"Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken"
The words of House Martell
are a promise to our enemies
and a challenge to our lovers.
Thousands of years ago,
the warrior queen Nymeria crossed into Dorne from Essos,
fleeing the dragonlords of Valyria.
After she landed,
she burned her ships, all ten thousand of them,
so no cowards could slink home.
what a woman, Dornish in spirit before she ever was in flesh.
she was lucky to land in Dorne,
where powerful women
are not locked away in septs and the beds of old men.
My Ancestor Mors Martell saw her
desired her, and proved that where armies fail
"a tongue" may succeed.
Wedding his strength to hers,
his spear to her sun, they subdued
all of his rivals together.
After the tradition of her people,
House Martell then ruled Dorne as Princes, not kings,
unless the eldest child was a daughter. For unlike the rest of Westeros,
Our loyalty isn't commanded by a cock we follow a Prince
or a Princess Martell just as same.
and we always have.
some people forget that Aegon I Targaryen crowned himself
The Lord of six kingdoms, not seven.
When his sister marched on Dorne,
she found no mighty hosts drawn up against her for her dragon to burn and
her soldiers to slaughter.
The sands swirled, men died
and her dragon saw nothing.
The sun shone, men died and her dragon bowed to our greater fire.
The Targaryens retreated with their tails tucked between their legs.
Of course, in later years his descendants would try again.
Daeron I succeeded at great cost
and reigned in Dorne for "a few glorious months".
One night, his steward pulled down a sash by his bed to summon his consorts.
Instead, the canopy split open and one hundred red scorpions fell on him.
He was a Tyrell you would think he would be used to getting stung.
Within a fortnight, House Martell again ruled a free Dorne.
Eventually, after centuries of courtship House Martell got into bed with the Targaryens.
We took King Daeron II and his sister for our own
before they could take each other and six kingdoms
became seven. Even now, I does not blame my ancestors,
one look at those long silver locks...
it is not everyday a man gets to "ride" a dragon.
But they soon learned that you cannot leap off a dragon at will.
My sister Elia
she married Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and became the Princess
she already was. In Dorne she walked among vipers
and none would bite her
In King's Landing she found herself surrounded by Lions.
When Robert Baratheon rebelled against his rightful king
his future father-in-law Tywin Lannistor ordered, his beast
Gregor Clegane to rape & murder my sister
along with her helpless children
and men called The Lannisters heroes
Now, Lannisters sit on the Iron Throne,
surrounded by the blasted swords of Aegon's broken foes.
I wonder if the Lannisters remember, as I do, that none of those swords are ours.
I wonder if they see, as I do my sister's Red Blood soaking into the stones
of their precious Red Keep.
they need reminding:
The lion may be a mighty beast,
but pride always lifts his gaze to the horizon,
never seeing, in the grass, the viper.
From the east coast of the Vale, the Fingers
reach out into the Narrow Sea, four rocky peninsulas plagued by wind and rain
and barren to all but the hardiest of weeds, the ancestral home of House Baelish.
our house began with my great-grandfather, a Braavosi sellsword
who came to the Vale at the invitation of House Cobray. My grandfather
raised himself to the status of
hedge-knight and even managed to acquire a bit of land and a keep on the smallest
of the Fingers, though I do believe he often missed sleeping under
his titular hedges. The only thing worse than owning a dreary and desolate land
is owning only a small portion of it. Luckily
I did not spend much time there as a child. During the War of the Ninepenny Kings,
a cheap name for a cheap cause other men fought for the King my father fought to
be friend Holster Tully
Lord Paramount of the Trident and head of one
of the oldest and greatest houses in Westeros.
Thanks to my father's heroic efforts Lord Hoster
agreed to foster me at Riverrun with his own children.
Until then my whole world had been an small tower on
the gull-stained rocks of the Fingers,
but when I first saw the stone walls of Riverrun rising from the Trident,
towering over me, back then I was a little more easily impressed.
The boy in me thought the gods themselves must live in such a place.
I soon learned otherwise. Lord Tully's son
Edmure was quick to ensure I would never forget myself in their House.
He nicknamed me 'Littlefinger' after my size and homeland,
and the name was just cruel enough to stick.
His sisters, Lysa and Catelyn,
made me a pawn in their kissing-games, trading
back and forth between them for practice.
Needless to say, I enjoyed spending time with them
more than Edmure. As we grew older,
the game began to change, as all games do.
Lysa grew more bold, and Cat more demure.
When Lord Tully announced Cat's betrothal to
a brute from the North, whom she had never met,
I realized her duty would outweigh any feelings she had for me
Fool that I was, I challenged this
Brandon Stark to a duel for her hand. He was a warrior,
I was a boy. If Cat had not intervened,
he would have killed me and laughed over my corpse.
For my insolence Lord Tully banished me from Riverrun. No matter,
I had learned everything I needed by then. I would fight my battles not with swords
but with wits, a few men could match me. Even then
House Baelish might have died out on the rocks of the Fingers,
I was again a poor lord, with no allies and no prospects except,
if I were lucky, a daughter of a middling merchant.
