Red Rain

A Valyrian sword the ironborn say was taken the honest way ÔÇö by reaving.

The blade itself

Red Rain is a longsword whose steel is said to hold a red cast ÔÇö the dark rippled waves of Valyrian work shot through with something closer to rust or old wine than to the usual smoke-grey. Whether that is genuine or whether generations of Drumms have simply insisted on it to suit the name is not a question anyone in the Iron Islands is keen to test. In any light it is a dark sword. The fittings are plain. Nothing about it is pretty.

Like every blade in this collection it is lighter than its size promises, sharper than any smith could make it, and permanently so; and like every blade in this collection it cannot be replaced, because Valyria is a poisoned ruin and the art went into the sea with it. On islands as poor as these, a weapon worth more than the castle it hangs in is not a curiosity but a political fact.

Taken, they say

The Drumms hold that an ancestor ÔÇö Hilmar Drumm, remembered as the Cunning ÔÇö took Red Rain off an Andal knight by force during the long wars over the islands, and the version they prefer has him doing it while armed with almost nothing worth the name. The story exists to make a point about cleverness beating equipment, and the ironborn tell it constantly.

Whether any of it happened is impossible to say. What matters is the claim itself: in the islands, a sword taken in a fight is worth more than a sword bought with coin, and the Drumms have spent centuries making sure everyone remembers which kind theirs is. It is the same instinct that makes the ironborn call payment cowardice and theft a religion. The name of the blade suggests, at minimum, that the previous owner did not hand it over willingly.

Since then

The honest position is that not much has happened to Red Rain since. It has stayed with House Drumm of Old Wyk, passing to the head of the house ÔÇö currently the old and stubborn Dunstan Drumm ÔÇö and being produced at gatherings where the ownership of an irreplaceable weapon does the arguing for its owner. When the islands last gathered to choose a king by acclaim, the sword was in the room and everyone knew it. That is chiefly what a Valyrian blade is for in the Iron Islands: not the killing, which they can manage with axes, but the standing.

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.