#but so far nobody's pointed out that I drew her like she's Martin and Jon's biological daughter

[lonelyslutavatar]

been working till midnight so have a hot government girl

[poorquentyn]

Remember Your Name, Part 2: Always Smiling

“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

--1984

At first, I did not understand whose chapter I was reading.

“The rat squealed when he bit into it...” Wait, Reek? Didn’t he turn out to be dead after all? That was the big reveal at the end of Theon’s A Clash of Kings arc: Reek had died in Ramsay’s place, and the man we knew as “Reek” was actually Ramsay all along. So who...

...no.

Oh, oh no.

It can’t be.

It is.

George RR Martin did not exactly hide his intention to bring Theon Greyjoy back to the forefront in A Dance with Dragons, after two books and thirteen years offstage. This opening chapter had already been released as a teaser in 2008, three years prior to the book’s release, and the author had repeatedly hinted at Theon’s return on his Notablog. But I wasn’t paying attention to any of that at the time. I wasn’t plugged into the fandom in 2011; this was just a new book I was eager to read. I was ready to see how Jon and Stannis interacted after the former was named Lord Commander. I was ready to see how Dany handled her enemies in Slaver’s Bay. I was ready to see what really happened to Davos, after Cersei was told in AFFC that Wyman Manderly had him executed (I didn’t believe it for a second). What I was not remotely ready to see was that name blazing across the top of the book’s unlucky thirteenth chapter: REEK.

And I would argue, in retrospect, that this was the most appropriate context in which to first experience Reek I ADWD. You should be immediately confused about who you “are” within the chapter, because our POV is as well. You are dropped into the dark corner of a Dreadfort dungeon with no explanation, your mouth filled with rat and your ears with squeals; you have to reassemble the world along with him. You are not permitted to stand at a distance, shaking your head and clucking your tongue at this pitiful creature, as so many people do in-universe. You are there, in a world that feels far more like horror than high fantasy, remembering his name as he does.

In that fateful first trip through this sawtoothed gauntlet of a chapter, it was only when our POV flashed back to the fate of poor Kyra did I remember the name Theon Greyjoy.

He had run before. Years ago, it seemed, when he still had some strength in him, when he had still been defiant. That time it had been Kyra with the keys. She told him she had stolen them, that she knew a postern gate that was never guarded. “Take me back to Winterfell, m’lord,” she begged, palefaced and trembling. “I don’t know the way. I can’t escape alone. Come with me, please.”

And so he had. The gaoler was dead drunk in a puddle of wine, with his breeches down around his ankles. The dungeon door was open and the postern gate had been unguarded, just as she had said. They waited for the moon to go behind a cloud, then slipped from the castle and splashed across the Weeping Water, stumbling over stones, half-frozen by the icy stream. On the far side, he had kissed her. “You’ve saved us,” he said. Fool. Fool.

It had all been a trap, a game, a jape. Lord Ramsay loved the chase and preferred to hunt two-legged prey. All night they ran through the darkling wood, but as the sun came up the sound of a distant horn came faintly through the trees, and they heard the baying of a pack of hounds. “We should split up,” he told Kyra as the dogs drew closer. “They cannot track us both.” The girl was crazed with fear, though, and refused to leave his side, even when he swore that he would raise a host of Ironborn and come back for her if she should be the one they followed.

Within the hour, they were taken. One dog knocked him to the ground, and a second bit Kyra on the leg as she scrambled up a hillside. The rest surrounded them, baying and snarling, snapping at them every time they moved, holding them there until Ramsay Snow rode up with his huntsmen. He was still a bastard then, not yet a Bolton. “There you are,” he said, smiling down at them from the saddle. “You wound me, wandering off like this. Have you grown tired of my hospitality so soon?” That was when Kyra seized a stone and threw it at his head. It missed by a good foot, and Ramsay smiled. “You must be punished.”