Then opportunity arose, the Mad King executed that Brandon Stark and incited a rebellion.
my old friend Lysa Tully was married off to Jon Arryn,
Lord of the Vale, to cement the alliance against the Iron Throne,
bringing her within my circle again. I quickly capitalized on our former
affection and persuaded her to have me appointed as controller of customs at
Gulltown, the Vale's greatest port.
Wars burn gold like wildfire.
When I increased the port's income tenfold, her husband took notice of this
lowly lord from the Fingers and when the new and profligate King Robert needed a
Master of Coin, who could find gold where no one else could,
why Lord Arryn knew just the man.
Once House Baelish had no lands, no name
and no gold, now we have quite a lot of each.
What new rung would the new generation climb?
let us not be hasty I'm not finished yet.
Fire made flesh.
Such is the nature of dragons, claimed
the eastern mystics. For once, they may have a point,
though not the one they think.
Fire consumes, leaving at it's end
nought but ash. Thus, the fate of the Targaryens and their dragons.
Thousands of years ago, Valyrians stumbled on the first dragon eggs
in the mountains of the 14 Fires. I cannot imagine that shepherds could hatch
dragon eggs and bind such creatures to their will,
but whatever aid they must have had is lost to history. Every
educted person knows how the dragonlords then conquered most of The Known World.
Breaking the ancient Ghiscari Empire, enslaving a continent,
building roads and bridges that still stand today,
though the art that made them is lost. An empire of marvels
and misery. And now what is left of Valyria?
A smoking wasteland, ash.
In time, Aegon I Targaryen and his sisters brought their three dragons that had
escaped the Doom to
Westeros, perhaps thinking to regain his people's lost glory,
and so he did. On the Field of Fire,
he proved that armies were no match for dragons. At Harrenhal,
he proved that mighty castles weren't either. Aegon Targaryen became
Aegon the Conquerer, First of His Name,
founder of a dynasty. His first act: to order his dragon, Balerion the Black Dread,
to melt the swords of his beaten foes into his new
Iron Throne.
For over a hundred years,
the Targaryen dragons cemented their breeders' hold on the Seven
Kingdoms,
if not each other. When Targaryen fought
Targaryen in the civil war called the Dance of the Dragons,
an angry mob stormed the Dragonpit, that huge now
-ruined vault where Targaryens stabled their beasts.
Thousands died, but through sheer numbers
and madness, five of the Targaryen dragons lay dead by the morning.
Which was perhaps too many. Thereafter,
each generation grew smaller than its parents'.
Their skulls used to line the throne room of the Red Keep
in order of birth. The oldest, Balerion,
could swallow an oxe whole. The last skull was barely the size of a dog's.
Yet the Targaryens never stopped trying to revive
their dragons. Aerion Brightflame drank a draught of wildfire
and burned to death. Aegon V
tried to hatch stone dragon eggs with sorcery
and burned to death. Against these,
Aerys II looks almost sensible: he only burned other men to death.
Now, we hear rumours that the young Daenerys Targaryen has
hatched three dragons far to the east.
If she were to be so foolish as to march on Westeros,
she will not find, as her ancestor Aegon did,
seven disparate kingdoms frightened by strange beasts.
She will find a continent united by
Lord Tywin Lannister, who extinguished her own father's flame.
And we have known dragons now; we have seen them die.
Any man who calls a poison a woman's weapon
is a traitor to his fellow men. A dagger,
arrow, axe; these are the arms of passion.
But poison is cold, calculating.
Poison is the thought that wakes you in the morning and lulls you to sleep at night.
You watch your victim die a thousand times before you ever offer him that
fateful taste.
Is a man's hate so inferior to a woman's
that we are to be denied such a weapon? When I was a boy of sixteen,
a great lord caught me with his mistress. He should have been honored,
instead the fat old fool challenged him to a duel.
Thanks to my age and status, only to first blood.
But his mistress and his wife warned me which
of my parts the lord intended to draw first blood from
he was strong and fierce but slow.
I cut him quickly and the duel ended with honor satisfied.
Then, his wounds festered and he died.
Ever since, men have called me
the "Red Viper",
A name that never fails to draw a laugh from me.
As if a single serpent was all I knew of venom!
Essence of Nightshade
is the gentlest of poisons. A drop dissolved into wine
will slow a pounding heart and stop a hand from shaking.
Three drops will grant a night of deep
and dreamless sleep. Ten drops
and you will have a sleep that does not end.
Basilisk's blood.
It will give cooked meat a savory smell,
but if eaten it produces violent,
madness, in beasts as well as men.
A mouse will attack a lion after a taste of Basilisk's blood.
But to a man who loves his art, is not passion
a form of madness?
Widow's blood forces a man's bowels and bladder to fail.
