Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, gender discrimination, ableism, sexual content, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and death.

The novel begins on Dragonstone, home to Stannis Baratheon, brother to the late king, Robert Baratheon. Maester Cressen, Stannis’s elderly advisor, watches a red comet in the sky. The comet is seen as an omen, though its true meaning is unknown. Cressen is visited by Stannis’s 10-year-old daughter, Shireen, and her jester, Patchface. Shireen wants to see the white raven that recently arrived to signal the end of the long summer.

Cressen’s assistant, Pylos, shares that Stannis’s most trusted knight, Davos Seaworth, has recently returned. Davos tells Cressen that all the southern house lords dislike Stannis too much to support his claim for the throne. Many have instead pledged their fealty to Stannis’s charismatic younger brother, Renly, who is pushing his own claim.

Davos is living proof of the coldness that makes Stannis so unpopular. Davos was previously a smuggler, and when he was apprehended, Stannis granted him mercy and knighthood on the condition that he cut off one of Davos’s fingers for every year of his smuggling career. Davos is now anxious over Stannis’s chances of conquering King’s Landing, the capital city of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.