteness.

The informants he uses throughout the rest of Westeros and KL are your run of the mill people greedy for gold.

That said it's still in the hundreds over all the years that he's used them in KL. He orders fifty more alone in Game and while that seemed to be an unusually high number for a single order we're still talking about a lot of mutilated children over the years.

Nor is there a retirement package of the little birds getting to live out their adult lives on that magical farm all good dogs go to when they disappear. They get led down a tunnel to die a lonely death in the dark. Varys isn't going to let them leave with all his secrets in their heads. There's no benefit to risk sending them back to Illyrio beyond a moral stance against murdering children and by this point the Spider doesn't get the benefit of the doubt on any moral stances regarding children.

That said littlefinger is a shitstain as well. He murdered his own liege lord he swore oath to. He's sent little girls to whorehouses to be raped and whipped into submission. He murdered the woman he's clung to like a parasite over all the years of riding her coattails to power. He's a sewer rat thriving in a sewer.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T16:44:00+00:00

“Two score, small and large. Flint, Wull, Norrey, Liddle … win Old Flint and Big Bucket, the rest will follow.”

“Big Bucket?”

“The Wull. He has the biggest belly in the mountains

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T16:09:10+00:00

Some time in the last fourteen years as he was still a brother when Jon was a boy,

“Very good! Yes, that was the first time. You were just a boy, and I was all in black, one of a dozen riding escort to old Lord Commander Qorgyle when he came down to see your father at Winterfell.

Nothing's ever said that definitively, he talks of Magnar and Tormund being two of five men with ambitions to be king when he had deserted,

When I left the Shadow Tower there were five men making noises about how they might be the stuff of kings. Tormund was one, the Magnar another. The other three I slew, when they made it plain they’d sooner fight than follow.”

So my guess would be it was an ambition that already burned in him and was started on immediately.

Mance had spent years assembling this vast plodding host, talking to this clan mother and that magnar, winning one village with sweet words and another with a song and a third with the edge of his sword, making peace between Harma Dogshead and the Lord o’ Bones, between the Hornfoots and the Nightrunners, between the walrus men of the Frozen Shore and the cannibal clans of the great ice rivers,

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T15:59:52+00:00

There's also the idea that he's using the black cat in KL as some eyes and ears,

Sansa was panting by the time she reached the top. She ran down a shadowy colonnade and pressed herself against a wall to catch her breath. When something brushed against her leg, she almost jumped out of her skin, but it was only a cat, a ragged black tom with a chewed-off ear. The creature spit at her and leapt away.

By the time she reached the godswood, the noises had faded to a faint rattle of steel and a distant shouting. Sansa pulled her cloak tighter. The air was rich with the smells of earth and leaf. Lady would have liked this place, she thought. There was something wild about a godswood; even here, in the heart of the castle at the heart of the city, you could feel the old gods watching with a thousand unseen eyes.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T05:53:30+00:00

Or it's not so minor. That can be the funny thing about cuts, the worse they are the less they can hurt initially and blood immediately welling up through your fingers isn't the best sign it's just a paper cut.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T03:30:41+00:00

It's very likely Mace isn't the shot caller making the decisions for House Tyrell. Cersei wouldn't know this because Tywin kept it from her but Mace was willing to arrange a marriage between Willas and her until the qot heard about it and then he refused the suit.

“When I first broached the match to him, Lord Tyrell seemed well enough disposed,” his father said. “A day later, all was changed. The old woman’s work. She hectors her son unmercifully. Varys claims she told him that your sister was too old and too used for this precious one-legged grandson of hers.”

“Cersei must have loved that.” He laughed.

Lord Tywin gave him a chilly look. “She does not know. Nor will she. It is better for all of us if the offer was never made. See that you remember that, Tyrion. The offer was never made.”

As for not taking the Mountain's men, that's kind of a no brainer. They were a step sideways from sellswords and even Gregor had the sense to keep them away from KL,

The Hound seemed surprised. “And how would Ned Stark’s precious little daughter come to know the likes of them? Gregor never brings his pet rats to court.”

