Tumbleton

A market town on the upper Mander, remembered for an old dance of dragons.

The fuller tale

Tumbleton is a prosperous market town on the upper Mander, close enough to the Blackwater's headwaters to be the Reach's front porch on the Crownlands ÔÇö wool, wine and river trade under a modest lord, with nothing about it to suggest it once hosted the ugliest chapter of the Dance of Dragons. It did: here the Hightower host camped in the first Dance, here two dragonseed riders sold their queen for promises, and the town paid for the bargain twice over, sacked and burned so thoroughly that 'the treasons of Tumbleton' remains a proverb among people who could not tell you the war it comes from.

The town the tale knows has long since rebuilt over its ashes, the way Mander towns do ÔÇö the river forgives faster than the histories. Armies still use the road: hosts bound between Highgarden and King's Landing water at Tumbleton as they always have, and its people practice the market town's oldest survival skill, selling to every banner at a fair markup and asking no questions the ale cannot answer. If there is a lesson in the place, the smallfolk learned it a century and a half before the story begins: dragons decide wars, towns absorb them.

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.