He drowns in his own poisons; a slow
painful death. It has earned it's name
many times, sure.
The Tears of Lys, a rare and costly poison.
Clear, tasteless and odorless. Dissolved in wine or water,
it eats at a man's bowels. He dies in agony,
which will not appear unusual if the victim is old or sickly.
The favourite fool of impatient heirs.
Across the world, on certain islands of the Jade Sea,
grows a certain plant. The leaves must be aged
and soaked in a wash of limes, sugar water and certain rare spices from the Summer Isles
Afterward, the potion must be thickened with ash
and allowed to crystalise. The process is slow and difficult,
the necessaries costly and hard to acquire. The Alchemists of Lys
know the way of it, and the Faceless Men of Braavos
and the Maesters. Dissolved in wine, it makes the muscles
of a man's throat clench tighter than any fist.
The victim's face turns purple as the little crystal seed from which his death
was grown, and so they call it "The Strangler".
Which of these vials would Oberyn take from it's shelf,
you may ask? None. To kill a man at his table
or in his bed bores me. To toils hours over a boiling pot,
measuring and stirring, bores me. How life begins is always entertaining,
and my kind must make sure it's end is worth our wait.
"Sex". A simple word
for a simple act. And so, of course, men complicate it.
A child born to a wife is a gift from the gods.
A child born to a mistress or an obedient servant girl
is a bastard, unworthy of its father's name.
So instead they call the children after the land where they were born:
"Flowers" in The Reach and "Hill" in The Westerlands,
"Stone" in The Vale and "Storm" in The Stormlands,
"Rivers" in The Riverlands and "Waters" in The Crownlands,
"Pyke" in the Iron Islands, "Snow" in The North
and in Dorne, "Sand". By these names,
everyone can recognise a bastard, even if his own father won't.
Though sometimes a father with too much gold and daughters
will ask the king to legitimize a bastard son
and give him his family name. If his wife objects,
the next one does not. But sometimes the gods play their jokes
and later his wife will give him a trueborn son of their own.
When this happens, well...
children die all the time, so do fathers.
Even the beautiful Targaryens had bastards
when brothers tired of their sisters many to the name Blackfire
after the Conquerer's own sword. When Aegon the Unworthy legitimized all his
bastards on his deathbed,
they rose up against his trueborn heir. Westeros bled,
Dorne yawned. For most of Westeros, the Blackfyre rebellion only proved what they
already knew:
bastards are treacherous, born of lust and shame.
But here in Dorne lust is not shameful.
We know that bastardy does not make a man more
treacherous than another; man does not need the help.
The Iron Bank dates from when Braavos was still
the secret city, filled with runaways and refugees from the Valyrian
slave lords. The first tradesmen to achieve success
realised that if they pulled their resources, they could loan money to their
less fortunate fellows
and build a better Braavos. For a profit,
of course. First they needed a space to store their combined gold,
safe from thieves and more importantly each other,
for the business rivalries that created their fortunes were not
easily put aside. They found an abandoned iron mine outside the city
and sealed its only entrance with heavy gates and bars
and set guards supplied by every principal investor.
Each guard watched the gate, and the other guards.
Over time, this distrust vanished as the investors gave up their other businesses
and poured their energies into the new endeavour, now called
the Iron Bank after the mine. They have since moved to more spacious quarters,
but we still keep our first vault, not merely to remind them of our roots,
but because they did not become the world's greatest depository of wealth by
wasting assets,
no matter how minor. If you're inspiring merchant,
you come to us to buy ships and goods. If you are an aspiring shopkeeper,
you come to them to us your shop. Whatever you need in this world,
we are the conduit. Even a throne can be yours if you are an aspiring king,
or stay yours if you are a sitting one. Just ask House Lannister of Westeros.
We are not the only bank in this world. Every free city has its own.
But when those banks need gold, the come to the to us,
We lend to princes, kings, merchants and tradesmen.
If a prince or king cannot payus back, well...
the world lacks for loyal men, not ambitious ones.
We simply fund the rise of new princes and kings,
and they tend to honor our investment. If a merchant refuses to repay us
well...the vicissitudes of trade are well known,
and Braavos is full of men who are not. One way or another,
the Iron Bank will have its due.
"Sellsword". Pretty much sums it up.
A poor man has a sword. A rich man needs a man with a sword.
Gold is exchanged. If the poor man knows how the use the sword,
maybe he becomes a rich man, one way or another.
I'm sure sellswords have a long and illustrious history,
but if you meet a sellsword who knows it, best hire someone else.
A sellsword should be good at one thing: getting paid to killed people.
It's not an easy job; most people try to kill you back,
at least a few of them know how. The ones that do not,
well, they often come in enough pretty armor to ruin an afternoon.
A lot of high lords turn their noses up at sellswords. They say they cannot trust a
man who sells his allegiance to the highest bidder.
I don't blame them, much cheaper for them to own an army from birth,
either by people being on their lands or by their ancestors swearing a few oaths.
