Ser Maynard Plumm

A lean, mocking knight of the Fiddler's wedding party who sees through hoods, walls, and plots, and always happens to be standing exactly where he is needed. Almost as if somebody were watching through him.

The fuller tale

Lean, dry-humored, and unnervingly perceptive, Ser Maynard Plumm arrives among the guests at Lord Butterwell’s wedding with the loose, unplaceable manner of a man who belongs everywhere and nowhere in particular — a mystery knight in temperament even before the novella gives him anything especially mysterious to do.

What sets him apart from the wedding’s other guests is a habit of being exactly where he is needed, exactly when he is needed there, with a consistency that starts to look considerably less like coincidence the longer the tale goes on. He appears to see through hoods, through walls, through the careful deceptions other characters are laboring to maintain, offering dry observations that suggest he already knows more about Whitewalls’ hidden currents than anyone has told him.

That uncanny quality culminates in his intervention at the well, arriving in time to turn Ser Alyn Cockshaw’s ambush against its own author — a rescue too precisely timed to read as luck, and pointed enough that readers have long speculated Maynard Plumm is not entirely who, or what, he appears to be, his watchfulness perhaps belonging to interests considerably larger than one wedding guest’s personal business.

Whether that speculation is the novella’s intention or simply its most tempting invitation to guess, Plumm functions, within the tale itself, as proof that nothing at Whitewalls goes entirely unseen — a quiet, walking reminder that some of the wedding’s guests are watching far more closely than they are being watched.

The page and the screen

Ser Maynard Plumm’s role in The Mystery Knight has not yet reached the screen, no season having adapted that novella as of this writing, and no casting has been announced. The character’s carefully cultivated ambiguity — is he simply clever, or something considerably stranger — would make for one of the more interesting casting puzzles the production eventually has to solve.

In the books

The Mystery Knight. In The Mystery Knight — Sees through hoods, walls, and plots — almost as if he had a thousand eyes.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The bedding and the after-feast: Dunk drinks with the shrewd Ser Maynard Plumm, ducks Ser Alyn's strange hostility, and hears the Fiddler talk of dreams — a dragon hatching at Whitewalls, and Dunk in white armor with a white cloak. (TMK 4)
• Ser Alyn Cockshaw draws Dunk aside to a quiet well — and pays bravos' wages for it. Ser Maynard Plumm proves quicker: Alyn goes down the well, and Plumm shows Dunk that he knows exactly who Egg is, and minds not at all. (TMK 8)

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.