Reek I

Alfie Allen as Theon Greyjoy in HBO's Game of Thrones

Down in a dark dungeon, a starved prisoner has finally caught a rat and now eats it raw, ripping it apart with broken teeth. His limbs are thin like weeds, but his stomach is swollen and aching. He is half-mad, fearing that someone might catch him eating the rat and then punishing him for it, like it happened before. When the sound of approaching guards can be heard, the prisoner is stiff with fear, hoping that they will go to some other cell, where he can hear prisoners screaming. He muses that the women always scream loudest.

The guards finally arrive at his cell, opening it, obviously first in a longer time, since the prisoner is not accustomed to light and blinded even by the small lantern. Two boys are standing in the door, chatting lightly over the stink and bad condition the prisoner is in, who himself can’t get any clear thought. It becomes evident that the two are the Walders, the formal wards of Winterfell, and they have been commanded by Ramsay Bolton to bring him up to the throne room. They ask him if he remembers his name, and the prisoner panics again, having forgotten it in the darkness. The Walders remind him that he is Reek.

On the way up, Reek thinks about overwhelming the two boys and trying to escape, but shrinks away from the idea when he remembers a similar attempt undertaken some point earlier, together with a woman named Kyra. It had been a trap. Ramsay had allowed them to escape, just to hunt them down merciless in the surrounding woods, punishing Reek severely and doing some unimaginable and unspecified things to Kyra. Full of terror, Reek is ushered forward into the throne room.

There, soldiers and mercenaries are feasting. On the dais, Ramsay Bolton sits in his father’s chair, drinking from his cup and celebrating with his favorite lowlife fighters, the “Bastard’s Boys”. Left and right of him, two lords are seated, both old, one clad in a bearskin and wearing an immense white beard, the other with a crooked shoulder. Ramsay greets him friendly, chiding him for eating a rat, since all rats are possession of Roose Bolton and he didn’t have leave to kill one. Terrified, Reek remembers the rules he has been taught. Wrong answers result in the loss of fingers or toes, with Ramsay not only cutting them off, but flaying them and waiting until the pain becomes unbearable, only then cutting them off, provided the victim begs hard. Once, Reek tried to bite off a flayed and hurting finger himself and lost a toe for it. 

The two lords are clearly disgusted by the spectacle, and Ramsay explains them that Reek is in truth Theon Greyjoy. That disgusts them only more, and they suggest killing him “like the dog he is”. Ramsay, however, has other intentions. He explains to Reek that he intends to wed Arya Stark, who is brought north currently by his father, Roose Bolton. He then asks if Reek would attend his wedding and help him out a little bit, which Reek eagerly agrees to. 

The first Reek chapter is fairly short. The chapters concerning Theon and his exploits in the Dreadfort and later on the road with the Boltons, being entirely at their mercy, are easily the most ugly and disgusting of the book, even topping the torturing of Gregor Clegane’s men. Theon is totally broken, being half-mad and not really remembering who he is, concentrating all efforts in pleasing Ramsay, who just plays an unusually cruel game even by Westerosi standards. 

Ramsay likes flaying, which is a cruel punishment by itself, but he also adds a mental cruelty to the dimension, adding more and more fear into the mix, degrading his victims below the status of the most despicable of all animals. With Theon, he just shows off what he can do, degrading the heir of the Iron Islands into a feeble wreckage of submissive shit. The whole Dreadfort ambience reeks of cruelty, blood and torture. 

Theon doesn’t really understand what happened to Kyra, deliberately suppressing the knowledge in his twisted and tormented mind. Ramsay Bolton, we will later learn in great detail, likes to set out women, beautiful in most cases, and give them half a day head start before going after them with hounds and hunting parties. When he finally finds them, he kills them and flays them, or the other way round, depending on how good sports they were. Clearly, Ramsay is a new category of evil. 

We also get the storyline about the false Arya picked off again, after Jaime met her in the beginning of “A Feast for Crows”, where she departed for the north. It is of course a false Arya, is has to be, since the real one never fell into the hands of the Lannisters. The false Arya is in fact Jeyne Pool, as will later be confirmed. That doesn’t really matter, however, since the episode and the show of force clearly shows that Ramsay has the north in his grip. 

This leaves just one question: who are the two lords? There are not that much descriptions given, and their names are never called, but it’s fairly certain to assume that the one with the crooked shoulders is Hother Umber, called Whoresbane, who suffered such an injury, and the other is Arnolf Karstark, uncle to the old lord Rickard and castellan of Karhold. Since said castellan officially declared for Stannis, it becomes apparent that he is playing a double game here, but Theon has no eye for these things, concentrating on his own survival only.