Something people are missing about Theon and the Miller's boys
I was just re-reading ACOK and finished up the part with Theon and the Miller's sons. I never really liked the theory (That Theon was the father of the younger boy) but on a re-read I was pretty convinced by it.
I read a lot of the threads posted here but I was really surprised that they didn't mention this one piece of evidence that sealed the deal for me although I'm sure other people must have caught it too.
So you have the Theon chapter where he goes to hunt Bran and Rickon but can't find them, which ends with "Reek" proposing the plan to kill the Miller's Boys and immediately after you have Jon's chapter where he captures Ygritte and Ygritte begins telling him about Bael the Bard stealing the Lord Stark's daughter:
But when morning come, the singer had vanished … and so had Lord Brandon’s maiden daughter. Her bed they found empty,
...
“Lord Brandon had no other children. At his behest, the black crows flew forth from their castles in the hundreds, but nowhere could they find any sign o’ Bael or this maid. For most a year they searched, till the lord lost heart and took to his bed, and it seemed as though the line o’ Starks was at its end. But one night as he lay waiting to die, Lord Brandon heard a child’s cry. He followed the sound and found his daughter back in her bedchamber, asleep with a babe at her breast.”
“Bael had brought her back?”
“No. They had been in Winterfell all the time, hiding with the dead beneath the castle.
This seems to obviously foreshadow how Bran and Rickon escaped Theon:
“You vanished … in the woods … how, though?”
“We never went,” said Bran. “Well, only to the edge, and then doubled back. I sent the wolves on to make a trail, but we hid in father’s tomb.”
“The crypts.” Luwin chuckled,
But then Ygritte's story continues:
Thirty years later, when Bael was King-beyond-the-Wall and led the free folk south, it was young Lord Stark who met him at the Frozen Ford … and killed him, for Bael would not harm his own son when they met sword to sword.”
“So the son slew the father instead,” said Jon.
“Aye,” she said, “but the gods hate kinslayers, even when they kill unknowing. When Lord Stark returned from the battle and his mother saw Bael’s head upon his spear, she threw herself from a tower in her grief. Her son did not long outlive her. One o’ his lords peeled the skin off him and wore him for a cloak.”
Which seems to parallel Theon: he kills his own son without knowing it, accidentally becoming a kinslayer and ends up getting skinned.
Like I said I think other people must have picked up on this, but I just think it's a really cool piece of writing I haven't seen people mention.
Posted Apr 28, 2026, 7:11 PM UTC