Dany arrives intending to take part in the blood-soaked commerce, just as Jorah was urging her and Drogo to do back in AGOT. But after her religious arc in ACOK and her own experience with slavery in AGOT, she instead decides to overthrow the Underworld with fire and blood, thus merging her political and prophetic selves. Yet note how GRRM describes her first step in doing so: 

A lance of swirling dark flame took Kraznys full in the face. His eyes melted and ran down his cheeks, and the oil in his hair and beard burst so fiercely into fire that for an instant the slaver wore a burning crown twice as tall as his head. The sudden stench of charred meat overwhelmed even his perfume, and his wail seemed to drown all other sound.

Even in liberation, Astapor is characterized by stomach-churning violence. It’s a city-wide butcher’s floor...and indeed, look who takes over next:

“Your Worship!” he cried. “My name is Ghael. I bring greetings to the Mother of Dragons from King Cleon of Astapor, Cleon the Great.” 

Dany stiffened. “I left a council to rule Astapor. A healer, a scholar, and a priest.”

“Your Worship, those sly rogues betrayed your trust. It was revealed that they were scheming to restore the Good Masters to power and the people to chains. Great Cleon exposed their plots and hacked their heads off with a cleaver, and the grateful folk of Astapor have crowned him for his valor.” 

“Noble Ghael,” said Missandei, in the dialect of Astapor, “is this the same Cleon once owned by Grazdan mo Ullhor?” 

Her voice was guileless, yet the question plainly made the envoy anxious. “The same,” he admitted. “A great man.” 

Missandei leaned close to Dany. “He was a butcher in Grazdan’s kitchen,” the girl whispered in her ear. “It was said he could slaughter a pig faster than any man in Astapor.” 

I have given Astapor a butcher king.

The descent continues:

“The city bleeds. Dead men rot unburied in the streets, each pyramid is an armed camp, and the markets have neither food nor slaves for sale. And the poor children! King Cleaver’s thugs have seized every highborn boy in Astapor to make new Unsullied for the trade, though it will be years before they are trained.”

“We have heard that the Butcher King of Astapor is dead.”

“Slain by his own soldiers when he commanded them to march out and attack the Yunkai’i.” The words were bitter in her mouth. “He was hardly cold before another took his place, calling himself Cleon the Second. That one lasted eight days before his throat was opened. Then his killer claimed the crown. So did the first Cleon’s concubine. King Cutthroat and Queen Whore, the Astapori call them. Their followers are fighting battles in the streets, while the Yunkai’i and their sellswords wait outside the walls.”

And in “The Windblown,” GRRM drops the veil entirely: 

Frog would be glad to put Astapor behind him. The Red City was the closest thing to hell he ever hoped to know. 

“The Windblown” is about the reaper coming for Dany’s revolution...only to find that in Astapor at least, it was already dead: 

Frog did not see it, but those who did claimed Cleon’s copper armor rent like silk, and from within came an awful stench and a hundred wriggling grave worms. Cleon had been dead after all. The desperate Astapori had pulled him from his tomb, clapped him into armor, and tied him onto a horse in hopes of giving heart to their Unsullied.

Again, it’s hell from the very first sentence:

The word passed through the camp like a hot wind.

The “hot wind” immediately goes for Dante’s Inferno to set the chapter’s tone. Specifically, the second circle of hell (fitting, as this is Quent’s second chapter) inflicts such a wind on the lustful. As @goodqueenaly noted, this is tearfully ironic given that Quentyn ain’t lustful at all. He does not desire Dany for himself; he is acting out of a sense of obligation to his father, to his dead companions, and to Story itself. 

Wed her or fight her; either way, I will face her soon. The more Quentyn heard of Daenerys Targaryen, the more he feared that meeting. The Yunkai’i claimed that she fed her dragons on human flesh and bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her skin smooth and supple. Beans laughed at that but relished the tales of the silver queen’s promiscuity. “One of her captains comes of a line where the men have foot-long members,” he told them, “but even he’s not big enough for her. She rode with the Dothraki and grew accustomed to being fucked by stallions, so now no man can fill her.” And Books, the clever Volantene swordsman who always seemed to have his nose poked in some crumbly scroll, thought the dragon queen both murderous and mad. “Her khal killed her brother to make her queen. Then she killed her khal to make herself khaleesi. She practices blood sacrifice, lies as easily as she breathes, turns against her own on a whim. She’s broken truces, tortured envoys…her father was mad too. It runs in the blood.”