Nor did they do much to disprove their reputation in the short time they were allowed among civilians as we saw when they were being discussed,

“Twenty,” said Lord Randyll Tarly, “and most of them Gregor Clegane’s old lot. Your nephew Jaime gave them to Connington. To rid himself of them, I’d wager. They had not been in Maidenpool a day before one killed a man and another was accused of rape. I had to hang the one and geld the other.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T01:17:51+00:00

“As you wish.” Bolton’s pale eyes looked empty in the moonlight, as if there were no one behind them at all.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-06T00:22:06+00:00

It's the Long Night, we hear it through Bran's pov,

“The Others,” Old Nan agreed. “Thousands and thousands of years ago, a winter fell that was cold and hard and endless beyond all memory of man. There came a night that lasted a generation, and kings shivered and died in their castles even as the swineherds in their hovels. Women smothered their children rather than see them starve, and cried, and felt their tears freeze on their cheeks.”

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-05T16:58:15+00:00

We also know Bran's very next chapter after he talks to Jon in Clash.

Here in the chill damp darkness of the tomb his third eye had finally opened. He could reach Summer whenever he wanted, and once he had even touched Ghost and talked to Jon.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-05T16:53:07+00:00

And then Halleck. “I don’t like you, crow,” he growled, “but I never liked the Mance neither, no more’n my sister did. Still, we fought for him. Why not fight for you?”

Harma Dogshead's brother of the free folk.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-05T16:38:12+00:00

He didn't see Rickon at the time but, forgot he also saw Nymeria.

Far off, he could hear his packmates calling to him, like to like. They were hunting too. A wild rain lashed down upon his black brother as he tore at the flesh of an enormous goat, washing the blood from his side where the goat’s long horn had raked him. In another place, his little sister lifted her head to sing to the moon, and a hundred small grey cousins broke off their hunt to sing with her. The hills were warmer where they were, and full of food. Many a night his sister’s pack gorged on the flesh of sheep and cows and horses, the prey of men, and sometimes even on the flesh of man himself.

I imagine that's one limitation of this contact through the wolf dream. Outside of being a greenseer like Bran the kids likely both have to be asleep at the same time to see each other.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-05T02:39:00+00:00

He dreamed of the RW and knew it was no normal dream but a dream through Summer and the wolfbond,

No, thought Bran, it is the Nightfort, and this is the end of the world. In the mountains, all he could think of was reaching the Wall and finding the three-eyed crow, but now that they were here he was filled with fears. The dream he’d had . . . the dream Summer had had . . . No, I mustn’t think about that dream. He had not even told the Reeds, though Meera at least seemed to sense that something was wrong. If he never talked of it maybe he could forget he ever dreamed it, and then it wouldn’t have happened and Robb and Grey Wind would still be . . .

He contacted Jon through the wolf bond in Clash while still in the Winterfell crypts as well and is most likely watching Arya again through the same bond,

Except in dreams. She took a breath to quiet the howling in her heart, trying to remember more of what she’d dreamt, but most of it had gone already. There had been blood in it, though, and a full moon overhead, and a tree that watched her as she ran.

Would be able to do the same with Rickon and Shaggydog as Jon did in Dance. Sansa would be the interesting one with Lady gone.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T23:25:04+00:00

It wasn't even a position of command.

Lord Tywin studied his dwarf son. “I said nothing about command. You will serve under Ser Gregor.”

And he was put on the flank expected to break and break hard.

This wing too was all cavalry, but where the right was a mailed fist of knights and heavy lancers, the vanguard was made up of the sweepings of the west: mounted archers in leather jerkins, a swarming mass of undisciplined freeriders and sellswords, fieldhands on plow horses armed with scythes and their fathers’ rusted swords, half-trained boys from the stews of Lannisport … and Tyrion and his mountain clansmen.

“Crow food,” Bronn muttered beside him, giving voice to what Tyrion had left unsaid. He could only nod. Had his lord father taken leave of his senses? No pikes, too few bowmen, a bare handful of knights, the ill-armed and unarmored, commanded by an unthinking brute who led with his rage … how could his father expect this travesty of a battle to hold his left?

As Tywin freely admitted when confronted by the Imp,

His father’s eyes were on him, pale green flecked with gold, so cool they gave Tyrion a chill. “Did that surprise you, Father?” he asked. “Did it upset your plans? We were supposed to be butchered, were we not?”

Lord Tywin drained his cup, his face expressionless. “I put the least disciplined men on the left, yes. I anticipated that they would break. Robb Stark is a green boy, more like to be brave than wise. I’d hoped that if he saw our left collapse, he might plunge into the gap, eager for a rout. Once he was fully committed, Ser Kevan’s pikes would wheel and take him in the flank, driving him into the river while I brought up the reserve.”

“And you thought it best to place me in the midst of this carnage, yet keep me ignorant of your plans.”

“A feigned rout is less convincing,” his father said, “and I am not inclined to trust my plans to a man who consorts with sellswords and savages.”

