I've read through the discussion threads on the board so far and had some of my questions answered and had some things pointed out to me that whooshed right over my head in my reading (so thank you for that!)

1. People feel bad for Theon? THEON? Really?

Poor little murdering Prince got his junk removed along with being tortured. Of course I feel sorry for him.

2. Was Dany miscarrying at the end there with all the blood? Or was this a more positive sign of some sort? I really don't know yet how literally to take the maegi's words to her and after this book think it could be more prophecy than doom.

I'm convinced it was just her moons blood returning. Of course it was "heavy" it might have been a miscarriage. Just one of those things that just isn't explained explicitly.

3. I assumed Brienne's reappearance meant she had agreed to ZombieCat's terms and was luring Jaime back to ZombieCat to face her wrath. But I gather there are those who think Brienne did die and was brought back? I am disappointed not to have gotten more of that storyline (though I did like the Jaime progression in this book, and liked how neatly he managed to do his duty to his family/king without breaking his oath to not take up arms against the Starks or Tullys). I will be interested to see what happens with that.

I think she got hung and then brought back from the dead to do Cat's bidding.

4. Do you think Stannis is dead? I'm going with no, since it seems like when we find out about 'offscreen' deaths like that they tend not to have happened. Does Ramsay actually have Mance? It seems horrible to me that we'd have gone through the Mance-isn't-really-dead switcheroo only to have that happen, and it is possible that one or more of his girls was captured and Ramsay knows he was there that way. I'm really leaning towards taking that letter to Jon as a bunch of angry rambling.

I think Stannis is not dead and is destined for greatness..... at least till Dany makes it north.

5. Speaking of Jon. Gah. GAH. I can't decide if I want him to be really most sincerely dead or not. Obviously prevailing opinion is that he's not. And yet. How much fun would that be?

I think he becomes dead and then comes back from some spell of Melisandre's doing. Firewight? Like Catelyn? That would be very cool. We might have POV's from two undead characters in upcoming books. Jon and Catelyn.

Edit to add:

6. Are we ever going to find out what happened to Benjen?