The deaths of Prince Aegon and his dragon, Quicksilver. (illustration credit 105)
The Lords of Harrenhal
Lord Gargon, the second and last Qoherys lord of Harrenhal, was the grandson of Lord Quenton. He was notorious for his appetite for women and became known as the Guest for his habit of attending every wedding within his domains, so that he might take advantage of the lord’s right to the first night. It is no surprise that the father of a maid Lord Gargon deflowered opened a sally port for Harren the Red and his band of outlaws, or that Gargon was gelded before he died. Harrenhal would earn a reputation as cursed in the years that followed, as many of its ruling houses would meet unhappy ends:
HOUSE HARROWAY
Raised to Harrenhal in the reign of Aenys I, following the death of Gargon Qoherys, Lord Lucas Harroway saw his daughter Alys wed to Maegor. She became one of Maegor’s queens, and he became Hand, until Maegor the Cruel had them and all their line killed.
HOUSE TOWERS
After destroying House Harroway, King Maegor decreed that the strongest of his knights would have the castle, though not all of its lands. Twenty-three knights of his household fought in the blood-soaked streets of Lord Harroway’s Town for the prize. Ser Walton Towers was the victor and was granted the seat, though he died soon thereafter of his wounds. His line faltered two generations later when the last Lord Towers died without heirs.
HOUSE STRONG
Lyonel Strong, famed as a warrior but also a man of great natural gifts who had earned six links in his chain at the Citadel, was granted the lordship in the reign of Jaehaerys I. He served as master of laws, then Hand to Viserys I, while his sons became deeply entangled in the court. He and his heir, Ser Harwin, were killed in a fire that broke out in Harrenhal, leaving the younger son Larys Strong to become Lord of Harrenhal. Larys survived the Dance of the Dragons but not the Judgment of the Wolf.
HOUSE LOTHSTON
Ser Lucas Lothston—master-at-arms at the Red Keep—was given the seat as a gift from King Aegon III in 151 AC. Newly wed to the Lady Falena Stokeworth, following the scandal of her relations with Prince Aegon, the future Aegon the Unworthy, Lothston soon departed court with his bride. He returned to King’s Landing in Aegon’s reign, serving as Hand for less than a year before Aegon again banished him from court along with his wife and daughter. Their line was ended in madness and chaos when Lady Danelle Lothston turned to the black arts during the reign of King Maekar I.
HOUSE WHENT
Knights in the service of the Lothstons, they were given Harrenhal as a reward for their service in bringing the Lothstons down. They hold the seat to this day, but tragedy has marked them.
The great castle of Harrenhal. (illustration credit 106)
Lord Forrest Frey riding to war. (illustration credit 107)
It was during the early days of the Dance that Prince Daemon Targaryen led Queen Rhaenyra’s forces to a bloodless victory at Harrenhal, seizing the castle and making it a rallying place for her supporters. There were many such supporters in the riverlands, who rose in their thousands and joined the prince’s host in Rhaenyra’s name. Notable amongst them was the puissant knight, Lord Forrest Frey, who had once been a suitor for Rhaenyra’s hand. The Freys were not an old house. They had risen to prominence some six hundred years ago, their line originating from a petty lord who raised a rickety wooden bridge across the narrowest part of the Green Fork. But as their wealth and influence grew, so did the Crossing. And soon the castle grew from a single tower that overlooked the bridge to two formidable towers that bracketed the river between them. These two keeps, now called the Twins, are amongst the strongest in the realm.
Lord Forrest fought gallantly for the queen he had loved, until the Fishfeed, where he was amongst many lords and knights killed in the war’s bloodiest battle. His widow, the Lady Sabitha of House Vypren, proved redoubtable for her courage and notorious for her lack of mercy. According to Mushroom, she was a “sharp-featured, sharp-tongued harridan of House Vypren, who would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women.”
But it was not long before Riverrun, too, began to chafe beneath King Maegor’s heel. As his enemies rose around him, the Tullys rallied to the banners of Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen, brother of the slain Prince Aegon, in the final year of his cruel uncle’s reign.
Through the years that followed, the Tullys continued to leave their mark on history. Lord Grover Tully spoke for Prince Viserys Targaryen over Laenor Velaryon as the successor to Jaehaerys I in the Great Council of 101 AC. When the Dance of the Dragons erupted in 129 AC, the old lord proved loyal to his principles and King Aegon II … but he was aged then, and bedridden, and his grandson Ser Elmo defied him and had the gates barred and the banners kept close.
