Standfast

A crumbling towerhouse on a hill, all that remains to the chequy lions who were once Marshals of the Northmarch and lords of all the land between Highgarden and the sea.

The fuller tale

Standfast is what remains when a great house loses a war and a crown’s favor in the same afternoon. The chequy lions of House Osgrey once styled themselves Marshals of the Northmarch and held every acre between Highgarden and the sea worth holding; two generations of attainder and bad luck later, Ser Eustace Osgrey — the last of his line with land enough to matter — commands a single crumbling towerhouse, a handful of smallfolk, and the memory of what his family used to be. His sons died at Redgrass Field fighting for the black dragon, a debt the crown never forgave and never quite forgot either.

It is to Standfast that Ser Duncan the Tall comes hunting honest work in the drought year of 211 AC, and finds instead an old man’s dwindled pride, a scorched wood, and a war over water that could ruin what little the Osgreys have left. Dunk’s service here — his first true post as a sworn sword rather than a wandering hopeful — teaches him the ugliest lesson of knighthood: that the lord you serve may be righteous, or a fool, or both, and your oath does not come with a clause excusing the difference. The dispute with neighboring Coldmoat nearly burns Standfast’s last wood and its last credibility to the ground.

It ends, as these things sometimes do in the marches, not with a siege but a wedding — Ser Eustace and the Red Widow of Coldmoat, ancient rivals, closing the account the old-fashioned way. Standfast’s towerhouse outlives its own crisis as a lesser seat gathered quietly into a greater one, the chequy lions preserved by exactly the alliance a prouder age of Osgreys would have refused to consider.

In the first season

The tale has not come here yet — but a dry summer, a dammed stream, and a chequy lion's last war are waiting for Dunk 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)
• Standfast: a towerhouse, three fields, a dry wood, and a lord with a thousand years of glories to recount. Ser Eustace tells of the Marshals of the Northmarch, of his dead sons — and of Lady Rohanne Webber, who has buried four husbands and, men whisper, made some of the graves herself. (TSS 2)
• 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)

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.