Willem Blackwood

A young lord of Raventree Hall with nine hundred years of Bracken grievances and a keen eye for which dragon settles them fastest. Kneels early, kills eagerly.

The fuller tale

A young lord of Raventree Hall, Willem Blackwood inherits not just his seat but nine hundred years of accumulated grievance against the neighboring Brackens — a rivalry so old and so thoroughly institutionalized that it functions, in the riverlands, as something close to a second religion.

The Dance offers him something the Blackwood-Bracken feud has never previously had access to: dragons. Willem kneels to Rhaenyra's cause early and enthusiastically, with a keen and entirely unsentimental eye toward which side's dragons will most efficiently settle nine centuries of scores against his hereditary enemies.

The page and the screen

Willem Blackwood exists only in the show's telling; Fire & Blood's own account of the riverlands' Blackwood-Bracken rivalry during the Dance does not single out this specific figure by name, making him one of the series' original creations built to dramatize a feud the book treats more generally.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In The Burning Mill — Kneels to Daemon for leave to settle nine hundred years of Bracken scores.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Daemon's Harrenhal dreams deepen; the riverlords test him, and Willem Blackwood's brutality against the Brackens does his recruiting. (S2·E5)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.