Horn Hill

Seat of House Tarly

The Tarlys' seat beneath the foothills of the Red Mountains ÔÇö the home Samwell Tarly was made to renounce at spearpoint.

The fuller tale

Horn Hill sits in the green foothills where the Reach climbs toward the Red Mountains and Dorne, a fine castle amid terraced gardens and hunting woods ÔÇö and the seat of House Tarly, whose huntsman banners and Valyrian greatsword Heartsbane announce the family business. The Tarlys are the Reach's soldiers: while the Tyrells feast and the Redwynes sail, Horn Hill breeds the realm's hardest captains, and its lord in the tale is widely held the finest soldier in Westeros, the man who handed Robert Baratheon his only defeat. That reputation is the anvil on which the seat's most famous son was hammered ÔÇö a bookish, gentle, unforgivably unwarlike heir given a choice beneath these hills that no father should offer: the black of the Wall, or a hunting accident with his name on it.

The show brings Samwell back through the gates in the story's late years, a Sweetrobe of the Citadel with a wildling woman and a baby at his side, and stages the visit as the dinner from hell ÔÇö his mother's warmth, his father's contempt served course by course, and a theft on the way out that is also a verdict: Heartsbane leaves Horn Hill under the arm of the son judged unfit to hold it. The sword goes on to do exactly what a Tarly blade should, opening dead things in the Long Night while the men who kept the name die in a war of thrones ÔÇö burned for a stubbornness their house would have called honor. The estate ends the tale as books' readers suspect it must eventually: in the hands of the soft son, whose weapons were the only ones that turned out to matter.

The page and the screen

The books never visit Horn Hill; it exists entirely in Samwell's memories, which are worse than the show's version, not better ÔÇö a childhood of chains in the yard and cruelties dressed as cures, sketched in asides that make Randyll Tarly one of the most chilling fathers in the story without a single scene at home. The show's dinner, Gilly's quiet defiance, and the taking of Heartsbane are all screen inventions, as are the Tarlys' deaths by dragonfire; in the books Randyll is very much alive, holding Maidenpool for the crown and dispensing his iron justice, with Dickon at his side and the family sword still over his hearth.