Lem Lemoncloak

A big, gruff outlaw of the Brotherhood Without Banners, known for the tattered yellow cloak that gives him his name.

The fuller tale

Nobody in the Brotherhood Without Banners knows Lem’s right name, and Lem has arranged things that way. What the band knows is the cloak — a great ragged wool thing dyed lemon-yellow, long past its best decade, which he will neither wash nor replace and which has named him as surely as any sept ever christened a lord. Under it stands a big, broken-nosed, gruff slab of a man with a soldier’s bearing and a border-country burr, who deflects every question about his past with a grunt and is plainly, to anyone paying attention, somebody who used to be somebody else.

Within the outlaw band he is the sergeant to Thoros’s chaplain and Beric’s saint: the practical, unsentimental enforcer who keeps watch, keeps order, and keeps prisoners from getting ideas. The books run Arya’s riverlands odyssey through his custody — it is Lem as much as anyone who hauls her back when she bolts, catches her kicks and her curses, and delivers her to the hollow hill for the Brotherhood’s strange justice. He is not kind, and not cruel: he is what a cause looks like at the rank where the work gets done.

The band changes masters, and Lem changes with it. In the later books, under a new and colder leadership, the Brotherhood’s justice curdles into vengeance — trials giving way to nooses, mostly Frey-shaped — and Lem rides at the front of that turn, having claimed for himself the snarling houndshead helm that once belonged to Sandor Clegane. The yellow cloak under the Hound’s helm becomes one of the books’ eeriest silhouettes: the decent-enough sergeant of a good man’s war, repurposed, piece by piece, as the hangman of a dead woman’s grief.

The page and the screen

The book Lem deepens by the volume — his custody of Arya, the houndshead helm, and his grim role in the hangings that stalk the Freys through the riverlands, including the noose offered to Brienne of Tarth — and readers have spent years trading theories about the man under the cloak. The show kept the name, the cloak and little else: its Lem is a coarse bit-player in the Brotherhood who reappears among the renegades that butcher Ray’s peaceable flock — the massacre that pulls the Hound back into the war — and answers to Beric and the rope for it. Two mediums, two Lems, and the yellow cloak the only thing they’d recognize in each other.

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The yellow-cloaked outlaw hanged the villagers of a sept the Hound had come to call home. The Brotherhood gave Sandor Clegane his rope-work as restitution; Lem got the noose he'd earned.