Oathkeeper

One of the two blades reforged from Ice ÔÇö and given away almost at once to keep a promise.

The blade itself

Oathkeeper is a longsword, single-handed but with grip enough for two fingers of the off hand, and it is not the colour Valyrian steel is supposed to be. The reforging left something in it: the dark ripples are shot through with red, so that the blade reads black in shadow and rust-coloured in the sun, and the waves run in tighter, more agitated bands than the ones in the greatsword it came from. Smiths will tell you this is a matter of heat and folding. Anybody who has held it tends to prefer the other explanation. The hilt is gold, worked as a lionÔÇÖs head with red stones for eyes ÔÇö a Lannister object made from a Stark one, which was very much the intention.

It is light, quick, and pitiless with an edge, and it will go through mail without the jarring shock a good castle-forged sword gives you. Valyrian steel cannot be made any more; there is exactly as much of it in the world as there was the day the Freehold burned, and every blade that gets cut down into smaller blades is a small permanent loss. Oathkeeper is the second half of that arithmetic ÔÇö a new sword that is not new at all, only a rearrangement of something older that no longer exists.

Given away at once

Jaime Lannister was handed one of the two swords cut from the Stark greatsword and got rid of it within days. He gave it to Brienne of Tarth, with instructions to use it to find the daughters of the man it had been taken from and to keep them safe, and she named it Oathkeeper on the spot ÔÇö a rebuke and a promise in one word, aimed squarely at the man handing it over. It is the single clearest sign in the books that the Kingslayer is trying, extremely late, to become something else.

There is a practical dimension people tend to skip past. Brienne is a woman of no standing riding alone through a country full of broken men. Jaime also gave her armour, a horse, a squire and a letter with his brotherÔÇÖs seal on it, and the sword was the least useful of those things right up until the moment it was the only useful one. A Valyrian blade is also a passport: men who would happily rob a big woman in plate think twice about a big woman in plate carrying something worth a castle.

What it is for

Almost no sword in this collection was made for a stated purpose. Ice was for sentences, Blackfyre was for kings, most of the rest are simply what a family happens to own. Oathkeeper is the exception: it was given, named and carried for one specific job, and the whole of its short history is the pursuit of two girls across a ruined countryside by someone with no authority to do it and no reason to give up.

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.