Edric Storm
King Robert's one acknowledged bastard, a well-born boy raised at Storm's End, black of hair like all his father's blood (book).
The fuller tale
Edric Storm is the only bastard King Robert ever acknowledged, and the reason is the scandal of his making: he was conceived at Stannis's own wedding feast, in the bridal bed, on the bride's cousin — Delena of House Florent, whose family was too proud to be ignored and too useful to be insulted. Robert's solution was very Robert: the boy was sent to Storm's End to be raised in honor by its castellan, given his father's black hair and blue eyes and, people said, rather more of his father's easy warmth than any of the trueborn children got, along with the unmistakable Florent ears.
The war makes his blood a commodity. When Storm's End passes to Stannis, so does Edric — a friendly, trusting boy, proud of his uncle the king, entirely unaware that the red woman at his uncle's side has begun to speak of the power in king's blood and of what a great victory a little sacrifice might buy. The books make him the object of their sharpest moral tug-of-war: Melisandre wants the boy for the flames, Stannis inches from no toward maybe as his cause dwindles, and Davos Seaworth decides that the whole worth of his knighthood comes down to one smuggler's errand — the boy, a boat, and the open sea before the king's maybe hardens.
Edric sails out of the story toward the Free Cities with a handful of loyal men, complaining, in the best tradition of rescued princes, about the weather and the injustice of it all. He is alive in the books, in Lys, unaware that he is the debt Davos paid his king's soul with.
The page and the screen
The show cut Edric and handed his entire plot to Gendry — the king's blood, Melisandre's leeches, the pyre narrowly avoided, Davos's midnight rescue by rowboat. The transplant is clean but changes the flavor: book Gendry never faces the fire, and book Edric is no anonymous Flea Bottom smith but a pampered, likable little lordling whose peril plays out in castle councils rather than dungeon cells. What the show loses is the Florent knot — Edric's existence as a standing insult to Stannis's marriage — and the pointed spectacle of a king weighing a nephew he knows personally against a kingdom he feels owed.
Mentioned in the chronicle
- The Hand who can barely read learns his letters beside Edric Storm — and reads in Melisandre's fires exactly what she wants of king's blood. (ASOS 55)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.