It runs in the blood. King Aerys II had been mad, all of Westeros knew that. He had exiled two of his Hands and burned a third. If Daenerys is as murdeous as her father, must I still marry her? Prince Doran had never spoken of that possibility.

Quent, as I’ve said ad nauseam, doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to be the hero. Every new twist of the plot, every bit of information he comes across, only makes that more plain. If “The Merchant’s Man” dealt with Quent reckoning with that after the loss of his friends and soldiering forward anyway, “The Windblown” tunes into Quent having just been faced with the ghastly, unshakable horror of riding with this particular motley crew, and what that says about his quest and the environment in which it’s taking place...only to have said crew continue to be the enablers of his quest. This is increasingly the Windblown’s story now, as they come to dominate and then hijack Quent’s adventure, and so flavor it with themselves.  

From ASOS to ADWD, the fall of Astapor is rendered as a series of hallucinogenic horror tableaux. The imagery is baroque and cinematic, contrasting with the more blunt, stripped-down presentation of atrocities that we see (for example) throughout Arya’s time in the Riverlands. The latter’s story found GRRM cutting through romantic presentations of war in favor of the learned hopelessness of being powerless, of having no rules to live by. But in Slaver’s Bay, he’s after something else: a war story shot through with lush, vivid horror, all to emphasize how horribly wrong Quent’s quest has gone. The shadows come to dance in Astapor, my prince, they come to stay.  

The Yunkai’i had sealed the broken gates to keep the dead and dying inside the city, but the sights that he had seen riding down those red brick streets would haunt Quentyn Martell forever. A river choked with corpses. The priestess in her torn robes, impaled upon a stake and attended by a cloud of glistening green flies. Dying men staggering through the streets, bloody and befouled. Children fighting over half-cooked puppies. The last free king of Astapor, screaming naked in the pit as he was set on by a score of starving dogs. And fires, fires everywhere. He could close his eyes and see them still: flames whirling from brick pyramids larger than any castle he had ever seen, plumes of greasy smoke coiling upward like great black snakes.

As Quentyn himself said in his first chapter: this is not how a fantasy adventure is supposed to go, following the white rabbit to Wonderland only to find he’s stranded you in hell. GRRM performs a delicate dance throughout Quent’s arc, providing us with the recognizable framework of a Hero’s Journey while the actual content is an endless nightmare. For example, our hero is now called “Frog,” because of course he is. As I’ll get into next time, it’s a carefully chosen pseudonym on GRRM’s part in terms of both the upended fairytale logic in Quent’s arc and his self-consciousness regarding looks and charisma. In-universe, though, he earned “Frog” by playing his role: the eager squire (the Podrick to the big man’s Brienne) and the bona fide sellsword, even as they secretly plan their next move.

(Because apparently I need to reference Wizard of Oz in every series?) 

Team Quent has joined the Windblown under false pretenses, using them to get to Slaver’s Bay with the intention of abandoning them in order to infiltrate Meereen and bring the marriage contract to Dany. As I said last time, Quentyn really doesn’t like lying (“I’d sooner pose as poor than evil,” such an irreducibly Quentyn line), and GRRM ties this into the lie that is his quest. His dead companions never got their longed-for story to tell, because Drink had to lie about “who they were and why they’d come,” and we find a similar dynamic at work in “The Windblown.” There’s nothing exciting or roguish about this extended deception and disguise. It’s alienating. It’s dishonorable. It makes them feel shitty.

“The big man’s made too many friends. He knows the plan was always to steal off and make our way to Daenerys, but he’s not going to feel good about abandoning men he’s fought with. If we wait too long, it’s going to feel as if we’re deserting them on the eve of battle. He will never do that. You know him as well as I do.”

There was much and more about this Quentyn did not like himself. Sailing on an overcrowded ship tossed by wind and sea, eating hard-bread crawling with weevils and drinking black tar rum to sweet oblivion, sleeping on piles of moldy straw with the stench of strangers in his nostrils … all that he had expected when he made his mark on that scrap of parchment in Volantis, pledging the Tattered Prince his sword and service for a year. Those were hardships to be endured, the stuff of all adventures.

