Heartsbane

Five hundred years in one family ÔÇö taken by the son his father called useless.

The blade itself

Heartsbane is a greatsword, though a shorter and more practical one than the monstrous ceremonial blades of the North ÔÇö it is meant to be swung in a battle, by a man in plate, at other men in plate, and the Tarlys have swung it in a great many. The steel is dark and rippled with the usual smoky waves, and it has the peculiar Valyrian quality of looking wet. There is a wolfÔÇÖs-tooth curve to the last handÔÇÖs-breadth of the edge. The grip is long and plainly bound; the crossguard is heavy, square and scarred, which is unusual, because the guard is ordinary steel and the ordinary steel is the only part of the weapon that can be damaged.

It is astonishingly light for its length. A fat, unathletic boy can carry it at a walk for weeks without his shoulder giving out, which is not a hypothetical. Nothing needs doing to it. It has never been sharpened by any Tarly and it never will be, because there is no whetstone in Westeros that would improve it and no smith who could repair it if he ruined it. The making of Valyrian steel is lost ÔÇö burned out of the world with the Freehold ÔÇö and the handful of surviving masters in Qohor can only reheat and reshape what already exists, at prices that make lords hesitate. A house that has held such a blade for five hundred years has, in a real sense, held the only truly irreplaceable thing it owns.

Five hundred years at Horn Hill

House Tarly have been the sword-hand of the Reach for as long as the Reach has had one ÔÇö bannermen to the Tyrells, and by common agreement among people who study these things the best soldiers in that part of the world. Heartsbane has been theirs for roughly five centuries. Where it came from before that, nobody says. The Tarlys have not needed to explain it; the sword and the reputation have reinforced each other for so long that the two are difficult to separate, and a Tarly host arriving on a field with that blade at the front of it has historically changed how the other side thinks about its afternoon.

Randyll Tarly, the head of the house in living memory, is the most feared field commander in the Seven Kingdoms and a genuinely unpleasant man. He carried Heartsbane in the last war and did the only real damage the rebels took in the field. He is precise, humourless, and entirely without the sentimentality that the swordÔÇÖs history might lead you to expect from him.

The son who would not do

His heir was Samwell ÔÇö soft, bookish, frightened of blood, and the exact opposite of everything Randyll had planned to hand the sword to. What followed was one of the ugliest pieces of parenting in a story crowded with competition. The boy was starved of comfort, dressed in mail and made to sleep in it, marched, drilled, humiliated in front of the household and finally taken hunting and told, in a level voice, that he could take the black or be found dead in the woods with an arrow through him. The family sword was named explicitly in that conversation. It was the point of it: Randyll would not have Heartsbane pass to a coward, and had a second son who suited better.

So Sam went to the Wall and Horn Hill got the heir it wanted. That should have been the end of the Tarly bladeÔÇÖs involvement in anything interesting.

Taken

On the screen it does not end there. Sam goes home years later, on his way to Oldtown, eats a spectacularly awful dinner with his father, and leaves in the small hours with the greatsword under his arm ÔÇö not stolen in any way he could argue in a court, simply taken off the wall on his way out by the son who was told he was unworthy of it. He carries it to Oldtown and then, eventually, north, which is the only place in Westeros where the thing was ever going to be genuinely needed.

On the page the sword is still at Horn Hill and Sam is still at sea, and RandyllÔÇÖs threat about the inheritance is still just a threat. Whether the two accounts converge is one of the smaller open questions in the story, though it is hard to think of a better use for a five-hundred-year-old dragonsteel greatsword than putting it in the hands of the one man in Westeros who read everything the maesters wrote about what the swords were actually for.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

The chronicle records no ending here ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.