Septon Sefton

Coldmoat's fat septon: shrewd, kindly, and generous with wine and news alike. Half the tale's history of the age arrives with his dinner conversation.

The fuller tale

Coldmoat’s resident septon is, by his own evident preference, considerably more interested in a good dinner and better conversation than in the stricter duties his office might in theory demand — round, comfortable, and generous with both his wine cellar and his gossip in roughly equal measure.

That generosity turns out to be more useful to the tale than any sermon he might have given instead. Half of Sworn Sword’s context for the wider political situation — the age’s grudges, its marriages, its old rebellions — arrives at the reader’s table the same way it arrives at Dunk’s, over one of Sefton’s unhurried dinners, delivered with a gossip’s relish rather than a scholar’s dryness. He is Coldmoat’s warmest presence amid a feud otherwise defined by suspicion and old grievance.

The page and the screen

Septon Sefton has not been announced as part of the confirmed cast for the show’s forthcoming second season, though a character serving essentially as the novella’s exposition-through-hospitality device seems a likely inclusion once the full Sworn Sword casting is revealed.

In the books

The Sworn Sword. In The Red Widow — Fat, shrewd, and generous with wine and news alike.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Coldmoat: Lady Rohanne is small, freckled, red-braided, and nothing like the ogress of the tales; her castellan Ser Lucas Inchfield — the Longinch — is exactly like his. The fat Septon Sefton pours wine and news: the Great Spring Sickness's scars, Dagon Greyjoy reaving the west, Bittersteel across the sea, and Bloodraven's thousand eyes and one. (TSS 5)

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.