But heres the thing no Sellsword is ever fled from the winning side
If your hired companies are running away from you, it is because you are not on that side
and you did not pay them enough to die with you. Not that you could.
Sellswords do not get rich dying for their lords. Sellswords do not really get rich.
Some of the eastern companies on Essos do fine:
the Golden Company, the Second Sons, the Windblown.
Always a bit of fighting to be had in the Free Cities,
even if those merchant princes can be as tight as an old man's cunt.
But then you are stuck in the heat and dust, hoping some dumb rich prick does not try to hire
a company to fight Dothraki,
because you your dumb, greedy captain would probably take it.
Hedge knights, now, are a different breed. Take a sellsword
and remove the sense. They get their name from where the sleep:
under the hedges of the Seven Kingdoms and ditches and stables.
They do not have the family name or the purse like real knights,
so the spend all their money on armor and a horse and riding tourney after tourney
in the hope of impressing some lord or winning some prize.
One loss and a lot of them are ruined. They cannot ransom back their armor.
Even if they win, think what a knight is good for: killing men.
You know how you train for killing men? By trying to kill men,
not prancing around with a blunted stick bowing and waiting your turn.
maybe you will think that I'm just insulting the competition so you hire me instead.
Well, of course I am. So don't hire me and hire a sellsword
with educated heirs who tells you all about the great battles he has heard of
or the hedge knight who has won a few tourneys starting to build his name.
The man you are fighting against he hires me.
Twice the Targaryens tried to conquer Dorne with soldiers.
Twice they failed. Only when the dragon kings came bearing husbands and wives
did my ancestors relent and agree to join their Seven Kingdoms.
House Martell could have waged war until
the end of days, but how could we resist a piece we could take
to bed? For centuries the Iron Throne
had no more loyal ally than the Princes of Dorne.
Since we had never fallen to them,
we kept our ancestral title.
Perhaps this is what drew Rhaegar Targaryen to us.
His royal parents had not produced a sister for him to wed, so he had to look
elsewhere for a princess
and there was only one in Westros:
Elia of House Martell, my sister.
She was not the most beautiful woman in the world or even in Dorne,
but rare for a woman from our land,
her flower came with no thorns.
She was kind and clever with a gentle heart.
I loved her and feared for her.
For years I fended off lesser men from her, but when Rhaegar came.
even I failed
He was beautiful and the crown prince of the Seven Kingdoms,
and our mother had worked so hard to secure the match how could
Elia not accept it? They were wed
and he took Elia from her home, from those who loved her
and would die for her and locked her in his Red Keep
above his sty of a city surrounded by false friends.
She bore him a a daughter and a son,
though each almost cost her her life.
Elia loved Rhaegar, she obeyed him and he chose to steal away Lyanna Stark,
a pale northern girl who veins ran with ice like all of her people.
Instead of disciplining his faithless son, King Aerys
executed the Starks when they came seeking justice and ignited a revolt.
I know how the maesters describe the war now but calling it
Robert's Rebellion does not change what it was:
the War of the Usurper. Dorne sided with the crown,
for when we swear oaths, we keep them. We needed no threats from King Aerys,
though he made them anyway, locking Elia and her children in the Red Keep
to ensure our loyalty.
Even in his madness, he knew that no true Dornishman would
ever take up arms against our beloved princess
and that we would fight to the death
for whatever side she was on. At the Trident,
Dorne lost ten thousand men and two princes:
My uncle in the Kingsguard and Elia's gallant
husband Prince Rhaegar, who was too slow
or too arrogant for Robert's warhammer. As Robert's army marched on King's Landing,
the Mad King sent his own wife and child away but kept my sister
and hers inside.
In his madness, Aerys thought that the Dornish had betrayed his son at the Trident
and was only too happy to welcome his one true friend
back into his ranks: Tywin Lannister.
Lord Tywin's army sacked his friend's city
while Lord Tywin's son murdered the king he had sworn to protect.
All of this could have been forgiven: war is terrible
and men must become terrible to wage it. But the Lannisters knew that as long as my sister
and her children, Prince Rhaegar's heirs, lived,
no usurper could safely sit the Throne. So Lord Tywin's
dog Ser Gregor Clegane, the Mountain,
made Elia watch as he murdered her daughter
and dashed her infant son's head against a wall.
Then with her baby's blood still on his hands,
he raped my sister and murdered her.
When Lord Tywin later presented their bodies to Robert Baratheon
wrapped in pretty Lannister cloaks, I have been told the red colour
graciously hid the blood from men's eyes.
The Targaryens talk of fire and blood.
In Dorne ouir blood is fire.
If Robert Baratheon had dared set foot in Dorne during his reign,
he would have lost the foot, and it is not even him we blame for Elia.
The Lannisters think their gold buys them power.
The Lannisters think their
Mountain buys them strength.
