Stoney Sept

The town where Robert hid before the Battle of the Bells in his rebellion — its ringing saved his life.

The fuller tale

Stoney Sept is the largest town in the riverlands, walled, prosperous, and famous for a single hour of noise. During Robert’s Rebellion the wounded fugitive Robert Baratheon was hidden here — moved house to house ahead of the crown’s searchers — and when Jon Connington’s royal army came hunting him door to door, the town’s bells began to ring and did not stop. The Battle of the Bells was fought in alleys to that clangor, the rebellion survived its most dangerous day, and the man who failed to burn the town looking for the stag lost his lordship for the mercy. Kings are made in fields, the town would tell you, but this one was saved in a bell tower.

In the war of the story’s day, Stoney Sept belongs to the Brotherhood without Banners’ country — the town’s hollow-hill hinterland shelters the outlaw court where a dead man passes sentences by firelight, and its people feed the war’s orphans at the sept’s door. The bells that once saved a king now toll mostly for the smallfolk’s dead, which is the riverlands’ whole war in one sound.

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.