130 ACOK 57 Theon V Iron Crown

Theon wrestles with his tormented conscience. When Asha leaves, he wonders repeatedly why he didn’t go with her. The answer to every aspect of his despair is Reek’s influence. He suggested Theon kill the miller’s sons to pass off as Bran and Rickon and likely suggested he kill the ironborn men who had seen it happen. In the guise of service, Ramsay posing as Reek has framed Theon for the Stark’s demise and torching of Winterfell. Aerys Come Again Theon bid Reek kill the men who knew he’d dressed the miller’s sons as Bran & Rickon. Or, rather, Reek suggested it. “The ironborn can’t keep secrets, they had to die, and someone had to take the blame for it." 803 It’s implied Theon didn’t kill the men who knew about the miller’s boys himself, meaning he didn’t have the foresight to avoid creating a viscious circle certain to foment disloyalty because acting wildly out of paranoia. Self-sabotage. Theon’s rough bedding of Kyra is reminiscent of Aerys’s treatment of his queen: leaving her sobbing and covered in bruises and bite marks. 810 Theon’s crown Ugly because made by the smith’s replacement who used to make horseshoes. The new smith likely has no love for Theon, having seen his men kill the previous smith, Mikken, who was a good man. A thin band of iron, studded with chunky nuggets of black diamond and gold, it represents Theon’s approach to rule. The roughly cut gems are more noticeable than the iron, which is brittle, symbolizing the amateurishness of Theon’s arrogant bravado and the pretentiousness of his rule by fear. Asha Asha will remember this visit to Winterfell in Dance With Dragons and feel stabs of conscience. Ironically, while she advises Theon to leave the castle he’s captured before he’s overwhelmed in it, not taking that advice herself is what gets her captured by Stannis. Asha understands the snarky art of pirate diplomacy and has only come to fetch Theon home, not to aid his precarious hold on Winterfell. By comparison, Theon doesn’t know anything and keeps realizing it. He goes to her in the Great Hall to find her in the high seat and realizes he should have made her come to him in his solar. 805 Really, he’s in more trouble for endangering Dagmer Cleftjaw and killing Bran & Rickon than seen as a success for taking Winterfell. Theon thinks of Asha as having humiliated him intentionally when she stood on the table at their father’s feast and called her axe her husband and her dagger her sweet suckling babe. Really, she was taking a stand against his attempt to reduce her, one the men gathered had seen before and that announced that she’d not be married off to one of them, so they should neither court nor disparage her because she was as brave and dangerous a man as any of them. Really, no one there thought of Theon as humiliated, only of Asha as being herself. Theon blames Asha for his having had to pull the stunt with the boys, since she made him wait in her desire for their father’s seat. Asha says “If only you’d had the good sense to raze the castle and carry the two little princelings back to Pyke as hostages, you might have won the war in a stroke.” 806

When Theon greets Asha, she calls him the Prince of Fools. He says she’s just jealous, since he took Winterfell in a night with thirty men where she required a thousand and a moon’s turn for Deepwood Motte. She mocks the heads over the gates. She explains that Winterfell is too far inland to be held or supplied from the sea and that mounting the boys heads above the gate made an enemy of every man in the region. Foreshadowing Theon’s mutilation by Ramsay Theon has a nightmare of fucking the miller’s wife where she eats his manhood with toothed vagina as she tore out his throat with her mouth. Mercy Crying for mercy from his own conscience in the form of the wolves with boy’s heads in his dreams, Theon wakes and wants to cry mercy to Wex, implying the lordship pains him and he’d like to beg mercy and relinquish it. Theon thinks he’s receiving mercy that Asha has arrived, assuming she’s brought the numbers he needs to hold Winterfell. Remembers nightmare of miller’s wife crying for mercy just before she was struck dead by Gelmarr. Foreshadowing Ramsay’s torching of Winterfell “If only you’d had the good sense to raze the castle and carry the two little princelings back to Pyke as hostages, you might have won the war in a stroke.” 806 “Put Winterfell to the torch and fall back while you still can.” 807 References back to Bran’s being taken by the wildling party in Game of Thrones Theon keeps the melted remains of the jet and silver pin they wanted. 805 Asha leaves by the Hunter’s Gate. Theon thinks of it as the gate Bran & Rickon escaped via, but it was also the gate they used to take Bran riding on Dancer that day. 807 Red Wedding foreshadowing in Theon’s nightmare of a feast of the dead in the Great Hall. Robb and Grey Wind arrive covered with wounds.