Ser Elmo Tully. (illustration credit 108)
Later during the Dance, Ser Elmo Tully led the riverlords into battle at Second Tumbleton, but on the side of Queen Rhaenyra rather than King Aegon II, whom his grandsire had favored. The battle proved a victory—at least in part—and soon after, his grandfather finally died, and Ser Elmo became Lord of Riverrun. But he did not long enjoy his station; he died on the march forty-nine days later, leaving his young son, Ser Kermit, to succeed him.
Lord Kermit brought the Tullys to the height of their power. Vital and bold, he fought tirelessly for Queen Rhaenyra, and her son, Prince Aegon, later King Aegon III. Lord Kermit was the chief commander of the host that descended on King’s Landing in the last days of the war, and he personally slew Lord Borros Baratheon in the final battle of the Dance of the Dragons.
His successors ruled as best they could after him, but Riverrun was never again as prominent as during those years. Loyal to House Targaryen through all the Blackfyre Rebellions, House Tully finally soured on the dragon kings during the madness of King Aerys II Targaryen, and Lord Hoster Tully joined Robert Baratheon and his rebels and helped bind together the alliance that brought Robert to the Iron Throne by granting the hands of his daughters to Lord Jon Arryn of the Eyrie and Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell.
RIVERRUN
The seat of House Tully is small when compared to the great fortress castles of other great houses. It is not even the largest castle in the riverlands, for Harren the Black’s ruined immensity of Harrenhal could contain ten Riverruns.
Yet Riverrun is stout and well constructed, and its position at the juncture of two rivers, surrounded by deep waters on two sides, makes it exceedingly difficult to assault. Though besieged many times over the centuries, Riverrun has seldom been taken, and never by storm. Key to the castle’s strength is the moat dug beneath its western wall, where the main gate stands. Many castles in the Seven Kingdoms have moats, but few are created with complicated sluice gates that allow them to be flooded at need. This gives Riverrun’s moat a depth and breadth few others can achieve. With its moat fully flooded, Riverrun becomes an island, all but invulnerable to assault.
Riverrun. (illustration credit 109)
illustration credit 110
THE V ALE
THE VALE OF ARRYN—a long, wide, fertile valley entirely ringed by the great grey-green peaks of the mighty Mountains of the Moon—is as rich as it is beautiful. Perhaps that was why the first Andal invaders chose to land there when they crossed the narrow sea beneath the banners of their gods. The proof of that claim lies in the stones carved all about the Fingers, which bear images of stars, swords, and axes (or hammers, as some have argued). The sacred book of the Faith, The Seven-Pointed Star, speaks of a “golden land amidst towering mountains” when Hugor of the Hill received his vision of the bounty that would one day belong to the Andals.
Isolated from the rest of Westeros by its towering mountains, the Vale proved the perfect ground for the Andals to carve out their first kingdoms in this new land. The First Men, who were there before the Andals, fought these seaborne conquerors stubbornly, but the Vale was but thinly peopled in those days, and they soon found themselves outnumbered in every fight. No sooner was one longship set aflame or driven back into the sea, the singers say, than ten more rose from the dawn. Nor could the First Men match the zeal of the invaders, and their bronze axes and byrnies of bronze scales proved less than equal to the steel swords and iron ringmail of the Andals.
Moreover, the Vale and its surrounding peaks were divided into a score of petty kingdoms when the first Andals began wading ashore, with the seven-pointed star painted (or carved, in some cases) on their chests. Riven by ancient enmities, the kings of the First Men did not unite against the invaders when first they appeared but rather made pacts and alliances with them, seeking to use the newcomers in their wars against one another. (A familiar folly that was to be repeated time and time again as the Andals spread out across Westeros).
Dywen Shell and Jon Brightstone, both of whom claimed the title King of the Fingers, went so far as to pay Andal warlords to cross the sea, each thinking to use their swords against the other. Instead the warlords turned upon their hosts. Within a year Brightstone had been taken, tortured, and beheaded, and Shell roasted alive inside his wooden longhall. An Andal knight named Corwyn Corbray took the daughter of the former for his bride and the wife of the latter for his bedwarmer, and claimed the Fingers for his own (though Corbray, unlike many of his fellows, never named himself a king, preferring the more modest style of Lord of the Five Fingers).
