House Reed
The crannogmen of Greywater Watch, a secretive marsh-dwelling people of the Neck, the most loyal and uncanny of all the Stark bannermen.
The fuller tale
The crannogmen of Greywater Watch are the North's most private people, marsh-dwellers of the Neck who use the region's bogs, fogs and the shifting foundations of their own moving castle as a defense no siege engine has ever managed to overcome. House Reed has sworn to Winterfell for generations without ever quite integrating into the North's wider political life the way the Umbers or Karstarks have ÔÇö a small, watchful, uncanny house that keeps its own counsel and turns out, when it finally matters, to have been keeping the North's deepest secret the whole time.
Howland Reed's most consequential act happened decades before the story opens and is only ever discussed in fragments: present at the Tower of Joy alongside Eddard Stark during Robert's Rebellion's final act, he is one of a vanishingly small number of people who actually know the truth of what happened there and why Ned kept the secret he did for the rest of his life. He appears in the present story hardly at all, sending his children Jojen and Meera north in his place ÔÇö a house whose greatest contribution to the tale is a silence kept faithfully for longer than most alliances survive.
Jojen and Meera carry a different, stranger gift into Bran Stark's story: Jojen's greendreams, prophetic visions the Reeds have always possessed in some measure, guide Bran toward the training that will make him the next greenseer, while Meera's fierce, exhausted protectiveness of her brother and Bran both carries them through a journey beyond the Wall that costs the family dearly and asks for no thanks in return.
The page and the screen
The books tease a considerably larger role for Howland Reed's own youth than the show ever dramatizes ÔÇö a recurring theory among readers, seeded through hints rather than confirmation, holds that Reed witnessed or participated in a mysterious tournament incident at Harrenhal involving a masked knight defending smallfolk honor, an episode some believe connects directly to Lyanna Stark and the secret at the heart of Jon Snow's parentage. The show adapts none of this ambiguity, leaving Howland Reed's full history one of the more actively debated mysteries the published novels have not yet resolved.