That, too, is appropriate, because this passage is designed to ground the reader in this disorienting environment. It reminds us of Ramsay’s nigh-peerless cruelty and sadism, how much of a bastard he is in the pejorative sense. We’d only heard about his Most Dangerous Game hunts before, and now we’re dropped into one from the prey’s POV. It’s a hideously ironic twist of fate for the accomplished hunter Theon Greyjoy, a significant moment in Ramsay’s deconstruction and near-destruction of his identity. After all, Ramsay was there--as Reek, no less--for Theon’s own (considerably less successful) human-hunt at Winterfell. There’s a further irony in that Kyra and Theon escape due to a drunk horny guard, which is in part how Osha helped Bran and his companions escape Theon in ACOK. These distorted, inverted echoes of his previous POV arc become even more pronounced when he actually returns to Winterfell; it lends his journey back to Theon an appropriate sense of the uncanny, as if he’s being drawn into his past before being spat out into his future. The flashback further blows the dust off of our memories of Theon’s ACOK storyline by bringing back Kyra, a woman he treated at the time as a prize to be abused on a whim. That power imbalance is now ash and dust, broken like Winterfell by the Bastard of Bolton. On the whole, this passage does a tremendous job of measuring the gap between our POV’s past and present (something he himself is having difficulties doing, as I’ll get into below and in my essay on Reek II). The man who ran still thought of himself as Theon. The man eating the rat thinks of himself as Reek, when he thinks of himself at all.

Upon reread, though, what struck me most about this sequence is how the author foreshadows the end of Theon’s ADWD arc right here in its opening pages. Theon thinks of this attempted escape as exemplifying the point at which “he still had some strength in him, when he had still been defiant,” but it also exemplifies the self-absorption that was his defining character trait in ACOK. Let’s be honest: when he promised Kyra that he would raise an Ironborn host and come back for her, he was lying through his as-yet-unbroken teeth. Not only because there’s no way in hell said Ironborn would follow the man they nigh-universally disdain on a suicide mission to save a greenland woman, but also because the Theon we knew in ACOK wouldn’t actually have asked them to do so, had he made it back safely. He would have breathed a sigh of relief and forgotten about Kyra, as he’d forgotten about the captain’s daughter. What was she to him, Theon Greyjoy, Prince of the Iron Islands and also (maybe, kind of, not really) Winterfell? Naught but a symbol of his eternally bifurcated identity, and Theon doesn’t exactly lack for reminders of that. When he told her that they should split up, it’s because he was hoping Ramsay would find her and not him. That is the person he was.

And yet, at the end of his ADWD storyline, our POV will once again find himself alone with a fellow victim of Ramsay, another woman from his past life begging him not to leave her, the Bastard hard on their heels...and this time, he will not attempt to abandon her. This decision takes place in the final words of a chapter entitled (at last, at last!) THEON. It is in this moment, with this moment, that Theon restores himself, and it’s ironically by doing something that the Theon we knew would never do. He recovers himself by improving himself; he returns to Theon by changing what it means to be Theon.

That’s how this storyline ends. But the name “Reek” is how it begins. So: why Reek? Why did Ramsay give Theon his dead servant’s name, and by extension, why did the author choose this name as his opening salvo in this storyline?

“Reek” is a cage. It is a name designed to enslave. Ramsay uses it to instill worthlessness, servility, and above all shame. It literally refers to the undoubtedly appalling smell coming off Theon after months in the dungeons of the Dreadfort, but more than that, it tells Theon that this smell is his fault. That reek is you. It represents who you are. You stink, from the inside out. You are unworthy, inhuman, an object more than a person. Ramsay, posing as Reek, enabled Theon’s heinous actions in A Clash of Kings, and now he has turned around and forcibly imprinted that identity and the crimes that go with it onto Theon. The most insidious element of this process is that the Bastard has forced Theon to take part in his own torture.

