House Seaworth
A new house, raised from a Flea Bottom smuggler to a knight and lord of the Rainwood for a single act of desperate loyalty to Stannis Baratheon.
The fuller tale
Davos Seaworth is the rare lord in this story who was not born one. A Flea Bottom smuggler who broke the siege of Storm's End by running onions and salted fish past a blockade that had starved the garrison to the edge of surrender, he earned his knighthood from a grateful Stannis Baratheon and his family's arms ÔÇö a black ship on a pale field, an onion for its sigil ÔÇö the same night Stannis shortened four of his fingers as penalty for a smuggler's life of crime the new knight never pretended he hadn't lived. Davos wears the mutilated hand as proudly as the title; both are honestly earned.
What makes him remarkable is not the rags-to-lordship story so much as what he does with the seat at the table it buys him: alone among Stannis's counselors, Davos says the things a low birth is supposed to disqualify a man from saying, arguing against Melisandre's fire magic on plain moral grounds when highborn advisers hold their tongues, and refusing, at real personal cost, to let a king he genuinely loves sacrifice a daughter to a god Davos has never trusted. He loses standing, position and nearly his life for that honesty more than once, and never once trades it away.
His loyalty outlives the king he served it to. After Stannis's cause collapses, Davos carries what he learned about plain speaking and low-born competence into service first at the Wall and then in King's Landing, becoming one of the few characters in the saga whose entire arc is a straight, undiverted line ÔÇö a man who started with nothing but a boat and his own good sense, and never once needed anything more than that to matter.
The page and the screen
The books send Davos on an entire diplomatic subplot the show skips almost entirely: after the Blackwater, he sails north to White Harbor to negotiate, at Stannis's direction, with the shrewd and cautious Lord Wyman Manderly for the North's support ÔÇö a lengthy sequence of political maneuvering, hidden loyalties, and one memorably grim banquet that has no screen equivalent, since the show moves Davos to the Wall and into Jon Snow's story considerably faster than the novels do.
