The Brotherhood Without Banners
An outlaw band of the Riverlands who fight for no lord and no crown, only for the smallfolk caught between the armies ÔÇö bound together by a red priest's fire.
The fuller tale
The Brotherhood Without Banners began as Eddard Stark's men, dispatched south to bring Gregor Clegane to justice for atrocities against Riverlands smallfolk ÔÇö and then Ned lost his head before they could return, and a company of soldiers with no lord left to report to had to decide what they were for. What they became was something the Seven Kingdoms had no other name for: an outlaw band loyal to no crown and no house, funded by nothing, fighting for the specific and unglamorous cause of smallfolk caught between armies that had stopped noticing they existed.
Beric Dondarrion leads them at first, kept alive past any reasonable expiration by a red priest's fire magic ÔÇö resurrected again and again by Thoros of Myr's prayers to the Lord of Light, each return costing him a little more of who he used to be, until there is barely enough Beric left to spend. The brotherhood's justice is rough and occasionally indistinguishable from the banditry it claims to oppose, holding trials in the woods for lords and smugglers alike and hanging whoever the fire god's flame seems to condemn, which is not always the same thing as whoever actually deserves it.
Their most famous transaction is also their most damning: selling a blacksmith's apprentice named Gendry to a red priestess for gold, a decision the brotherhood justifies as funding the only war that matters and that reads, to nearly everyone watching, as exactly the kind of exploitation of the powerless they were originally formed to prevent. It is the clearest sign that an order built to protect people caught between armies can drift, slowly and without anyone quite deciding to let it happen, into becoming one more thing the smallfolk need protecting from.
The page and the screen
The books take the brotherhood somewhere the show never follows. Catelyn Stark's body, recovered from the river after the Red Wedding, is revived by Beric Dondarrion's dwindling fire magic ÔÇö passed to her at the cost of what remains of his own life ÔÇö and what rises is not quite Catelyn anymore: a silent, vengeful figure known as Lady Stoneheart, who takes command of the brotherhood and turns its rough justice into something considerably darker, hunting down everyone even distantly complicit in the Red Wedding for summary execution. It is one of the most significant cuts the show ever made, quietly removing an entire late-book storyline and, with it, the brotherhood's grimmest chapter.
