Ser Waymar Royce

A young lordling of the Vale, newly of the Night's Watch and proud of his sable cloak, leading his first ranging beyond the Wall.

The fuller tale

Waymar Royce is what happens when the great houses tithe their surplus sons to the Wall. Third son of Bronze Yohn Royce of Runestone, he arrives with a warhorse, a sable-trimmed cloak and the total confidence of a boy who has never been contradicted by anything larger than a sparring partner — and the Watch, chronically starved of highborn officers, gives him a command at eighteen. Veterans with forty years of rangings ride at the orders of a knight half a year off his father’s practice yard.

The tale is scrupulously fair to him, which is what makes the prologue sting. Waymar is arrogant, yes — he mocks his men’s fears, overrules the woodsman’s instincts of better rangers, and pushes the patrol on through a cold that older hands know is wrong — but when the impossible steps out of the trees, the boy lordling does not run. He draws. Alone, outnumbered by things out of a nurse’s tale, he levels his sword at an Other and calls for the dance, and for a few strokes the last knight of the age of heroes is a spoiled third son from the Vale.

His function in the story is to be the reader’s first casualty of the gap between the world men believe in and the world that is. Every institution that made Waymar — house, knighthood, Watch — equipped him for the wrong war. His courage is real and it purchases nothing, which is the coldest sentence the prologue passes; the tale will spend eighty-odd chapters before anyone south of that clearing takes the lesson seriously.

The page and the screen

The prologue’s duel belongs to the books: the mocking, patient Other, the crystal sword that shivers Waymar’s blade to splinters, the watchers who emerge from the wood to finish the work with cold courtesy. The show shortens the encounter to a massacre glimpsed in the dark — Waymar dies quickly and mostly off-camera, and the eerie fencing-lesson quality of the book scene is spent elsewhere. Readers may also enjoy the long echo the books give him: seasons later, his father Bronze Yohn passes through the story still ignorant of how his son died, and the Vale plotline keeps House Royce’s grief quietly in view. The show’s Royces appear too, but the connection to the frozen boy from the first scene is never drawn.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Beyond the Wall, Ser Waymar Royce mocks the cold until pale shapes with burning blue eyes rise out of it; Will watches his lordling die — and rise. (AGOT 1)

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

The show: Killed beyond the Wall (S1·E1)

The books: Killed in the haunted forest (AGOT, ch. 1)

Led his first ranging into the haunted forest with a lordling's confidence and met the Others in the dark. He crossed swords with a White Walker, died for it, and rose again with eyes of blue.

He dies in the haunted forest on his first ranging, the first sworn brother lost in the saga. In the books it is nearly a formal duel: an Other steps from the dark, blades meet, and the inhuman thing toys with him — parry by parry, in a cold that makes steel scream — until Waymar’s sword bursts and the shard takes his eye, and then the watching Others close in together and cut the boy apart. What rises afterward wears his sables and his wounds and strangles the last of his men in a tree. The show gives him the same end with less ceremony, cut down in the dark by the first White Walker the audience ever sees. Either way his corpse is the story’s first proof that beyond the Wall, dying is not the end of one’s service.