But what must come next was plain betrayal. The Yunkai’i had brought them from Old Volantis to fight for the Yellow City, but now the Dornishmen meant to turn their cloaks and go over to the other side. That meant abandoning their new brothers-in-arms as well. The Windblown were not the sort of companions Quentyn would have chosen, but he had crossed the sea with them, shared their meat and mead, fought beside them, traded tales with those few whose talk he understood. And if all his tales were lies, well, that was the cost of passage to Meereen.

It is not what you’d call honorable, Gerris had warned them, back at the Merchant’s House.

Once again, we see GRRM’s genre deconstruction at work. In your classic quest narrative, the protagonist often acquires unexpected new companions that are off-putting or even hostile at first, but gradually warm up to our hero and educate them (in a given skill or just about Life Itself), contributing to the self-actualization that is the guiding principle of said journey. Here, Quent’s new companions are terrible people, who teach him nothing but atrocities, and whose presence in his story (as I’ll get into in later entries) contributes not to self-actualization but his agonizing death...and yet he still feels bad selling them out. So nothing about “The Windblown” makes for the kind of memory one would record years later in one’s hobbit-hole, a wry nostalgic smile flitting across one’s face. It’s the kind of memory that makes you jolt awake in the night covered with sweat, the kind you try to forget but can’t. Like I said last time, this is a horror story disguised as a fantasy story.

But here it’s also a war story, one that draws its power in part from its context within ADWD as a whole. Up to this point, Essos has been but trembling on the edge of the abyss. In Dany and Tyrion’s chapters so far in the book, as in “The Merchant’s Man,” war is a rumor, a threat, a gathering storm. Dany sees it in a bloody glove; Tyrion hears it from another boat through the fog. In “The Windblown,” the bill comes due, and all the feints and bluffs and wheels within wheels are stripped away to reveal the oceans of blood at the heart of it all. It’s one of the most important Essos-set chapters in the series in that it grounds the war over slavery’s social and economic existence. The battle is joined. 

And oh, it is a nightmare. 

He remembered how his gut had clenched when he was kicked awake at dawn with the big man looming over him. “Into your armor, slugabed,” he’d boomed. “The Butcher’s coming out to give us battle. Up, unless you mean to be his meat.”

“The Butcher King is dead,” Frog had protested sleepily. That was the story all of them had heard as they scrambled from the ships that had brought them from Old Volantis. A second King Cleon had taken the crown and died in turn, supposedly, and now the Astapori were ruled by a whore and a mad barber whose followers were fighting with each other to control the city.

“Maybe they lied,” the big man had replied. “Or else this is some other butcher. Might be the first one come back screaming from his tomb to kill some Yunkishmen. Makes no bloody matter, Frog. Get your armor on.” The tent slept ten, and all of them had been on their feet by then, wriggling into breeches and boots, sliding long coats of ringmail down onto their shoulders, buckling breastplates, tightening the straps on greaves or vambraces, grabbing for helms and shields and sword belts. Gerris, quick as ever, was the first one fully clad, Arch close behind him. Together they helped Quentyn don his own harness.

Three hundred yards away, Astapor’s new Unsullied had been pouring through their gates and forming up in ranks beneath their city’s crumbling red brick walls, dawn light glinting off their spiked bronze helmets and the points of their long spears. The three Dornishmen spilled from the tent together to join the fighters sprinting for the horse lines.

Battle. Quentyn had trained with spear and sword and shield since he was old enough to walk, but that meant nothing now. Warrior, make me brave, Frog had prayed, as drums beat in the distance, BOOM boom BOOM boom BOOM boom. The big man pointed out the Butcher King to him, sitting stiff and tall upon an armored horse in a suit of copper scale that flashed brilliantly in the morning sun. He remembered Gerris sidling up just before the fight began. “Stay close to Arch, whatever happens. Remember, you’re the only one of us who can get the girl.” By then the Astapori were advancing.

Dead or alive, the Butcher King still took the Wise Masters unawares. The Yunkishmen were still running about in fluttering tokars trying to get their half-trained slave soldiers into some semblance of order as Unsullied spears came crashing through their siege lines. If not for their allies and their despised hirelings they might well have been overwhelmed, but the Windblown and the Company of the Cat were ahorse in minutes and came thundering down on the Astapori flanks even as a legion from New Ghis pushed through the Yunkish camp from the other side and met the Unsullied spear to spear and shield to shield.