But if they want piece, they cannot buy it with mountains of gold
or one Mountain of steel. They must pay in blood.
Nobody really knows how the Wall was built.
Yes, every child hears how in the days of the First Men, Brandon the Builder raised
the Wall with magic and giants and set the Night's Watch to guard it.
But nobody thought to write down the story until thousands of years later,
and the septons who did it were not much for accuracy. I mean
They had knights bumbling thousands of years around before there were nights.
Sorry bad habit,But even if magic and
giants built the Wall, it is the Night's Watch who have held it. our order of
Builders repairs the keeps and towers,
digs tunnels, crushes stone for roads and footpaths
and clears away trees wherever the forest presses too close to the Wall.
Or at least they would if they had the men and the tools
and the time. Long ago when the Night's Watch was at full strength,
the Builders would quarry blocks of ice from the frozen lakes of the Haunted Forest
dragging them south on sledges to add to the Wall.
Now it is all they can do to watch for cracks
or signs of melt and make all the repairs
they can, without men or tools or time.
The order of Rangers is the fighting heart of the Night's Watch.
They ride beyond the Wall fighting and trading with wildlings,
surviving shadowcats and snow-leopards. The Rangers are meant to scout out
threats to the Wall and return to report, & they did beck in the days
when men could go north & come back alive.
Now they just come back. The orders of Stewards keeps the Watch alive.
We hunt and farm, tend the horses, milk the cows,
gather firewood, cook the meals and bring supplies from the south.
Not so heroic, I know, but since the Night's Watch does not starve or freeze,
I guess with the only order that still does everything it is supposed to.
Without all of them guarding the Wall together,
probably still would not have ever fallen.
Solid ice rising hundreds of feet into the air and running hundreds of miles to the sea?
No army is smashing it any time soon. Which is why our enemies have never tried,
well not directly. The brothers
Gendel and Gorne, Kings-Beyond-the- Wall, went under the Wall
through ancient caves buried deep in the Earth. But on the way back they took a wrong turn
and were lost in in the darkness.
People say that their children's children's children are still down there
looking for a way up, or for more food to find it's way down.
When our Rangers found Arson Iceaxe picking away at the Wall,
he was almost halfway through. The Rangers decided not to disturb him
and seal the way behind him with ice and stone and snow
Some say if you place your ear flat to the Wall,
you can still hear Arson chipping away with his axe.
A hundred years ago, another King-Beyond-the-Wall,
Raymun Redbeard, realised the Wall's size is both it's greatest strength
and it's greatest weakness. He waited for the Watch's patrols to pass
and then sent climbers to the now unguarded stretch of the Wall.
When they reached the top,
they dropped ropes and ladders for thousands more wildlings to clamber up.
The Night's Watch did not even know his army had crossed until after Starks and Umbers
had cornered and destroyed them,
and that was a hundred years ago, when the Watch had many more men than now.
Lucky for the Night's Watch, the Wall is not without it's own defences.
Besides being incredibly tall and thick, the Wall
is also treacherous. Many times a patrol will find the broken corpses of wildlings
who have tried to climb the Wall
only for a piece of it to break off mid-climb or to have their hold slip as the sun
melted the ice just enough.
When the light strikes the Wall just right, it can even look like it is weeping.
A thousand years ago, the Night's Watch could have lined up shoulder to shoulder
along the Wall,
all the way from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea to the Shadow Tower to meet
Mance Rayder and his army. But now Mance is not bothering to find tunnels
under the Wall
or climb over it. He was a Sworn Brother once.
He knows that the glory of the Night's Watch is behind them. Mance is going to try
what no man ever has: he
is going to come through the wall one day
I hopes Maesters will write stories about how we beat him back,
because if we do not there may not be any more stories to write.
"Wildlings". I supposes that is flattery coming from the Southerners
would kneel to a pig if their daddies did. We call ourselves the Free Folk,
or at least most of them will not kill you for calling us.
Some will, aye, but that is just the way it in
the True North, beyond the great white Wall,
where their laws and kingdoms end and men
live free and die cold.
For we live close to their land and she is a terrible wife;
fail to obey her, and she kills you.
On the Frozen Shore, so deep is the snow
that men ride chariots made of walrus
bones pulled by packs of dogs. The Hornfoots
have it easy in the mountains; the cold so hardens and blackens the soles of their feet
that they do not even need boots. The cave people
spend their lives in the dark doing
gods-know-what with gods-know-who-or-what.
The Thenns have one of the only nice bits of land up there.
A valley in the far north near the end of the Frostfangs
with game, copper and tin for shiny bronze weapons.
Better than the rusted old blades most of us have.
With such advantages, they could be a generous,
friendly race. They are not. As young boys,
they burn their faces and rub ash and dirt into the runes;
scars more than their face, I thinks. They follow their
Magnar, who is the kind of man who can rule these kinds of men.