Farther south, the wealthy harbor town of Gulltown on the Bay of Crabs was ruled by Osgood Shett, Third of His Name, a grizzled old warrior who claimed the ancient, vainglorious title King of the True Men, a style that supposedly went back ten thousand years to the Dawn Age. Though Gulltown itself was seemingly secure behind its thick stone walls, King Osgood and his forebears had long been waging an intermittent war against the Bronze Kings of Runestone, a more powerful neighbor from a house as old and storied as their own. Yorwyck Royce, Sixth of That Name, had claimed the Runic Crown when his sire died in battle three years previous, and had proved to be a most redoubtable foe, defeating the Shetts in several battles and driving them back inside their town walls.
Unwisely, King Osgood turned to Andalos for help in recovering all he had lost. Thinking to avoid the fate of Shell and Brightstone, he sought to bind his allies to him with blood in place of gold; he gave his daughter in marriage to the Andal knight Gerold Grafton, took Ser Gerold’s eldest daughter for his own bride, and married a younger daughter to his son and heir. All the marriages were performed by septons, according to the rites of the Seven From Across the Sea. Shett even went so far as to convert to the Faith himself, swearing to build a great sept in Gulltown should the Seven grant him victory. Then he sallied forth with his Andal allies to meet the Bronze King.
King Osgood won his victory, as it happened, but he himself did not survive the battle, and afterward it was whispered amongst the Gulltowners and other First Men that it was Ser Gerold himself who struck him down. Upon his return to the town, the Andal warlord claimed his good-father’s crown for his own, dispossessing the younger Shett and confining him to his bedchamber until such time as he had gotten Ser Gerold’s daughter with child (after which the father vanishes from the pages of history).
When Gulltown rose against him, King Gerold put down the protests brutally, and soon the gutters of the town ran red with the blood of the First Men … and women and children as well. The dead were thrown in the bay to feed the crabs. In the years that followed, the rule of House Grafton remained uncontested, for (surprisingly) Ser Gerold proved a sage and clever ruler, and the town prospered greatly under him and his successors, growing to be the first and only city of the Vale.
Not all the lords and kings of the First Men were so foolish as to invite their conquerors into their halls and homes. Many chose to fight instead. Chief amongst these was the aforementioned Bronze King, Yorwyck VI of Runestone, who led the Royces to several notable victories over the Andals, at one point smashing seven longships that had dared to land upon his shores and decorating the walls of Runestone with the heads of their captains and crews. His heirs carried on the fight after him, for the wars between the First Men and the Andals lasted for generations.
The last of the Bronze Kings was Yorwyck’s grandson, Robar II, who inherited Runestone from his sire less than a fortnight before his sixteenth nameday yet proved to be a warrior of such ferocity and cunning and charm that he almost succeeded in stemming the Andal tide.
By that time the Andals controlled three-quarters of the Vale and had begun to fight amongst themselves, as had the First Men before them. Robar Royce saw opportunity in their disunity. Across the Vale, a handful of First Men still held out against the Andals; the Redforts of Redfort, the Hunters of Longbow Hall, the Belmores of Strongsong, and the Coldwaters of Coldwater Burn chief amongst them. One by one, Robar made alliance with each of them, and many smaller clans and houses besides, bringing them to his cause with marriages, grants of land, gold, and (in one celebrated case) by outshooting the Lord Hunter in an archery contest (legend claims that King Robar cheated). So honeyed was his tongue that he even won the allegiance of Ursula Upcliff, a reputed sorceress who called herself bride of the Merling King.
Many of the lords who gathered beneath his banners had been petty kings, but now they set aside their crowns, bending the knee before Robar Royce and proclaiming him High King of the Vale, the Fingers, and the Mountains of the Moon.
The Battle of Seven Stars. (illustration credit 111)
Finally united as one people under a single ruler, the First Men went on to win a series of smashing victories against their divided, quarrelsome conquerors. Wisely, King Robar did not attempt to attack all Andals everywhere to drive them from his shores. Instead he warred upon one enemy at a time, often making common cause with one Andal chief to bring down another.
The King of the Fingers was first to fall. Legend tells us that King Robar slew Qyle Corbray himself, after striking Corbray’s famous blade, Lady Forlorn, from his hand. Gulltown was retaken by storm when Robar sent his own sister inside the walls to persuade the Shetts to rise against the Graftons and open the city gates. The Hammer of the Hills, the Andal king who held the eastern end of the Vale, was next to face the resurgent First Men and fell before King Robar’s host beneath the walls of Ironoaks. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared as if the First Men might yet retake their lands under the leadership of this brave young king.
