Ser Lucas Inchfield
The Longinch: castellan of Coldmoat, tall, humorless, and hungry for the hand of the lady he serves — certain a hedge knight ranks somewhere below his boot.
The fuller tale
Called the Longinch by nearly everyone who knows him, Ser Lucas Inchfield serves as castellan of Coldmoat under Lady Rohanne Webber — tall, humorless, and entirely convinced that his years of loyal service have earned him a claim on his lady’s hand that a passing hedge knight could never hope to match, let alone threaten.
That certainty curdles quickly into open contempt once Dunk arrives at Coldmoat and Rohanne’s attention proves harder to monopolize than the Longinch had assumed. He treats Dunk’s presence as an insult to the natural order of things — a hedge knight, in his estimation, ranking somewhere well below his own boot — and the condescension only sharpens as the dispute between Coldmoat and Standfast escalates.
The feud over the dammed Chequy Water gives his resentment a battlefield to play out on, and when the dispute reaches the point of trial by combat, the Longinch’s confidence in his own superior swordsmanship is not, in itself, unfounded — he is, by most accounts, the better technical swordsman of the two men who eventually face each other in the stream itself.
The page and the screen
Ser Lucas Inchfield’s casting has not been separately announced alongside the season’s headline names, though the character’s role as an antagonist within The Sworn Sword makes him a near-certainty for the show’s second season, which adapts that novella but has not yet aired as of this writing.
In the books
The Sworn Sword. In The Red Widow — The Longinch: tall, cold, and certain a hedge knight ranks below his boot.
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)
- Dunk names the quarrel his own: trial by combat, him against the Longinch, in the middle of the disputed stream. Steel in the water; Dunk half-drowned; and at the end Ser Lucas Inchfield floats and Ser Duncan the Tall — barely — does not. (TSS 9)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The books: Drowned in the Chequy Water in trial by combat (TSS, ch. 9)
The Longinch met Dunk in trial by combat in the middle of the Chequy Water, the stream his lady dammed. He was the better swordsman and it did not save him: half-drowned and bleeding, Dunk bore him under and put a dagger through him. The gods' verdict floated downstream.
The trial by combat that settles Coldmoat’s dispute is fought, fittingly, in the middle of the very stream Rohanne dammed — the Longinch meeting Dunk in water rather than on dry ground, a swordsman’s skill working against him once the footing turns treacherous. He proves, as expected, the more technically accomplished fighter, and it does not save him: half-drowned and bleeding in the current, he is borne under by Dunk’s greater size and finished with a dagger. The gods’ verdict, such as it is, drifts downstream with him.