Lady Forlorn

A Valyrian longsword with a red stone in the pommel, carried by the Vale's most feared duellist.

The blade itself

Lady Forlorn is a longsword of ordinary length and entirely ordinary silhouette, which is part of its reputation ÔÇö from ten paces it looks like any knightÔÇÖs sword until it is drawn. The blade is dark and rippled, and in the thin cold light of the Vale it reads almost blue. There is a single red stone set in the pommel, big enough to see across a hall, and it is the only decoration on the weapon. The grip is long enough for one hand and a little more. The whole thing is balanced very far back, which makes it fast in the recovery and is why the men who have carried it tend to be duellists rather than battlefield brawlers.

It is light, it never dulls, and it will take a hand off through a mail gauntlet without noticeably slowing. As with every blade on this list, that quality cannot be reproduced: the FreeholdÔÇÖs smiths are ash, the spells went with them, and no forge in the world can do more than reheat and reshape steel that already exists. In the Vale, where the great houses are old and proud and short of ready money, the fact that House Corbray owns something no amount of Arryn or Royce gold could purchase counts for a very great deal at a council table.

The Corbrays of HeartÔÇÖs Home

House Corbray came over with the Andals, which in the Vale is worth saying out loud, and their sigil is three black ravens carrying red hearts in their claws ÔÇö an image that is either heraldic poetry or a warning depending on the century. Lady Forlorn goes with the lordship. That is the rule at HeartÔÇÖs Home: the blade passes to the head of the house, and the head of the house carries it, and the matter is not open for discussion.

They have used it, too. Corbrays turn up in the ValeÔÇÖs wars with a regularity that suggests the sword was rarely idle, and their reputation is for personal violence rather than for generalship ÔÇö a family of dangerous individuals rather than a family of commanders. The blade suits that. It is not a sword for breaking a line; it is a sword for the twenty seconds after two men have found each other in a crowd.

On the Trident

The most celebrated recent use came in the last great rebellion, at the ford, in the general disaster of that afternoon. Ser Lyn Corbray put Lady Forlorn through Prince Lewyn of Dorne ÔÇö a Kingsguard knight, one of the seven, and the man commanding the Dornish spears in the royal host. Killing a white cloak in open battle is the kind of thing a knightÔÇÖs whole subsequent life gets measured against, and Ser Lyn has never been shy about the measuring.

It made him famous and it made him dangerous, and it did not make him popular. The ValeÔÇÖs opinion of Lyn Corbray is fairly consistent: brilliant with a sword, unpleasant to be near, and not a man anyone wants in the room during a negotiation.

The awkward inheritance

Here is where the family rule broke. Lyn is a younger son. His elder brother Lyonel holds HeartÔÇÖs Home and the title, and the sword ÔÇö by every custom the Corbrays have ÔÇö should hang at LyonelÔÇÖs hip. It does not. Their father gave Lady Forlorn to Lyn on his deathbed, and the elder brother has been living with that ever since: a lord with a castle and no blade, and a landless younger brother with the familyÔÇÖs soul in his scabbard and no intention of handing it over.

In the tangled, faintly poisonous politics of the Vale, this matters more than it sounds. A man with a Valyrian sword and a reputation for using it is a faction in his own right, whatever his acreage. Lyn Corbray has been used as an instrument by cleverer men, has agreed to be used, and has almost certainly been paid for it; when the lords declarant confronted the man they blamed for the ValeÔÇÖs troubles, it was Lyn who put a hand on the hilt and turned a debate into something much closer to a killing. Whether that scene was genuine or staged for the benefit of the room is a question the Vale is still chewing on.

The unresolved thing about Lady Forlorn is therefore not where it is ÔÇö everyone knows where it is ÔÇö but who it belongs to, and what the man carrying it will do next.

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.