But it was not to be. Robar had won his last victory, for the remaining Andal lords and petty kings had finally come to realize their peril. And now it was the Andals who put aside their differences to make common cause and unite beneath the banners of a single warlord. The man they chose to lead them was neither king nor prince, nor even lord, but a knight named Ser Artys Arryn. A young man, of an age with King Robar, he was esteemed amongst his peers as the finest warrior of his day, a champion with sword and lance and morningstar, and a cunning and resourceful leader of men, beloved by all who fought beside him. Though of pure Andal blood, Ser Artys had been born in the Vale in the shadow of the Giant’s Lance, where falcons soared amongst the mountain’s jagged peaks. On his shield he bore the moon-and-falcon, whilst a pair of falcon’s wings decorated his silver warhelm. The Falcon Knight, men called him, then as now.
To speak of what happened next, we must return to the realm of song and legend. The singers say the two hosts came together at the foot of the Giant’s Lance, within a league of the house where Ser Artys had been born. Though the armies were roughly equal in number, Robar Royce held the high ground with the mountain at his back, a strong defensive position.
Having arrived days before the Andals, the First Men had dug trenches in front of their ranks and lined them with sharpened stakes (smeared with offal and excrement, says Septon Mallow’s account of the battle). Most of the First Men were afoot; the Andals had a ten-to-one advantage in mounted knights and were better armed and armored as well. They came late to the battle, if the tales are true; King Robar had looked for them three days earlier and every day since.
It was dusk when the Andal army finally appeared, to raise their tents half a league from their foes. But even in that fading light, Robar Royce did not fail to mark their leader. His silvered armor and winged helm made the Falcon Knight unmistakable, even from afar.
No doubt the night that followed was a restless one in both camps, for every man there knew that battle would be joined at the break of day, with the Vale itself hanging in the balance. Clouds blew in from the east, hiding the moon and stars, so the night was dark indeed. The only light came from hundreds of campfires burning in the camps, with a river of darkness between them. From time to time, the singers say, archers on one side or another lofted an arrow in the air, hoping that it might find a foe, but whether any of the blind shafts drew blood, the tales do not tell.
As the east began to lighten, men rose from their stony beds, donned their armor, and prepared for the battle. Then a shout rang through the Andal camp. There to the west, a sign had been seen: seven stars, gleaming in the grey dawn sky. “The gods are with us,” went up the cry from a thousand throats. “Victory is ours.” As trumpets blew, the vanguard of the Andals charged up the slope, banners streaming. Yet the First Men showed no dismay at the sign that had appeared in the sky; they held their ground and battle was joined, as savage and bloody a fight as any in the long history of the Vale.
Seven times the Andals charged, the singers say; six times the First Men threw them back. But the seventh attack, led by a fearsome giant of a man named Torgold Tollett, broke through. Torgold the Grim, this man was called, but even his name was a jape, for it is written that he went into battle laughing, naked above the waist, with a bloody seven-pointed star carved across his chest and an axe in each hand.
The songs say that Torgold knew no fear and felt no pain. Though bleeding from a score of wounds, he cut a red swathe through Lord Redfort’s staunchest warriors, then took his lordship’s arm off at the shoulder with a single cut. Nor was he dismayed when the sorceress Ursula Upcliff appeared upon a bloodred horse to curse him. By then he was bare-handed, having left both of his axes buried in a foe’s chest, but the singers say he leapt upon the witch’s horse, grasped her face between two bloody hands, and tore her head from her shoulders as she screamed for succor.
Then chaos ensued, as the Andals came pouring through the gap in the ranks of the First Men. Victory seemed within their grasp, but Robar Royce was not so easily defeated. Where another man might have fallen back to regroup, or fled the field, the High King commanded a counterattack. He led the charge himself, smashing through the confusion with his champions by his side. In his hand was Lady Forlorn, that dread blade he had plucked from the dead hands of the King of the Fingers. Slaying men right and left, the king fought his way to Torgold the Grim. As Robar slashed at his head, Tollett grabbed for his blade, still laughing … but Lady Forlorn sliced through his hands and buried herself in Torgold’s skull.