Reek had been whipped and racked and cut, but there was no pain half so excruciating as the pain that followed flaying. It was the sort of pain that drove men mad, and it could not be endured for long. Soon or late the victim would scream, “Please, no more, no more, stop it hurting, cut it off,” and Lord Ramsay would oblige. It was a game they played.

And that “game” supports the narrative that Ramsay has kindled and fed like a flame burning in our POV’s mind: you deserve what is being done to you. You know you do, or you wouldn’t be asking me to cut off your fingers and toes. I was there, whispering in your ear like a devil on your shoulder, when you committed that unspeakable crime at that mill near Winterfell. I know who you are, more than anyone, and who you are reeks. This is right. This is justice. This is the fate you have earned.

But...it’s not, actually. Not because the Theon Greyjoy we knew in ACOK was a good person--he was loathsome by any reasonable standard--but because nobody deserves this. No one should be flayed. No one should be racked. No one should undergo mutilation and starvation and solitary confinement. The conflation of torture with justice is one of the most vile cultural artifacts of our species, and George RR Martin is very clearly making that argument throughout this storyline. What has happened to Theon has rendered him all but unable to come to terms with what he’s done. He is far less able to do, be, and get better because of what Ramsay has inflicted upon him. The critique is aimed not only at the Bastard of Bolton, but at us. Every time someone posted on a forum that Theon deserved what he was getting: this is what it looks like. This is what you were rooting for. How does it taste? Does it taste like justice? Or does it taste like a sudden mouthful of raw rat, all fur and skin and squealing?

That name change has to stand in for everything that’s happened to Theon, because the author chooses not to directly depict the torture. For GRRM, what happened to Theon is unfathomable. It defies description, elides elucidation, exposes the limits of language. It is beyond writing.

Now, I’m not making a general statement here. There’s certainly nothing wrong with going for a blunt, direct depiction. Yet there is also a real power in focusing instead on the aftermath, with the violence itself serving as a structuring absence festering in the back of our minds. What Martin is interested in conveying, more than what was done to Theon, is the state in which it has left him.

That state is one in which Reek does not want to be Theon again. For him, Ramsay has become a figure conjured out of and in response to his sins; the Bastard of Bolton is both tempting devil and avenging angel, destroyer of Theon, creator of Reek. In Theon’s mind, Ramsay stands in front of all the doors, holding all the keys, and what Theon wants most is to keep those doors shut. If they open, the past comes rushing in all red and screaming, and at this point, Theon would rather be Reek forever than face that. 

Reek turned away from the torch with tears glimmering in his eyes. What does he want of me this time? he thought, despairing. Why won’t he just leave me be? I did no wrong, not this time, why won’t they just leave me in the dark? He’d had a rat, a fat one, warm and wriggling…

I am done. I am dead. Theon is gone, forget me, leave me in the dark. I am so sorry, not only for what I’ve done, but for existing, at all. I will try not to. I beg you, author-father-god: write about me no more.

George RR Martin refused. Instead, in an act of both cruelty and compassion, he shone the spotlight on Theon once more, insisting that his story was not yet done despite all evidence to the contrary. The show must go on. Do you remember your lines? Do you remember your motivation? Do you remember your name?

Some wait alone, some share their invisible rooms with others. Invisible, yes, what do the furnishings matter, at this stage of things? Underfoot crunches the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened, lied to its children. Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, "You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow...." There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light? Will the light come before or after? But it is already light. How long has it been light? 

--Gravity’s Rainbow

image by Marc Fishman

As I said in the introduction to this series, part of what makes Theon’s ADWD arc work so well is how it functions as a hall of mirrors in which everyone he encounters reflects his identity crisis back at him. That begins here, with the boys who call him back from the wings, back into the light.

The sound of the lock turning was the most terrible of all. When the light hit him full in the face, he let out a shriek. He had to cover his eyes with his hands. He would have clawed them out if he’d dared, his head was pounding so. “Take it away, do it in the dark, please, oh please.”

