Raymun Fossoway

A squire of Cider Hall with a better heart than his knighted cousin — the sort of man who is embarrassed by other men's dishonor. The green-apple Fossoways begin with him.

The fuller tale

A squire of Cider Hall attending Ashford Meadow’s tourney, Raymun Fossoway distinguishes himself from most of the assembled young hopefuls by a quality that turns out to be rarer at a royal tournament than skill with a lance: a plain sense of decency, uncomfortable with dishonor even when it comes from his own family. He watches his knighted cousin Ser Steffon’s ambitions with a discomfort he does not entirely hide.

That discomfort becomes meaningful once the trial of seven and its surrounding controversies make clear exactly how far some of the tourney’s more ambitious knights are willing to bend their loyalties for advancement. Raymun’s steadier instincts, however unremarkable they might look beside princes and champions, mark him as one of the tale’s quieter moral anchors — a young man whose modest ambitions never quite crowd out his conscience.

His significance to House Fossoway’s later history outstrips his modest role in the tale itself. He becomes, in the tellings that follow, the founding figure of what heralds and gossips alike come to call the green-apple Fossoways — a cadet branch distinguished, ever after, from the family’s senior line by a different color of fruit on an otherwise identical shield, the whole split traced back to a squire’s decision to be a better man than his cousin.

Generations later, green-apple Fossoways still turn up in the chronicles of the wider Seven Kingdoms — minor lords and knights of the Reach whose shields quietly commemorate a squire’s choice, made at a country tourney, to stand apart from a cousin’s ambition rather than share in it.

The page and the screen

Shaun Thomas plays Raymun Fossoway in the show’s first season, part of the tournament’s supporting cast of young knights and squires whose smaller storylines flesh out Ashford Meadow beyond its royal principals — a faithful, if necessarily compressed, rendering of a character whose page presence is itself fairly brief.

In the show, season by season

Season One. In A Trial of Seven — Knighted at dawn by the Laughing Storm — the first green-apple Fossoway. In The Judgment of the Gods — Green apple against red: he settles it with his cousin directly.

In the books

The Hedge Knight. In The Trial of Seven — Knighted at dawn; settles the family's honor against his own cousin.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Raymun Fossoway shames his cousin Steffon into promising help; Steffon sells his promise to Aerion instead by morning — and Raymun is knighted on the spot to take his place. (S1·E4)

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.