The rest was butchery, but this time it was the Butcher King on the wrong end of the cleaver. Caggo was the one who finally cut him down, fighting through the king’s protectors on his monstrous warhorse and opening Cleon the Great from shoulder to hip with one blow of his curved Valyrian arakh. Frog did not see it, but those who did claimed Cleon’s copper armor rent like silk, and from within came an awful stench and a hundred wriggling grave worms. Cleon had been dead after all. The desperate Astapori had pulled him from his tomb, clapped him into armor, and tied him onto a horse in hopes of giving heart to their Unsullied.

Dead Cleon’s fall wrote an end to that. The new Unsullied threw down their spears and shields and ran, only to find the gates of Astapor shut behind them. Frog had done his part in the slaughter that followed, riding down the frightened eunuchs with the other Windblown. Hard by the big man’s hip he rode, slashing right and left as their wedge went through the Unsullied like a spearpoint. When they burst through on the other side, the Tattered Prince had wheeled them round and led them through again. It was only coming back that Frog got a good look at the faces beneath the spiked bronze caps and realized that most were no older than he. Green boys screaming for their mothers, he’d thought, but he killed them all the same. By the time he’d left the field, his sword was running red with blood and his arm was so tired he could hardly lift it.

I don’t know that GRRM’s given us a more singularly horrific image of the battlefield; even the burning men on the Blackwater didn’t stop my heart quite like the massacre of mutilated teenagers as they scream. Again, it immediately ramps the war in Essos up from the rumor-mongering and alleyway assassinations we’ve seen so far in ADWD, and it plunges our POV deeper into a nightmare from which he’ll never recover. 

Part of what makes this passage such a punch to the gut is how it’s framed--specifically, as a classic step on a fantasy quest. Quent’s First Big Battle! The buildup seems like a deliberate parallel to Tyrion’s experience in his own first battle, back on the Green Fork in AGOT. Except, of course, Tyrion became acting Hand in his next chapter, while Quent’s journey into the abyss has only begun. If “The Merchant’s Man” was all about Quent reeling from the loss of his friends in the corsair attack, “The Windblown” is about him staggering around in the wake of the sack of Astapor. Pursuing his father’s “heart’s desire” has made him not a hero, but a war criminal, and his war buddies dismiss the entire experience as forgettable, unworthy of story and song: 

“We were dancing with cripples at Astapor. Do you want to face real Unsullied with that lot on your side?”

“We fought the Unsullied at Astapor,” the big man said.

“I said real Unsullied. Hacking off some boy’s stones with a butcher’s cleaver and handing him a pointy hat don’t make him Unsullied. That dragon queen’s got the real item, the kind that don’t break and run when you fart in their general direction.”

“Them, and dragons too.” Dick Straw glanced up at the sky as if he thought the mere mention of dragons might be enough to bring them down upon the company. “Keep your swords sharp, boys, we’ll have us a real fight soon.”

A real fight, thought Frog. The words stuck in his craw. The fight beneath the walls of Astapor had seemed real enough to him, though he knew the sellswords felt otherwise. “That was butchery, not battle,” the warrior bard Denzo D’han had been heard to declare afterward. Denzo was a captain, and veteran of a hundred battles. Frog’s experience was limited to practice yard and tourney ground, so he did not think it was his place to dispute the verdict of such a seasoned warrior.

It seemed like a battle when it first began, though.

Quent emerges from the battle not having learned courage and self-reliance, but with horrors flashing behind his eyelids every time he blinks, and it will turn out to have been for nothing. He has slaughtered innocents, and his own innocence; for who is Quentyn Martell in his final moments but a green boy screaming for his mother? Before his flesh melts, he sells his soul.

Ah, but who does he sell it to? Well, no hell worth its salt is complete without a devil.

(image by Diego Gisbert Llorens for Fantasy Flight Games)

An old man he was, past sixty, yet he still sat straight and tall in the high saddle, and his voice was strong enough to carry to every corner of the field. “Astapor was but a taste,” he said, “Meereen will be the feast,” and the sellswords sent up a wild cheer.

The Tattered Prince looms over Quentyn’s arc like the shadow of a gallows; he lures Quentyn into hell and then leaves him to the fires. He treats slaughter like a party, inflicts gruesome violence on his followers, and at every turn serves as the epitome of the hellscape that is the Meereenese Knot. He lies like Satan:

“You Dornish three, you think we lied to you. The plunder from Astapor was much less than you were promised in Volantis, and I took the lion’s share of it.”