“That’s not him,” said a boy’s voice. “Look at him. We’ve got the wrong cell.”

“Last cell on the left,” another boy replied. “This is the last cell on the left, isn’t it?”

“Aye.” A pause. “What’s he saying?”

“I don’t think he likes the light.”

“Would you, if you looked like that?” The boy hawked and spat. “And the stench of him. I’m like to choke.”

“He’s been eating rats,” said the second boy. “Look.”

The first boy laughed. “He has. That’s funny.”

I had to. The rats bit him when he slept, gnawing at his fingers and his toes, even at his face, so when he got his hands on one he did not hesitate. Eat or be eaten, those were the only choices. “I did it,” he mumbled, “I did, I did, I ate him, they do the same to me, please …”

The sound of the lock turning, the scream of a rusted iron hinge...

Little Walder is Ramsay the Second, described by Theon as the Bastard’s “best boy” who “grew more like him every day.” Big Walder is something else entirely: George RR Martin’s Enfant Terrible, a tiny adorable squeaky-voiced child who is, nevertheless, one of the smartest and most dangerous people in the entire story. I’ll delve much more into his character when we get to Reek III (he’s a favorite of mine), but for my purposes in this chapter, what matters most is that it’s Big Walder who first poses The Question...

“Talk to me,” said one of them. He was the smaller of the two, a thin boy, but clever. “Do you remember who you are?”

The fear came bubbling up inside him, and he moaned.

“Talk to me. Tell me your name.”

My name. A scream caught in his throat. They had taught him his name, they had, they had, but it had been so long that he’d forgotten. If I say it wrong, he’ll take another finger, or worse, he’ll … he’ll … He would not think about that, he could not think about that. There were needles in his jaw, in his eyes. His head was pounding. “Please,” he squeaked, his voice thin and weak. He sounded a hundred years old. Perhaps he was. How long have I been in here? “Go,” he mumbled, through broken teeth and broken fingers, his eyes closed tight against the terrible bright light. “Please, you can have the rat, don’t hurt me …”

...and it’s Little Walder, the mini-Ramsay, who first gives The Answer.

“Reek,” said the larger of the boys. “Your name is Reek. Remember?” He was the one with the torch. The smaller boy had the ring of iron keys.

Reek? Tears ran down his cheeks. “I remember. I do.” His mouth opened and closed. “My name is Reek. It rhymes with leek.” In the dark he did not need a name, so it was easy to forget. Reek, Reek, my name is Reek. He had not been born with that name. In another life he had been someone else, but here and now, his name was Reek. He remembered.

It’s fitting that the Frey boys are the ones who kick off this struggle. The Walders themselves are constantly conflated and confused for one another, not only because they share a birth name, but because their nicknames upend expectations: “Little” Walder is the lumbering domineering bully, “Big” Walder the pint-sized silver-tongued backstabber. Moreover, they too were there for his rise and fall in ACOK; they remember Theon Greyjoy, the prideful Prince of Winterfell. That’s why they can’t believe at first that the shaking, stammering ghost begging them to leave him in the dark is him. They are his past, come for him at last.

“I know you,” he whispered, through cracked lips. “I know your names.”

Beyond that, the Walders and their question force Theon to start interrogating rather than merely accepting his environment, looking at both the world and himself with new eyes.

The air was cold and damp and full of half-forgotten smells. The world, Reek told himself, this is what the world smells like. He did not know how long he had been down there in the dungeons, but it had to have been half a year at least. That long, or longer. What if it has been five years, or ten, or twenty? Would I even know? What if I went mad down there, and half my life is gone?

When he raised a hand, he was shocked to see how white it was, how fleshless. Skin and bones, he thought. I have an old man’s hands. Could he have been wrong about the boys? What if they were not Little Walder and Big Walder after all, but the sons of the boys he’d known?