I knows what you Southerners think, and no,
the Magnar is not a king; more like
their god, though not one you would care to follow
if you do not sleep with your eyes open. Then there are the giants,
a proud race as old as the Frostfangs
and about as tough. They speak the Old Tongue
when they speak at all, though the understand more Common than they let on.
They are not the monsters you Southerners think.
Once I was caught in a winter storm so cold
I would freeze to death before it broke. Lucky for me,
I stumbled on a sleeping giant, cut open her belly
and crawled right up inside her. It kept him warm enough,
but the stink nearly done me. The worst thing
was when she woke up she took me for her babe,
suckled me for three whole moons before I could get away.
aye, but there times when I still misses the taste
of giant's milk. I thanks the gods
she was in a good mood, unlike the husband. An angry giant?
You want no part of that. Whatever our differences,
one thing unites us. When we look south,
we see hundreds of feet of ice piled high,
manned by shivering crows in black cloaks.
Our wardens is pinning them up there, warning us away for
warmer lands, softer beds and prettier girls.
But the cold winds are rising. The Hornfoots
could not stand against them, nor the Thenns,
nor the giants. First they kill you,
then they send their dead against you. we faced
extinction, every one of us. But then Mance Rayder came to us
and rallied every nation of the Free Folk
as no man ever has. He was a crow once
and knows your ways. For thousands of years,
we have sucked fear of your kind from our mothers' teat.
We've have been on one side of the Wall and you on the other.
No more. One of these nights,
going to hear a knock on your front door you best not answer.
All boys dream of becoming knights.
The boys with talent dream of becoming Kingsguard.
The boys without talent...well, I wouldn't know.
I remember the day the Lord Commander wrote
my name down in the White Book, the official record of the Kingsguard.
At sixteen, the youngest member ever to join.
Knighted by Ser Arthur and Ser Barristan for valour against the Kingswood Brotherhood.
An outlaw had decided to try his luck against a lowly squire.
He was not using his head, so I'd took it off him.
Shortly afterwards, King Aerys II,
who had not yet earned the title of the "Mad King", took me into his service.
If I have ever been happy, it was that day.
For centuries, the Kingsguard have been the glory of the realm. Aegon the Conquerer
had established the order as his personal guardians
after uniting Westeros with fire and blood.
He knew that some of his subjects wouldn't take to conquest
and his dragons were no use against knives in the dark.
No doubt surrounding himself with the greatest knights in Westeros
made his rule more palatable and less foreign as well.
Everyone in the kingdoms soon knew the names and some of the songs of the Kingsguard.
I certainly did from his earliest days.
Lord Commander Gerold Hightower, the White Bull.
Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. Barristan Selmy,
the Bold. Prince Lewyn Martell. Oswell Whent,
Jonothor Darry and soon enough the boy prodigy,
me. We protected the King and his family.
we killed his enemies and led his armies. We gave him counsel when asked
and kept his secrets when not.
swore to hold no lands, take no wives and father no children
like the Night's Watch, except with a real job to do.
Was I awed to see my name inscribed in the same
book as my heroes? Of course not. I was sixteen
and brilliant. I knew it belonged there. Beside the name
of Prince Aemon the Dragonknight, who wielded the Valyrian sword
Dark Sister. He died defending
King Aegon the Unworthy from assassins though the King had insulted
Aemon throughout his reign and had well earned his fate,
because Prince Aemon had sworn our oath.
Beside the name of Ser Gwayne Corbray
who had duelled the Targaryen bastard Daemon Blackfyre for an hour
during the Battle of Redgrass Field though outmatched and grievously wounded
because Ser Gwayne had sworn our oath.
Beside the name of Ser Duncan the Tall who as a hedge knight broke several
of Prince Aerion Targaryen's teeth while defending a Dornish woman. He later rose
to Lord Commander and
burned beside his King as Summerhall, because Ser Duncan
had sworn our oath. Now, below the name of Jaime Lannister.
You knows how it reads, what I did,
even though I had sworn our oath.
That was years and a hand ago.
When I joined the Kingsguard I fought beside legends in the flesh.
Their kind is dust now
and the men who have taken their place mud.
Ser Boros Blount, the Fat. Ser Meryn Trant,
the Forgettable. Sandor Clegane, the Dog
Who Tucked Tail and Ran. Like mud,
their names have soiled the White Book, almost as much as my.
You can hear a maester coming
long before you see him thanks to the jangling chains he is forced to wear around his neck.
It is meant to remind him of his servitude,
like the collar of a dog. I cannot remove it,
even to sleep. Each link signifies mastery,
or at least what those withered old men in The Citadel consider
mastery, of a different area of study:
gold for the study of sums and accounts, silver for healing,
iron for war, black iron for ravenry, lead for poisons
and Valyrian steel for the higher mysteries.
Only one maester in a hundred forges such a link,
only one maester in a hundred has a sense the gods gave a goat.
Though i admits that no one had performed true magic in centuries.
we sit in a room mumbling over a candle of dragonglass,
trying to make it catch fire. After a sleepless night of failure,
We supposed to admit defeat and admit to our own limitations.