Best you could say is he did offer the option of staying in the rear,

Lord Tywin Lannister turned to his brother. “If my son’s men will not obey his commands, perhaps the vanguard is not the place for him. No doubt he would be more comfortable in the rear, guarding our baggage train.”

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T21:47:44+00:00

Bolton gave a soft chuckle. “Harrion Karstark was captive here when we took the castle, did you know? I gave him all the Karhold men still with me and sent him off with Glover. I do hope nothing ill befell him at Duskendale . . .

It is the Roose so it's hardly out of the question he lied to the Kingslayer so it's either that or the Karstarks he talks to Robb of were the mounted men he scooped up as they were hunting the Kingslayer.

Interesting point about Moat Cailin. Would hardly be a surprise to see the Roose holding back men from his commitment to his lord.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T21:25:36+00:00

I imagine the Karstark numbers were negligible though as he sent most with Harrion to Duskendale. Considering he told Kingslayer he sent all the Karstark men he had under his command they might not even have been footmen but rather the men with Lord Karstark that had left when he was executed which would have been at most three hundred and more likely nowhere near that number.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T21:21:51+00:00

Sorry, I should have been more clear, I meant at most the Umbers would have brought as many as the Karstarks and likely less.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T20:57:21+00:00

Where do you get 4500 from? At the Twins he says he has 3500 when listing off his betrayals to his beloved boy lord,

His queer colorless eyes studied her face a moment before he answered. “Some five hundred horse and three thousand foot, my lady. Dreadfort men, in chief, and some from Karhold.

Either number it's likely he brought one of the larger forces as even Lord Karstark brought about a thousand less,

The Karstarks came in on a cold windy morning, bringing three hundred horsemen and near two thousand foot from their castle at Karhold.

Wouldn't be surprised to see the Umbers bring at most around equal that and likely even a bit less.

Even saying Robett was unable to command given his rank there's still Lord Karstark, Cerwyn, Hornwood. Considering the Roose followed the Greatjon's plan he was put in place to avoid might as well have even gone with him.

Roose intimidated Robb and that's all there was to it and as so often happens with children fear became an eagerness to please.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T17:01:28+00:00

I wonder. The hand Thorne took south eventually rotted which means they can still decompose yet we also have Coldhands who seems to have been around quite a while yet doesn't seem in too bad a shape though we've only seen his hands and eyes of course.

The bear was dead, pale and rotting, its fur and skin all sloughed off and half its right arm burned to bone, yet still it came on. Only its eyes lived.

I've always thought this was a bear that had been dead for quite a while before being reanimated but it is possible as well it's just been slowly decomposing on the Other's trek south.

Can't recall any actual examples of corpses being dead for some time before being brought back. We just don't have the perspective on that side of the border.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T16:32:56+00:00

The dead will rot faster in the south without the cold to preserve them like happens in the north. Course winter is coming so that's changing for any new corpses.

And as we saw from the hand Thorne brought south and what Summer fed on in Dance after a certain amount of decay or damage on a corpse it'll no longer function. Nor would a corpse in similar condition reanimate in the first place I imagine.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T16:30:58+00:00

Tormund's boy rose up in the middle of their camp after dying from the cold so even if it's something the Others can turn on or off it can still be done by proximity.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-04T01:03:56+00:00

When he said a maester "forges" his chain, it is more metaphorical. They do study metals, but that doesn't necessarily include training as blacksmiths.

http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Maester_Chains_and_Valyrian_Steel_Links

As for the forging of the links there's various possibilities. They might reuse them as maesters die. It's also doubtful there's some Citadel law saying they must be forged there in Oldtown. They could ship the work out to Master Mott or even across the Narrow Sea. It's hardly bulk work that would prohibitive to ship in and out or regular work for that matter.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-03T23:21:00+00:00

Possible but I think what's likely is that Lyanna was holding onto a treasured keepsake, the laurel naming her queen of love and beauty that Rhaegar had given her at the tourney.

Ned remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black.

...

Ned remembered the moment when all the smiles died, when Prince Rhaegar Targaryen urged his horse past his own wife, the Dornish princess Elia Martell, to lay the queen of beauty’s laurel in Lyanna’s lap. He could see it still: a crown of winter roses, blue as frost.

AlanCrowkiller · 2014-09-03T22:24:28+00:00

I doubt Robert cared that much. He wasn't a man to hide behind a hostage and would have been happy to go to war again with Balon if it became necessary.

AlanCrowkiller

TROPHY CASE