Billy Pilgrim Theon Greyjoy has come unstuck in time. He’s trying to reassemble a self that keeps re-fragmenting in front of him. It’s a painful, punishing process, but it’s also a necessary first step forward from the annihilating void of Reek and the dungeon in which he was (re?)born. Again, that void itself is not what Theon fears most right now. The questions he’s asking himself above, and their answers--that’s what he fears most right now, the pain and confusion and self-loathing that goes with remembering his name. Big Walder asking him to “tell me your name” opened up the Pandora’s Box inside Theon’s head and heart, and Little Walder answering “Reek” shut it for him. That’s what Ramsay set out to do: enslave Theon by rendering the void an attractive alternative to being himself.

His lord was merciful and kind. He might have flayed his face off for some of the things Reek had said, before he’d learned his true name and proper place.

The author’s strategic use of secondary characters to spur Theon’s identity arc continues when the squires bring our POV before the Bastard.

At the high table the Bastard of Bolton sat in his lord father’s seat, drinking from his father’s cup. Two old men shared the high table with him, and Reek knew at a glance that both were lords. One was gaunt, with flinty eyes, a long white beard, and a face as hard as a winter frost. His jerkin was a ragged bearskin, worn and greasy. Underneath he wore a ringmail byrnie, even at table. The second lord was thin as well, but twisted where the first was straight. One of his shoulders was much higher than the other, and he stooped over his trencher like a vulture over carrion. His eyes were grey and greedy, his teeth yellow, his forked beard a tangle of snow and silver. Only a few wisps of white hair still clung to his spotted skull, but the cloak he wore was soft and fine, grey wool trimmed with black sable and fastened at the shoulder with a starburst wrought in beaten silver.

GRRM chooses not to tell us directly who Ramsay’s dinner companions are. Only with context provided in other chapters (from Jon and Davos as well as Theon) can we fill in the gaps and realize that the one with “grey and greedy” eyes is Arnolf Karstark and the one described as “gaunt, with flinty eyes, a long white beard, and a face as hard as a winter frost” is Hother “Whoresbane” Umber. Names and identities cannot simply be assumed. They must be earned.

But again, even the most minor of supporting characters in Theon’s ADWD storyline has layers that reflect his arc. Arnolf and Whoresbane are inverses in terms of where their loyalties lie. The castellan of Karhold is publicly feigning loyalty to Stannis, while secretly planning to betray the king to the Boltons. The castellan of Last Hearth, by contrast, appears to be feigning loyalty to the Boltons, while his heart remains with the Starks (and his brother fights for Stannis). As such, Arnolf represents Reek, he who has given himself over to Ramsay, and Whoresbane represents Theon, with the best part of him--the part that loved a Stark like a brother--still intact down deep.

Beyond this subtext, though, these two characters directly engage with the question of Theon’s identity.

“There he is. My sour old friend.” To the men beside him he said, “Reek has been with me since I was a boy. My lord father gave him to me as a token of his love.”

The two lords exchanged a look. “I had heard your serving man was dead,” said the one with the stooped shoulder. “Slain by the Starks, they said.”

Lord Ramsay chuckled. “The ironmen will tell you that what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger. Like Reek. He smells of the grave, though, I grant you that.”

“He smells of nightsoil and stale vomit.” The stoop-shouldered old lord tossed aside the bone that he’d been gnawing on and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth. “Is there some reason you must needs inflict him upon us whilst we’re eating?”

The second lord, the straight-backed old man in the mail byrnie, studied Reek with flinty eyes. “Look again,” he urged the other lord. “His hair’s gone white and he is three stone thinner, aye, but this is no serving man. Have you forgotten?”

The crookback lord looked again and gave a sudden snort. “Him? Can it be? Stark’s ward. Smiling, always smiling.”