“The last part’s true,” Ser Orson said.

“The best ruses always have some seed of truth,” said the Tattered Prince.

“You brought three men,” Ser Gerris pointed out, with an edge in his voice. “We agreed on two apiece.”

“Meris is no man. Meris, sweet, undo your shirt, show him.”

“That will not be necessary,” said Quentyn. If the talk he had heard was true, beneath that shirt Pretty Meris had only the scars left by the men who’d cut her breasts off. “Meris is a woman, I agree. You’ve still twisted the terms.”

He talks like Satan:

“Tattered and twisty, what a rogue I am.”

And like any devil, what he seeks above all is a way back into paradise: 

“What I want,” said the Tattered Prince, “is Pentos.”

All of this is reflected in his carnage-happy crew. I think it’s no accident that the chapter right before “The Windblown” is “The Lost Lord,” in which (via Jon Connington) we get a deep dive into the impressively advanced logistics and well-established ideological roots of the Golden Company. In Quent’s chapter, we get the flipside: the mercenary band as rampaging festering skin-crawling horrorshow, the Bloody Mummers as seen from the inside. They’re in Slaver’s Bay to “fuck the goddess slaughter up her arse,” which sure sounds like Rorge and Shagwell to me. The Windblown’s violence is flamboyant, performative, a declaration of identity; note that the Prince’s right-hand man Denzo D’han is a warrior-bard, and that the company is introduced singing. “The Windblown” is about them painting in red, Jackson Pollock-style.

Which shakes Quent to his very core. How can the planned endgame of his quest (which, again, secretly terrifies him) be noble if these are the means, these are the surroundings, these are his new companions in place of his dead friends? That he has to join them, become them, in order to succeed at his quest is, well, part of how you know that he won’t. The connection between what happens in “The Windblown” and what happens at the end of “The Dragontamer” works on a tonal level as well as thematic and aesthetic. This has the beats of a Hero’s Journey, but it doesn’t feel like one, which is GRRM setting the groundwork for the final revelation that Quentyn is not the hero.

Now, it might seem weird to label a sellsword, rather than one of the Masters, as the devil of this particular lake of fire. But the Masters are deliberately undercut in this chapter:

It was a hundred leagues from Astapor to Yunkai by the old Ghiscari coast road, and another fifty from Yunkai to Meereen. The free companies, well mounted, could reach Yunkai in six days of hard riding, or eight at a more leisurely pace. The legions from Old Ghis would take half again as long, marching afoot, and the Yunkai’i and their slave soldiers…“With their generals, it’s a wonder they don’t march into the sea,” Beans said.

The Yellow Whale and the Little Pigeon are vain pampered louts who are utterly useless on the march and even more so on the battlefield. And in between, as I said in my Tyrion-in-ADWD series, the sellswords increasingly run the show in the camp. There’s a broad satirical streak running through this chapter coexisting with and feeding off the horror elements, reflecting both the blunt, brutal cynicism with which the Windblown regard this war and the absurdity of the people they’re working for. This actually serves GRRM’s aims in Quent’s arc. It draws attention away from the Masters, letting them serve as bitter comic relief, while the tone and imagery of the chapter as a whole casts the danger as something more elemental, more intrinsic to the environment and the narrative itself. The walls are closing in; the fires are growing hotter and larger; the story itself wants you dead. Bricks and blood built Quentyn, and bricks and blood his story. The slavers themselves are buffoons, for all their pretensions to innate supremacy.

And indeed, what happens at chapter’s end inspires laughter in our protagonist.

“Wait. A few more days, that’s all. We have crossed half the world, be patient for a few more leagues. Somewhere north of Yunkai our chance will come.”

“If you say,” said Frog doubtfully…

…but for once the gods were listening, and their chance came much sooner than that.

It was two days later. Hugh Hungerford reined up by their cookfire, and said, “Dornish. You’re wanted in the command tent.”

“You’re to ride east, deep into the hills, then swing wide about Yunkai, making for Meereen. Should you come on any Astapori, drive them north or kill them…but know that is not the purpose of your mission. Beyond the Yellow City, you’re like to come up against the dragon queen’s patrols. Second Sons or Stormcrows. Either will serve. Go over to them.”

“Go over to them?” said the bastard knight, Ser Orson Stone. “You’d have us turn our cloaks?”

