Whitewalls

A palace-castle of milk-white marble hard by the Gods Eye, new-built with the gold of the dairy lords — called the Milkhouse, and soon to host a wedding, a tourney, and a treason.

The fuller tale

Whitewalls, better known as the Milkhouse, is what a dairy fortune looks like once it decides to become architecture: marble walls the color of cream, a sept glowing with colored glass, and a hall raised by Lord Ambrose Butterwell with more ambition than any single lord’s reputation could comfortably support. It stands for barely a generation before the tale catches up with it, and the occasion that draws every eye to the Gods Eye shore is, on its face, entirely ordinary — Lord Butterwell’s second marriage, to a young daughter of the Freys of the Crossing, celebrated with a tourney and a dragon’s egg offered up as the champion’s prize.

Beneath the wedding feast, though, is the era’s last serious throw of the Blackfyre dice. The guest list at Whitewalls reads like a roster of men with unfinished business from Redgrass Field — Lord Gormon Peake chief among them — and among the hedge knights drawn by the joust and the egg is a mystery knight whose true face and true blood turn out to matter a great deal more than his blank shield suggested. Dunk and Egg arrive as guests, not conspirators, and find themselves, not for the last time, standing rather closer to a rebellion’s beating heart than either of them planned.

The rebellion collapses the way Bloodraven prefers his rebellions to collapse — quietly, and before a single ordered battle can be fought. By the time the plot is exposed, the dragon’s egg has vanished, the pretender is dealt with, and Aerys I’s Hand has an armed host around Whitewalls’ walls by first light, having watched the whole gathering assemble itself for his convenience. It is intelligence work as decisive as any battle, and it costs the crown almost nothing next to what a real war for the throne would have.

The crown’s sentence on the castle afterward is its own kind of message: Whitewalls is attainted and pulled down, marble wall by marble wall, until nothing remains that could ever again gather so many discontented men under one roof unnoticed. Travelers along the Gods Eye in later years know the site only as a scatter of pale, quarried stone — a dairy lord’s palace reduced, within a decade of its raising, to good building material for other men’s barns.

In the first season

The tale has not come to the Milkhouse yet — but a wedding, a tourney, and a dragon's egg are waiting there, a few years down the road.

The chronicle here

• On the kingsroad they fall in with a wedding party bound for Whitewalls: sour Lord Gormon Peake, amiable Ser Alyn Cockshaw, and the golden Ser John the Fiddler, who laughs easily, jousts brilliantly, and says he has dreamed of Dunk before. (TMK 2)
• Whitewalls, the Milkhouse: Lord Butterwell weds a Frey of the Crossing, and every lord who ever drank to the black dragon is under one marble roof. The wedding gift that stops the hall: a dragon's egg, promised to the tourney's champion. (TMK 3)
• The bedding and the after-feast: Dunk drinks with the shrewd Ser Maynard Plumm, ducks Ser Alyn's strange hostility, and hears the Fiddler talk of dreams — a dragon hatching at Whitewalls, and Dunk in white armor with a white cloak. (TMK 4)
• Fireball's son unhorses Daemon Blackfyre in one course — and the dawn shows Bloodraven's army ringed round Whitewalls. At the gates Black Tom Heddle bars Dunk's way with steel, and dies of it. (TMK 11)
• The net closes without a battle: Daemon taken, the wedding lords bled white with fines, