Coldmoat

A fine moated castle an easy ride from Standfast, held by the Red Widow — 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 — 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 countryside’s favorite explanation for her survival — poison, mostly whispered, never proven — 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 father’s 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 Coldmoat’s business at its least flattering — a dammed stream, a burned wood, accusations traded across the border by men who ought to know better — 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 Wat’s Wood.

Coldmoat’s 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 — 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.

In the first season

The tale has not come here yet — but the Red Widow's moat, her spotted spider banners, and a certain trial by combat wait beyond the season's end.

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 — the stream stolen by the Red Widow of Coldmoat. (TSS 1)
• At the dam, Bennis opens a digger's cheek with his sword — 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 — 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 — 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 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 — 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 — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

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