“I would,” said the Tattered Prince.

Quentyn Martell almost laughed aloud. The gods are mad.

“You are all Westerosi. Friends from home. You speak her same tongue, worship her same gods. As for motive, all of you have suffered wrongs at my hands.”

“Webber, you nurse claims to lands lost in Westeros. Lanster, I killed that boy you were so fond of. You Dornish three, you think we lied to you. The plunder from Astapor was much less than you were promised in Volantis, and I took the lion’s share of it.”

Which, sidebar: whatever you wanna say about the machinations of the Meereenese Knot (I have few complaints, personally), let’s give GRRM some credit for having his characters make fun of him for it. 

Deliver me to the queen, he says. Aye, but which queen? He isn’t selling me to Cersei. He’s giving me to Daenerys Targaryen. That’s why he hasn’t hacked my head off. We’re going east, and Griff and his prince are going west, the bloody fools.

Oh, it was all too much. Plots within plots, but all roads lead down the dragon’s gullet. A guffaw burst from his lips, and suddenly Tyrion could not stop laughing.

“Your dwarf is having a fit,” the widow observed.

“My dwarf will be quiet, or I’ll see him gagged.”

Tyrion covered his mouth with his hands. Meereen!

As in “The Merchant’s Man,” Quentyn is only advancing his story by taking advantage of the general deceit and cynicism running through the entirety of the Meereenese Knot. In his last chapter, Quent and his companions lied to get to Slaver’s Bay; in this chapter, we learn the Windblown lied to them in turn, and are now betraying their Yunkish employers. Basically, Quentyn’s story is advancing not out of his own wit and cunning, but because the Prince is an amoral killer always looking for a back to stab. And the Prince trusts them only because he stabbed them in the back already, and he assumes they’re as into the whole devilish game as he is. Why wouldn’t he? That welcome-to-the-jungle logic works for everyone else in the gang. 

“Dick, I’ve whipped you more than any man in the company, and you have the back to prove it. Hugh lost three fingers to my discipline. Meris was raped half round the company. Not this company, true, but we need not mention that. Will of the Woods, well, you’re just filth. [The possibilities!] Ser Orson blames me for dispatching his brother to the Sorrows and Ser Lucifer is still seething about that slave girl Caggo took from him.”

“He could have given her back when he’d had her,” Lucifer Long complained. “He had no cause to kill her.”

“She was ugly,” said Caggo. “That’s cause enough.”

The Tattered Prince went on as if no one had spoken.

This is your quest, Quentyn Martell! How do you like it? Does it get your heart fluttering like the singers promised? All tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary aside, there’s no shaking what Quent’s seen and taken part in, and in this way, “The Windblown” serves above all as an expansion of the trauma and desperation expressed in “The Merchant’s Man.” In that opening chapter, Quent was reeling from a very personal, intimate trauma: the violent death of his best friend. In this chapter, his entire environment is running on the same nightmare-logic. He’s surrounded by ghouls unleashing hell, and fears he may be joining them. The environment of Quent’s quest is deliberately at tonal odds with the tropes of that quest. The effect is that of a constant falling of scales from eyes, innocence burned away. This is what adventure looks like.

 As in “The Merchant’s Man,” GRRM’s imagery is carefully sculpted to foreshadow our POV’s fate; upon reread, “fires, fires everywhere” leaps off the page and slaps you in the face. At every step, we catch glimpses of Quent’s death, ripples sent backwards in time. It’s as if the author is trying to warn him. There are fires everywhere, my boy, hint hint hint, turn back while you can! But he doesn’t. He can’t let himself, and the Prince (of Darkness) is always there to tempt him onward, to make his doom possible. 

So as in Volantis, Quentyn succeeds in “The Windblown” in the continuation of his quest: he will make it to Meereen. But the chapter lingers so heavily on the costs incurred so as to leech away any triumph we might feel about that and replace it with sickening dread. The undercurrent is that, as we’ll see when we’re left alone with him and a candle in “The Dragontamer,” Quent does see all the foreshadowing, and knows exactly what it’s leading him toward. In this chapter, as in the last, we see survivor’s guilt haunting his every decision. His remaining companions are willing to die for him because “you’re the only one of us who can get the girl.” Again, we see the fantasy-quest imagery in Quent’s arc turned inward and weaponized. He’s being betrayed by his own genre.