Patchface's Rhymes

A tattooed fool who nearly drowned as a boy, and now sings things that keep coming true.

The prophecy

The boy was a gift. Lord Steffon Baratheon went to Volantis to find a bride for the crown prince and came home with a clever young jester he had bought for his sons ÔÇö a boy who juggled, riddled and sang, and who the household were told would be the making of many a dull evening at StormÔÇÖs End. The ship went down in sight of the castle, in a storm, with the whole town watching from the walls and the lordÔÇÖs two elder sons watching from the shore. The lord and his lady drowned. Two days later the fool washed up on the rocks, alive, having been in the water long enough that everyone had stopped looking.

He was not the same afterwards. Whatever he had been in Volantis ÔÇö quick, funny, valuable ÔÇö was gone, and what came out of the sea was a simple, damaged creature who could not hold a thought and could not stop talking. The maester at StormÔÇÖs End tattooed his face in red and green squares so that nobody would mistake what he was, and he was fitted with a hat of antlers and bells and given the name Patchface. He attached himself in time to the household on Dragonstone, and above all to the small, scarred girl of that house, who is the only person in either of her parentsÔÇÖ castles who is kind to him and the only one he seems to love.

What he does now is caper and sing, and the songs are the reason he is in this collection. They are nonsense in shape ÔÇö jingles with a refrain, sung sideways into a room where nobody is listening ÔÇö and they are not nonsense in content. He sings of the sea coming inland: fish in the halls, water in the corridors, the drowned holding court in castles that stand a long way from any coast. He sings of shadows that come to dance, and of shadows that come to stay. He sings about crows and about their black wings, about a dead man singing a song, about heads under the water still speaking, and about a wedding where the guests do not fare well.

None of it is delivered as prophecy and he claims nothing. He does not say a thing will happen; he says he knows, and then he says it again, and then he goes back to his bells. Nobody at either court treats him as anything but a broken toy. He is the only figure in this collection whose warnings are given for free, in public, to people who have no idea they are being warned.

Where it comes from

There is no tradition behind Patchface, which is precisely what makes him disturbing. He is not a priest of anything, he has no god, no order, no art and no training. He was a foreign entertainer who spent an unsurvivable length of time in cold water and came back with something he did not go in with. The books have never explained the mechanism and have never had a character usefully speculate about it either, which for a series this fond of maesters and their theories is conspicuous.

What the story does supply is context. Drowning and returning is not a neutral event in this world. The ironborn make a sacrament of it: their priests hold a man under until he stops and then work to bring him back, and the ones who come back are held to belong to their god afterwards. Their faith concerns a deity in the deep, halls under the sea, and the dead who feast there ÔÇö imagery that overlaps to an uncomfortable degree with what a Volantene boy who never went to the Iron Islands sings about at a dinner table in the narrow sea.

Beyond the ironborn there is the wider pattern of the books: coming back from death costs something, and what returns is never quite what went in. A man restored by a red priest loses a piece of himself with each return. The dead who walk beyond the Wall are not the people whose bodies they wear. Set in that company, a boy who was under the water for two days and came out unable to think clearly, but able to sing the future, looks less like an anomaly and more like an instance of a rule the story has stated repeatedly.

The one thing that can be said about his frequency is that nobody has ever counted his hits, because nobody in the story is listening. He has been singing at Dragonstone for years. No maester has recorded a line of it, no priestess has read a flame about him, and the only person who repeats his songs is a little girl who thinks they are songs.

How it has been read

The first question is whether he is a prophet at all, and there is an honest case that he is not. Fools are licensed to say strange things and have been putting uncomfortable truths in front of lords for as long as there have been lords; a damaged man with a compulsive habit of rhyming about water and death will, over enough years and enough verses, appear to have predicted a great deal by pure arithmetic. Nothing he says is ever specific. There are no names, no dates and no places, and every one of his images is drawn from the vocabulary of drowning that a drowned man would be expected to be stuck on.

The case on the other side is that the images are too particular and too foreign to his experience. Fish swimming through a great hall is not a general nightmare about the sea; it is a very specific picture, and it recurs. A boy who has never been north of the narrow sea has no reason to sing about a castle in the snow filling with water. Readers who take him seriously argue that he is not predicting events so much as reporting them from somewhere the ordinary sequence of time does not apply ÔÇö that the songs are transcripts rather than guesses.