To win the link, we are supposed to lose our curiosity.
I never did. In time, the archmaesters decided more links were useless
to a man who would not be chained by them. They took my chain and expelled me from the Citadel,
their loss.
The chain as a whole is supposed to signify the realm.
One cannot have only lords and only knights,
one needs farmers, smiths, merchants, shepherds and the like.
Like a chain forged of many different metals.
An obvious and trivial point disguised with pomposity,
much like the maesters themselves. They study
without learning and proudly pass down the
same knowledge that was passed down to them,
with no addition. Perhaps such is to be expected
when one considers the kinds of men who become maesters.
The youngest sons of noble families, dutiful and timid,
raised in the shadow of their older brothers,
or bastards and peasant boys whose minds are easily
satisfied by the knowledge of their next meal.
Because bold men will not be chained.
They dare to ask questions that the maesters fear to answer.
They will look at a living man and ask: "How?".
They will look at the dead and ask: "What if?".
the maesters tell us that Aegon I Targaryen came to Westeros
with fire and blood and hammered six kingdoms into into one.
Fire he undoubtedly brought, as the Kings of the Rock,
Reach and Iron Islands learned. But blood has never been in short supply there,
ever since the First Men carried a crown into Westeros.
This First King united his people against the Children of the Forest
and is supposedly buried in the North, a victim of a war he started.
The first ruler of this land and the first to die on his throne.
But not nearly the last...
For thousands of years afterwards a thousand kings rose and fell,
dying in their beds, in their battles, in their guards' and mistresses' arms.
The Age of Heroes sounds pretty until you realise what makes a hero:
killing the enemies of his king, and to a king there is no greater enemy
than other kings. The Starks and Boltons,
the Gardeners and Storm Kings, the ironborn and...
everyone else. Even the mighty Targaryens were not immune from shortened reigns.
Aegon's own son, Maegor the Cruel,
was killed by the very Iron Throne his father had forged,
if you believe the tales. If you don't,
then perhaps "the Cruel" is not a wise name for a king to earn.
Daeron, first of his name, tried to finish his ancestor's work
and bring Dorne into the fold.
For his efforts, he lost sixty thousand men
and his own life of eighteen years.
During the great Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons,
a king and queen each vied for the throne,
dividing their House and it's dragons against each other.
Eventually, the queen was fed to her rival's dragon while her son watched
and the victorious king
soon died of his own wounds. By the war's end,
King's Landing was smashed, cities razed and sacked
never to be rebuilt and dragons had faded from this world.
Decades later, Aegon the Unworthy legitimized all of his bastards on his deathbed.
Inevitably, the greatest of these, Daemon Blackfyre,
declared himself the rightful heir and ignited yet
another war for the crown. After much bloodshed,
Daemon was killed by an alliance of his half-brothers on the Redgrass Field.
All the same, his descendants continued to
threaten the Targaryens until half a century later,
when Barristan the Bold slew Maelys the Monstrous on the Stepstones,
extinguishing Daemon's line. Given such an illustrious history, need people be
so shocked by regicide? A War of the Five Kings can end only one way:
with the death of four. Yet even in times of peace,
a wise ruler knows that when men bend the knee to a king,
too often they rise holding daggers.
Iron chainmail and steel plate
over the chest. Metal gauntlets over the hands and greaves over the legs.
A visored helm over the skull.
A knight in full armor can shrug off swords, spears and and axes.
But Valyrian steel slices through his protections like so much cloth.
As advanced as iron is from bronze,
so is Valyrian steel from ordinary steel. Later yet stronger,
and nothing holds an edge like it. If you take a whetstone to a Valyrian blade,
you will need another whetstone, or maybe another hand to hold it.
Nobody knows how the Valyrians forged their steel.
Less than a handful of smiths can now even reshape it.
The process, like so much of their civilisation, was lost in the Doom.
Many claim they wove magic spells into the molten metal
and blasted it with dragonfire. When you see a Valyrian blade,
smokey and dark as if drinking in the sun and rippling with a thousand foes,
you may not scoff so loudly. The Valyrian steel that exists now is all
there will ever be.
Some survives in The Citadel where the Maesters' chains,
where a link of Valyrian steel signifies study of the higher mysteries,
whatever those are. Some drifts through the world as prized daggers
and jewellery for rich merchants.
I've even seen a Dothraki Arakh. But much more of Valyrian steel lives on in
the great houses of Westeros
as their most treasured possession: a sword passed down from father to son for generations.
Ice of House Stark. Heartsbane of House Tarly. Lady Forlorn of House Corbray.
But even precious treasures can be lost.
Aegon I Targaryen's Blackfyre and Visenya's Dark Sister
disappeared in Daemon Blackfyre's rebellion.
