Wat's Wood

A parched old wood between Standfast and Coldmoat, tinder-dry in the great drought — Ser Eustace's pride, and the first thing the summer takes from him.

The fuller tale

Wat’s Wood is a strip of old timber on the disputed border between Standfast and Coldmoat, named for some long-dead woodward nobody remembers past the name, and it is the first casualty of the great drought that opens the Sworn Sword. Ser Eustace Osgrey loves the wood the particular way ruined men love the last thing they still own outright — proprietarily, past reason — and when the stream that keeps it green runs low under Coldmoat’s dam, the wood dries to tinder within a season, ready to burn at the first spark of the wider quarrel. Burn it eventually does, and the fire does more to force a reckoning between the two castles than either lord’s pride ever managed on its own. A parched wood between two proud houses turns out to be exactly the kind of small, flammable thing that starts a war — or, in this case, forces an end to one.

The chronicle here

• 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)
• Egg's counsel and a night's hard thinking. Before Dunk can settle his service, the horizon settles it for him: Wat's Wood burns in the dark, the drought's tinder gone up at a stroke — and Ser Eustace names the widow arsonist. (TSS 7)

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.