Stoney Sept

A market town of the southern riverlands, where Dunk and Egg watch the hanging of the Wyl brigands before the road takes them north toward Whitewalls.

The fuller tale

Stoney Sept is an unglamorous market town of the southern riverlands, known well enough for its bells that travelers use the sound to mark the hour without needing to ask, and known to Dunk and Egg specifically for a grimmer piece of business witnessed on their road north to Whitewalls — the hanging of Wyl brigands, marcher outlaws whose family seat lies far south in the Dornish borderlands, executed here for crimes committed well outside their own country. It is the kind of ordinary roadside justice that barely rates a paragraph in most tellings, and its purpose in the Mystery Knight is exactly that ordinariness: a plain reminder, before the story turns toward a conspiracy of lords and princes, of the coarser justice meted out to men without titles to protect them.

The town itself has no larger role to play in this era — its later fame in the wars still generations off, unknown and unknowable to anyone drinking in its inns in 212 AC — and that is rather the point of including it at all. Stoney Sept is where the realm’s low business gets conducted while its high business gathers itself at Whitewalls a few days’ ride further on, and Dunk and Egg pass through it as travelers rather than participants, watching the rope do its work before moving on toward the rope that very nearly waits for them too.

In the first season

The old man and the boy passed this way many a season. Every inn between here and Ashford knows the tall lad who was Ser Arlan's squire.

The chronicle here

• Near Stoney Sept, Dunk and Egg pass gibbets heavy with hanged men — Lord Wyl's brigands, taken by the king's men. The realm is uneasy: Bloodraven hunts traitors, and rumor says the black dragon stirs. Dunk turns their road north, meaning to winter at Winterfell. (TMK 1)

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.