There is a moment, on the night he wakes in a stranger's body, when Grim Crabb understands exactly how he dies.
He is nineteen, half-wild, and the lord of a fishing village on Crackclaw Point — a broken castle called the Whispers, four hundred hungry smallfolk, and a name so far beneath the great houses that no one in King's Landing will ever bother to have him killed. That is the only advantage he has. The rest he already knows: Jon Arryn will die. Eddard Stark will come south. The realm will crack into five crowns and burn for a decade, and every man who chose wrong will end on a spike above the Red Keep's gate.
So Grim chooses early. Either the Lioness, or the Dragon.
He arms his half-savage fisherfolk with longbows because arrows are cheaper than knights. He turns his ruin into a barracks-farm and his bandits into a company. And then he walks into King's Landing with nothing but a baron's worthless title and the most dangerous asset in Westeros — knowing what everyone at the small council table will do before they do it.
Cersei Lannister takes him on as a clerk. Within a year he is her chief secretary. Within two, the court has learned to be afraid of the polite young man from Crackclaw Point who never raises his voice, never loses a negotiation, and never, ever forgets.
But foreknowledge is a wasting asset. Every choice Grim makes bends the story a little further from the one he remembers. Littlefinger begins watching him. Varys begins asking questions. Tywin Lannister begins to wonder why a nobody keeps ending up in the right room. And far across the Narrow Sea, a silver-haired girl is walking into a fire that will not burn her — and Grim is the only man alive who knows what she will become.
He has climbed from baron to Lord of Crackclaw Point on cunning, longbows and loyalty. The next step will cost him something he cannot buy back.
"I am not a good man, Your Grace. But I am the only one at this table who is telling you the truth."