The Kingswood

The royal forest south of the Blackwater, where kings hunt boar and outlaws once made the Kingswood Brotherhood famous. Robert Baratheon took his last quarry here ÔÇö or it took him.

The fuller tale

The kingswood spreads south of the Blackwater in a green sweep from the river to the marches of the stormlands ÔÇö the crown's own forest, where kings have hunted boar and stag since the Targaryens fenced it for their pleasure, and where everyone else hunts at the risk of a hand. Royal forests breed outlaws the way ponds breed frogs, and the kingswood bred the most famous band of them all: the Kingswood Brotherhood, whose chiefs and lieutenants ÔÇö a would-be robber knight, the terrifying Smiling Knight, a white fawn who ransomed squires ÔÇö ran the woods until the old Kingsguard came in force. That campaign is a hinge of the backstory: it was in the kingswood that a fifteen-year-old Jaime Lannister fought well enough for Ser Arthur Dayne to knight him on the spot, the last unstained morning of the realm's most argued-over career.

In the tale itself the wood keeps working for the plot in its old capacities ÔÇö hunting ground, ambush country, and the green route armies take when the roseroad is watched. It is in the kingswood that Robert Baratheon meets his boar, with a squire keeping the wineskin helpfully full; through its eaves that the war of the five kings maneuvers before the Blackwater; and beneath its branches that the story stages its quieter dramas of flight and pursuit, because a royal forest is the one place in the Crownlands where the crown cannot quite see. The smallfolk of its fringes could have told any of these grandees what the wood teaches: kings name forests, but forests outlast the naming.

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.