Ser Glendon Ball
The Knight of the Pussywillows: son of Quentyn Ball, the Fireball who shattered armies at Redgrass Field. Poor, furious, and magnificently proud of his blood — with a lance that backs every word of it.
The fuller tale
Son of Quentyn Ball, the famous knight remembered as the Fireball for the ferocity he brought to the Blackfyre cause before dying with it at Redgrass Field, Ser Glendon Ball grows up poor, proud, and furiously determined to prove that his father’s legend is a birthright rather than merely a memory. He earns his own nickname — the Knight of the Pussywillows, for the modest, unglamorous hedge growing near his family’s meager holding — through a combination of skill and sheer bloody-mindedness that makes him one of the more dangerous lances at Lord Butterwell’s wedding tourney.
That skill draws attention Glendon can ill afford in the political climate surrounding Whitewalls. Whispers follow him that his resemblance to another famous figure of the previous Blackfyre generation is more than coincidental — that he might, in fact, carry pretender blood of his own, born on the wrong side of a blanket during the years his father rode for the black dragon. Whether the rumor is true or simply the kind of story a suspicious, plot-riddled gathering generates about any sufficiently talented stranger, Glendon himself seems as unsettled by it as anyone.
His hunger for glory, entirely genuine and entirely his own, becomes dangerous precisely because it intersects with a rebellion he wants no active part in. A poor knight fighting to restore his family’s name is one thing; a poor knight suspected of carrying royal pretender blood at a wedding secretly organized around exactly that kind of claim is quite another, and Glendon spends much of the tale caught in the gap between the two.
What becomes of the suspicion once Whitewalls’ plot collapses is left, by the novella’s own design, at least partly unresolved — a poor knight’s dangerous inheritance, tested by circumstance rather than by his own choosing, in a rebellion whose architects never bothered to ask his opinion before making him useful to their story.
The page and the screen
As a Mystery Knight character, Ser Glendon Ball has not yet appeared in any aired season of the show, and no casting has been announced for the role. His combination of chip-on-the-shoulder pride and unwilling entanglement in a political plot makes him one of that novella’s more dramatically promising figures for whenever the production reaches it.
In the books
The Mystery Knight. In The Mystery Knight — The Knight of the Pussywillows: Fireball's blood, and prouder of it than any lord. In The Black Dragon and the White — Cleared the only way that counts: with a lance, fairly, in front of everyone.
Mentioned in the chronicle
- The tourney opens with the lists full of old Blackfyre men. Ser Glendon Ball — the Knight of the Pussywillows, Fireball's angry son — unhorses all comers; Dunk falls to the craft of Ser Uthor Underleaf, the Snail, and wakes with a dented head and a ransom owed. (TMK 5)
- The dragon's egg vanishes from Lord Butterwell's bedchamber in the night. The drawbridge comes up, the castle is sealed — and Ser Glendon Ball, whose father shattered the red dragon's van at Redgrass, is seized for the theft on no evidence but his blood. (TMK 7)
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.