A foolish King of the Rock took House Lannister's Brightroar to Valyria,
and neither blade nor man was seen again. And then there are the swords that are not lost,
but lose their owners. For five centuries Longclaw was the pride of
House Mormont, my house. Even
penniless and in great debt, I chose to sell men
rather than the sword. When my shame became known and I
fled Bear Island for the east, I left it behind for my father,
to hold it for a worthier heir. Valyrian steel
a wonder of the world, sharper than wits,
is truer than men, rarer than virtue. But even its
edge cannot cut so deeply as a son's failure, nor its value match that of redemption.
Justice is a funny thing. For the poor, it
is what keeps them alive and starving, depending on how the local lord feels
about his woods
his streams, his crops. For the rich,
justice is what you get if you are not careful enough or rich enough.
Usually how it works is you commit a crime and the local lord sends his guards
after you or your victim's family kills you and the guards go after them instead.
Or you do nothing and the guards come after you anyway. Either way,
someone is brought before the lord and he decides what is to be done.
It could be a fine if you are rich enough to pay. Otherwise it is the dungeons,
the chopping block or the Wall.
You think that most folks would choose the Wall.
The North is nasty, dark and cold but
so are most dungeons and every man knows how the Night's Watch earned their name.
All they can do is watch. I don't blame the men who choose a quick chop
rather than life without one of it's few joys. If you are in the capital,
it is the King's Justice who takes your head. Elsewhere in the south,
the headsman of the local lord. But in the North it is the lord himself.
"The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword", they say up there.
It sound noble, but given some of the Northern lords our judgment
they just do not want anyone else spoiling their fun. If you are so unlucky to be in
the Vale when you are caught,
you might never make it to sentencing thanks to their sky cells.
Open on one side to a long fall with the floor sloping down towards it like a woman's thighs
After a few days, they say the sky starts calling to you.
Men jump with smiles on their faces, expecting the wind to lift them into the sky;
it does not. To think that Lord Tyrion was one tit-shaped cloud away from death.
Lucky for him, he was highborn. If your family honor goes back hundreds of years
to a time when your ancestors hit other men harder than they were hit,
you had another option: trial by combat. You either fight your accuser,
or you both pick champions to fight on your behalf
and the gods will favor the righteous man as long as he's also the strongest,
the quickest or the luckiest. Once in a long while,
you may get two real highborn shits having a go at each other
and one of them might be fool enough to demand a trial by seven.
Exactly how it sounds: seven men against seven men.
Makes for a good show, but any man who has been in battle
knows that the more men involved, the less skill needed, the more chance of accidents.
Just ask that Targaryen prince who got his head staved in by his brother all
those years ago,
and all for some hedge knight. If you ever find yourself arrested in the Seven Kingdoms,
just remember that justice is up to the judge. Beg him for forgiveness
all claims for it for us to be allowed to take the black but remember
he doesn't have to like you there are plenty of lords out there who think hands and
heads are great decorations for their spikes.
The septons claim that justice is of the gods.
Nice of them to keep it up there to themselves.
Most boys dream of becoming a Kingsguard.
Rich boys from good families get the chance. Smart boys stay at home and sing songs about them
instead, opening purses and thighs, because the Kingsguard is not really good for much else.
There was one Kingsguard, I forgotten the bastard's name,
who swore an oath to his dying Targaryen king to crown his daughter
after him. The very night that king died, this Kingsguard crowned the king's son instead.
When an old man on the Small Council dared to protest,
this "honorable" knight opened his throat. The bastard died in the very civil war he started
along with the old king's son, daughter and most of their dragons.
And the Kingsguard? All that duty and honor
and not enough brains to figure out which Targaryen to give it to.
Twin brothers even ended up on opposite sides,
died with tears on their cheeks as they cut each other down.
I supposes I should think this is tragic, but stupid men do stupid things every day
and nobody cries over them.
Prince Aemon the Dragonknight
may be the most famous Kingsguard who ever lived. How did he die?
Defending Aegon the Unworthy from the brothers of a man
whom Aegon fed to his dogs. The man's crime? Sleeping with one of the many mistresses
Aegon was not using, and the man was one of Aegon's own Kingsguard.
Arthur Dayne. Gerold Hightower.
Sure, if half the stories about them are true, they could swing a sword better than most,
which makes their lives even more of a waste.
Bodyguards to the maddest king the Seven Kingdoms ever saw.
Watching their king burn men alive. Standing guard as their king raped his queen.
Hiding the Stark girl that Prince Rhaegar stole away, causing a war that toppled
their king. And all of this without any women or gold to show for it.
Stupid buggers! The only one with any sense was Jaime Lannister.
When his father stormed the city, he put a sword through the Mad King's back rather
than die gloriously at his post. He's still here, they are not.
Even if the Kingsguard are the greatest knights in the realm,
knights are just arses in armor. Riding whatever horse their daddies gave them.
Putting on a white cloak does not make a man smarter
of bolder. It's just a pretty little curtain. Behind it is the same pile of shit.