Chapter 1 – Tyrion

Tyrion is on a boat bound for the free cities; he’s drunk and feeling very sorry for himself. When the ship makes port, Tyrion is stuffed inside a wine cask and delivered to Magister Illyrio Mopatis, the man responsible for selling Danaerys to Khal Drogo. Tyrion feels sorry for himself. Illyrio has to go out on magisterial duties and so Tyrion wanders about the mansion, drinking, and rambling to servants he believes don’t understand him. The rambling concerns his future and what he might do with it. He falls down drunk, sees some mushrooms, picks them and puts them in his pocket. He thinks they might be poisonous.

Later he dines with Illyrio and his appetite for food is re-stimulated by the feast laid out before him. Illyrio makes reference to ‘the king’ but Tyrion doesn’t appear to pick up on it. During the feast, mushrooms in garlic butter are served. Tyrion goes to take one but falters when he remembers the mushrooms he picked earlier. He offers the plate to Illyrio who insists that he goes first. Tyrion believes he is being offered poison. Illyrio asks him if that isn’t what he wants. The servants understood his rambling better than he thought. Instinctively, Tyrion doesn’t want to die, but realises he doesn’t know what he will do with the rest of his life. The magister talks about going east so that Tyrion can return to Westeros with the three-headed dragon.

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Oh hai, Tyrion, where’ve you been? You know, in some respects Tyrion is very naive. He is prone to dwelling on the past and now he has more to torment himself with. His experience in King’s Landing has revealed the truth about his family and it’s a blow. And really, it’s not like he thought his family was great. He already thought that his experience was pretty shit, and then to find out that it was worse, well that sucks.

I think that Tyrion has had a lot of his sense of identity stripped away from him and the worst of his character is at the surface at the moment. He’s soft-hearted and protecting himself behind bitterness. A lot of the commenters on the fan blogs seem to be willing Tyrion to hook up with Dany – I guess on the basis that you always want your favourite characters to get together – but I’m not sure that’s how this is going to pan out. And why does Illyrio want to help Tyrion? What’s he getting out of this?

I think I should say at this point that there are no characters I dislike in this series. Obviously I have my favourites, but all the characters are sympathetic to some degree. Yes, even Cersei.

Prologue

A warg is hunting in the snow beyond the Wall with two other wolves. They find a small group of people; two men and a woman with a baby. The wolves attack, kill and eat the people.

Varamyr Sixskins, one of Mance Rayder’s chiefs, and a big noise in the army of the King Beyond the Wall, lies dying alone in the snow. The wolves are what remains of the six animals he was previously linked with. We learn what happened to the wildling army after their defeat by Stannis. Some have gone on to Eastwatch to try to breach the Wall there. Others have gone to the sea to look for boats to take them away. Others are heading north again to the land of the Thenns, even though the Thenns joined Mance’s army to escape the ice zombie invasion of their lands. Many have scattered in small bands. Varamyr was with one such group which has been whittled down to him and one woman, who has gone hunting, leaving him dying of a knife wound to the side which he got while trying to steal a cloak.

Varamyr’s thoughts turn to his childhood and how he became a shape shifter, which conveys more information about the link between the Starks and their wolves. He remembers his mentor telling him about the times he shouldn’t link with animals, the types of animals not to join with and that it is an abomination to join with another person. Varamyr has done all these things. He goes out looking for the woman he was travelling with. As he finds her, he slips, causing his wound to rip open and he bleeds out. At this point, Varamyr tries to transfer his soul to the woman. She fights him and the fight causes her to kill herself, biting out her own tongue and clawing out her eyes. Varamyr’s soul finds his alpha wolf, from whose eyes he watches hundreds of ice zombies slowly marching south.

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Good start. Initially, I thought we were with Bran and that it was Summer eating the baby. So, the whole baby-eating scene was quite shocking. A paragraph later, I learn that the warg is Varamyr Sixskins. Who is awful. And I find myself quite relieved that it wasn’t Bran.

This chapter goes a long way to explaining the gift of shape shifting that the Starks seem to have with their direwolves. It’s something more accepted north of the Wall than in the South, where these talents have been stamped out. It also conveys that there are times when it’s just not right to do it. Wolves are somewhat accepting, but Varamyr also had a shadowcat, a bear and an eagle. The cat and the bear hated it and tried to fight him.

And just so we don’t forget, the Prologue rams home the theme of Winter is Coming. There are ice zombies and we should be scared. The writing is as good as ever, particularly as this chapter is essentially exposition told through a character study, and I’m totally gripped.