Smiling. Always smiling, because what was there in life that would not swoon before Theon Greyjoy’s smile? Women, battle, the realization that there’s an invisible noose around your neck, the growing panic that you have no home and no family and will never be welcome anywhere--just smile, and laugh, and kick Gared’s head away as the blood gushes forth. What, me worry? It might be cynical and childish, but it worked...

...until it didn’t.

The last thing Theon Greyjoy saw was Smiler, kicking free of the burning stables with his mane ablaze, screaming, rearing...

Ramsay did not wipe that smile off Theon’s face, he broke it. He did not teach Theon a lesson, he took a hammer to Theon’s ability to learn, and think, and move, and eat. He did not bring this proud wicked man to justice. What he did was methodically cut away at Theon’s defense mechanisms until he found the quivering child they dragged from his room on Pyke, and then resumed cutting. We are left to catch up with the results, and “smiling, always smiling” is GRRM’s most poignant measuring of the gap between what was and what is.

Speaking of our host for the evening...if Theon sees Ramsay as a divine terrible force sent to punish him for his sins, Ramsay sees Theon as a vessel to work through his own identity crisis: the character-defining struggle to claim the name of Bolton rather than Snow.

If he’d had a tail, he would have tucked it down between his legs.

If I had a tail, the Bastard would have cut it off. The thought came unbidden, a vile thought, dangerous. His lordship was not a bastard anymore. Bolton, not Snow. The boy king on the Iron Throne had made Lord Ramsay legitimate, giving him the right to use his lord father’s name. Calling him Snow reminded him of his bastardy and sent him into a black rage. Reek must remember that. And his name, he must remember his name. For half a heartbeat it eluded him, and that frightened him so badly that he tripped on the steep dungeon steps and tore his breeches open on the stone, drawing blood. Little Walder had to shove the torch at him to get him back on his feet and moving again.

And for the moment, it’s working. The word “Theon” never appears once in this chapter, and at its end, Ramsay Bolton né Snow declares his war upon the world.

Ramsay Bolton smiled. “I ride to war, Reek. And you will be coming with me, to help me fetch home my virgin bride.”

The locked-in hell of the Dreadfort will be set loose from its cage, writ in red across the North once more...the inside will become out. Yet he also inadvertently kicks off Theon’s arc in this book, because the focus of Ramsay’s war is the most important supporting character in Theon’s ADWD storyline, more even than Ramsay himself: Jeyne Poole. It is her, more than anyone else, who helps Reek return to Theon. Of course, I’ll get much more into that in later chapters, but in this first chapter, the author grants us a brief glimpse of where he’s going with this:

“I remember her. Arya.”

“She shall be the Lady of Winterfell, and me her lord.”

She is only a girl.

Jeyne both reminds Reek of his life as Theon (connected as she is to Winterfell and the Starks) and offers the most poignant of the many mirrors he encounters in ADWD. She, too, is Ramsay’s victim, forced to bear a name that isn’t hers, and “she is only a girl” is but the first stirring of Theon’s conscience in response. The defiance is all internal for the moment, but it’s there, a choice beyond “eat or be eaten.”

I must not let him drive me mad. He can take my fingers and my toes, he can put out my eyes and slice my ears off, but he cannot take my wits unless I let him.

Again, you can see the end in chrysalis here at the beginning, and that’s what I call strong characterization and great writing. (Remind me why ADWD is bad?)

And so stage is set. As you may have noticed, there are no actual plot points of note in this chapter, because it’s designed to establish this singular mood and explore what happened to our POV offstage (it’s very much like “The Merchant’s Man” in that regard). The seeds for his later victory are sown, but that’s to add another layer upon rereads. First time through, the unmistakable takeaway is that Reek or Theon or whatever you want to call him is at rock bottom:

Even if he had wanted to resist, he did not have the strength. It had been scourged from him, starved from him, flayed from him.

But hey, as anyone who ever started on the long painful road to recovery told themselves over and over and over: there’s nowhere to go from rock bottom but up.