The giant died choking on his last laugh, the singers say. Whereupon the High King spied the Falcon Knight across the field and spurred toward him; should their leader fall, the Andals would lose heart and break, he hoped.
They came together as the battle raged around them, the king in bronze armor, the hero in silvered steel. Though the Falcon Knight’s armor flashed brilliantly in the morning sun, his sword was no Lady Forlorn. The duel was done almost before it began, as the Valyrian steel sheared through the winged helm and laid the Andal low. For an instant, as his foe toppled from the saddle, Robar Royce must surely have thought his battle won.
Then he heard the trumpets, ringing through the dawn air, the sound coming from behind him. And turning in his saddle, the High King beheld in dismay five hundred fresh Andal knights pouring down the slopes of the Giant’s Lance to take his own host in the rear. Leading the attack was a champion in silvered steel, with a moon-and-falcon on his shield and wings upon his warhelm. Ser Artys Arryn had clad one of his knights retainer in his spare suit of armor, leaving him in camp whilst he himself took his best horsemen up and around a goat track that he remembered from his childhood, so they might reappear behind the First Men and descend on them from above.
The rest was a rout. Attacked from front and rear, the last great host of the First Men of the Vale was cut to pieces. Thirty lords had come to fight for Robar Royce that day. Not a one survived. And though the singers say the High King slew foes by the score, in the end he, too, was slain. Some say Ser Artys killed him, whilst others name Lord Ruthermont, or Luceon Templeton, the Knight of Ninestars. The Corbrays of Heart’s Home have always insisted that it was Ser Jaime Corbray who dealt the mortal blow, and for proof they point to Lady Forlorn, reclaimed for House Corbray after the battle.
Such is the tale of the Battle of the Seven Stars as it is told by the singers and the septons. A stirring story to be sure, but the scholar must ask, how much of it is true? We shall never know. All that is certain is that King Robar II of House Royce met Ser Artys Arryn in a great battle at the foot of the Giant’s Lance, where the king died and the Falcon Knight dealt the First Men a blow from which they never recovered.
No fewer than fourteen of the oldest and noblest houses of the Vale ended that day. Those whose lines endured—the Redforts, the Hunters, the Coldwaters, the Belmores, and the Royces themselves amongst them—did so only by the dint of yielding up gold and land and hostages to their conquerors and bending their knees to swear fealty to Artys Arryn, the First of His Name, new-crowned King of Mountain and Vale.
In time some of these fallen houses would regain much of the pride and wealth and power lost on the battlefield that day, but that would require the passage of centuries. As for the victors, the Arryns would rule the Vale as kings until the coming of Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters, and thereafter served as the Lords of the Eyrie, Protectors of the Vale, and Wardens of the East. And from that day forth, the Vale itself has been known as the Vale of Arryn.
The fate of the defeated was far crueler. As word of the victory spread across the narrow sea, more and more longships set sail from Andalos, and more and more Andals poured into the Vale and the surrounding mountains. All of them required land—land the Andal lords were pleased to give them. Wherever the First Men sought to resist, they were ground underfoot, reduced to thralls, or driven out. Their own lords, beaten, were powerless to protect them.
Some of the First Men surely survived by joining their own blood with that of the Andals, but many more fled westward to the high valleys and stony passes of the Mountains of the Moon. There the descendants of this once-proud people dwell to this very day, leading short, savage, brutal lives amongst the peaks as bandits and outlaws, preying upon any man fool enough to enter their mountains without a strong escort. Little better than the free folk beyond the Wall, these mountain clans, too, are called wildlings by the civilized.
Though the Vale is guarded by mountains, that has not prevented outside attacks. The high road from the riverlands through the Mountains of the Moon has seen much blood spilled, for steep and stony as it is, it provides the most likely way for an army to enter the Vale. Its eastern end is guarded by the Bloody Gate, once merely a rough-hewn, unmortared wall after the fashion of the ringforts of the First Men. But in the reign of King Osric V Arryn, this fortress was constructed anew. Over the centuries, a dozen invading armies have smashed themselves to pieces attempting to breach the Bloody Gates.
The coast of the Vale—rocky and full of treacherous shallows and reefs—provides poor anchorage, which again has added to their defense, but the Arryn kings, well aware that their own ancestors came to Westeros from across the sea, have never neglected their coastal defenses. Strong castles and forts guard the most vulnerable coastlines, and even the stony, windswept Fingers are studded with watchtowers, each with its own beacon to warn against raiders from the sea.