The most interesting reading treats him as an instrument rather than a seer. On this view something in the deep found a small unguarded mind that had stopped and started again, and now uses it to say things aloud. That would account for the flatness of the delivery, the lack of intent, the refusal to explain, and the fact that the man himself takes no interest whatsoever in what he has just said. It would also mean the warnings are not being given to help anybody, which fits the tone of them: his songs are not cautionary. They are gleeful.

The genuinely contested images are the ones about the sea inland. Read literally they are a flood, and there are at least two ways the story could produce one. Read figuratively they are an invasion, and the arms of the people most likely to invade are a kraken. Read as the ironborn faith would read them, they are about a hall under the water where the dead sit down to eat, which is neither a flood nor an invasion but something worse and less negotiable. The books have not indicated which reading they intend, and the songs are still being sung.

Two things can be said without dispute. His verses have repeatedly described things that later occurred, and no character in either book or show has ever noticed. He is, in the most exact sense, a warning system nobody has installed.

The problem with prophecy

Patchface is the collectionÔÇÖs hardest case, because he isolates the variable everyone else confuses. The Ghost of High Heart is ignored because she is an outlawÔÇÖs contact; Melisandre is disbelieved because she has been wrong; Quaithe is dismissed because she wears a mask. Patchface is ignored for a reason none of them share: he is a fool, and the whole apparatus of a noble household exists to make sure that what a fool says does not count.

This is not stupidity on the part of the people around him. It is a category error built into the culture. Information arrives in a form the court has already decided is not information, and so it passes through the room without touching anything. It would not have mattered if his songs came with dates attached. The lords of Dragonstone would still have gone back to their soup.

There is a colder possibility that the books leave open. If something is speaking through him, then it is not warning anybody; it is enjoying itself. A prophecy that arrives set to a tune, with bells, and is designed never to be believed, is not a mercy. It is a taunt delivered in advance, and the reason readers find him genuinely frightening rather than sad is that he seems to be having a marvellous time.

How it has played out ÔÇö open at your peril

The shadows that came to dance

He sang about shadows coming to dance, and about a shadow that came to stay, before either happened. At StormÔÇÖs End and again on the Blackwater, Melisandre produced something out of darkness with a manÔÇÖs face, and it went through stone walls and sworn guards to reach the men it was sent for. Renly Baratheon was killed by one of them in his own tent, in armour, in front of two people who could not be believed afterwards; the castellan of StormÔÇÖs End was killed by the second.

The show staged both shadows and kept the second one memorable, but Patchface does not exist on screen at all. The character, the songs and the entire thread were cut from the adaptation, so on television there is nobody who sang about the shadows first.

Water in the halls

The image he returns to most often is the sea coming inland ÔÇö fish swimming where people should be walking, halls filling, and the drowned holding a court of their own. Nothing in the books has yet cashed this in full. What has happened is that the ironborn, whose god lives under the water and whose priests drown men and revive them, have taken the northÔÇÖs coast and its castles, and that one of their captains has sailed east with a horn and a plan while another has taken the seastone chair with intentions the books have deliberately kept out of view.

This is an open thread and it should be labelled as one. Readers have proposed a literal drowning of a castle, an ironborn conquest, and a rising of the drowned dead; the published books support all three as possibilities and confirm none of them. It is one of the largest unspent prophecies in the series.

The wedding and the crow

Several of his verses concern a feast that goes wrong, with a fool at it and a fish in it, and a great deal of blood. The Red Wedding accounts for the fish ÔÇö the Tullys were the hostsÔÇÖ nominal overlords and the brideÔÇÖs family ÔÇö and for a fool: the only man to get Sansa Stark out of the other poisoned wedding was a drunk knight who had been made to caper for the court in a mockery of a jester.

His crow songs are harder to place and have not been resolved. Black wings and black words is an ordinary Westerosi expression for bad news arriving by raven, and it does arrive; but the NightÔÇÖs Watch are also crows, and their story on the page ends in the yard at Castle Black with knives. He also sings of a dead man who sings, and the books have since produced more than one person who came back from death and did not come back whole.

The girl who listens

The relationship that matters is the one with Shireen Baratheon, the disfigured daughter of the house, who taught him to read after a fashion, who repeats his rhymes, and who is the only person in the story who treats him as a person. She is also the only one who could have carried a warning to anyone with power, and nobody would have listened to her either.

On screen there is no Patchface, and Shireen was burned alive on her fatherÔÇÖs orders outside Winterfell to buy a change in the weather. In the books she is alive at the Wall, in the care of the queenÔÇÖs people, with the fool still capering beside her and still singing about the water. What that means for her, or for him, the published books have not said ÔÇö and readers should be wary of assuming the page will go where the screen went.