Coldmoat

A fine moated castle an easy ride from Standfast, held by the Red Widow ÔÇö Lady Rohanne Webber, four times wed and four times widowed, if the tales are to be believed.

The fuller tale

Coldmoat is everything Standfast is not ÔÇö a well-run, well-moneyed castle behind a proper moat, held by a woman the smallfolk of two baronies call the Red Widow with equal parts fear and respect. Lady Rohanne Webber has buried four husbands by the time the tales find her, and the countrysideÔÇÖs favorite explanation for her survival ÔÇö poison, mostly whispered, never proven ÔÇö says more about what an age like this expects of a woman who keeps her own accounts and wins her own disputes than it does about Rohanne herself. Her fatherÔÇÖs will is the true trap: Coldmoat passes out of her hands unless she remarries within the year, whatever she might prefer.

The drought dispute with Standfast is ColdmoatÔÇÖs business at its least flattering ÔÇö a dammed stream, a burned wood, accusations traded across the border by men who ought to know better ÔÇö and it is managed, in the end, by Lady Rohanne herself rather than by the castellan she is unwise enough to trust with too much rope. Her resolution, marrying the old enemy at her own gate rather than a stranger chosen for her, is the single cleverest stroke in either tale: it keeps Coldmoat in her hands, ends the water war for good, and turns a feud into an alliance without a drop more blood spent than had already soaked into WatÔÇÖs Wood.

ColdmoatÔÇÖs longer shadow falls well past the drought year. The line Lady Rohanne founds afterward runs, by the twisting logic of Westerosi genealogy, straight into the great houses of the age readers actually know ÔÇö proof, if the castle needed one, that a well-managed holding outlasts every lord who ever thought he could take it from a widow by force of reputation alone.

The chronicle here

• Two years on: Dunk and Egg serve old Ser Eustace Osgrey of Standfast as sworn swords through a drought that has burned the Reach brown. Riding home with the brown-shielded Ser Bennis, they find the Chequy Water dammed ÔÇö the stream stolen by the Red Widow of Coldmoat. (TSS 1)
• At the dam, Bennis opens a digger's cheek with his sword ÔÇö and Standfast braces for Coldmoat's answer. Dunk drills a handful of field hands into something like soldiers, knowing exactly how it will go against real knights. (TSS 3)
• Rather than watch smallfolk die for a stream, Dunk rides for Coldmoat to treat with the widow ÔÇö past the parched ruin of Wat's Wood, past the dam and its diggers, to a moated castle flying the spotted spider. (TSS 4)
• Coldmoat: Lady Rohanne is small, freckled, red-braided, and nothing like the ogress of the tales; her castellan Ser Lucas Inchfield ÔÇö the Longinch ÔÇö 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 wakes at Coldmoat, leeched and alive. Peace is made the old way: Ser Eustace Osgrey weds Lady Rohanne Webber, stream and honor mended in a sept. And the Red Widow pays a hedge knight's fee with a kiss ÔÇö and keeps a lock of his hair in her book of debts before Dunk and Egg take the road again. (TSS 10)

Born here

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place ÔÇö if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.