Orphan-Maker

A Valyrian sword with an unusually honest name.

The blade itself

Orphan-Maker is a Valyrian longsword, dark and rippled, light and permanently keen, of no recorded ornament. It belongs to House Roxton of the Ring, a middling house of the Reach whose fortunes have never been great but whose blade puts them in company far above their acreage. There is a certain plainness to the whole object that suits the name.

And the name is the point. Most Valyrian swords are called something grand or something mournful ÔÇö the great houses like a blade that sounds like an epic. This one is called what a sword actually does to the families of the men it is used on, and declines to dress the transaction up in chivalry. As with all of them, it cannot be remade: the art was lost with the Freehold and no living smith can do more than reheat and reshape what exists, which is why a modest house that owns one never sells it, whatever the year has been like.

Ser Jon Roxton

The bladeÔÇÖs one real appearance in the histories is during the Dance of the Dragons, in the hands of Ser Jon Roxton ÔÇö called Bold Jon, a knight whose reputation for lethality was matched only by his reputation for arrogance and for a private life that made even a war-torn court raise its eyebrows. He fought for the greens, he fought well, and he was the sort of man the histories describe with a faint air of relief at not having had to share a table with him.

He used Orphan-Maker as it was named to be used. That is nearly the whole of the record; the Roxtons are not a house the maesters spent much ink on before or after, and the sword vanishes back into obscurity once that war is over.

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

Bold Jon Roxton met his end at Tumbleton in circumstances the chroniclers clearly enjoyed writing down ÔÇö dragged from his feet in ground churned to mud, killed with his own sword still in his hand and unable to get up. Orphan-Maker is not reported anywhere afterwards with any confidence. A sword that goes missing in a sacked town during a civil war is rarely seen again, and no later Roxton is recorded carrying it.