The Honeywine

The gentle river that flows through Oldtown beneath the Citadel's bridges, its valley famed for orchards, hives and the honey-colored light the maesters write poems about when they should be studying.

The fuller tale

The Honeywine is the modest river with the sweetest name in Westeros, flowing down out of the northern hills past Honeyholt's hives and Uplands' vineyards to reach the sea through the middle of Oldtown, where it becomes the loveliest urban water in the realm ÔÇö spanned by stone bridges, walled with guildhalls and sept-fronts, reflecting the Hightower's beacon by night and the Citadel's domes by day. The maesters cross it daily on their way between lectures; the acolytes fish it, against the rules; and the honey-colored light of its valley has been praised in more bad Oldtown verse than any other feature of the Reach, the river being conveniently easier to rhyme than the Citadel.

It has run red exactly when history required. In the Dance of Dragons the Honeywine gave its name to a battle upriver, where an Oldtown host caught between converging enemies was saved by a boy prince on a blue dragon ÔÇö the day that made the youngest of the era's dragonriders a legend called the Daring. The tale's present asks quieter service of it: the river carries Oldtown's trade, the Citadel's visitors, and, in the books' late chapters, a swelling traffic of refugees and rumors from the coasts the ironborn are burning, all funneling toward the city at the river's mouth. The Honeywine has watered the realm's memory-keepers for a thousand years; it is about to find out, readers suspect, what the price of that is.

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

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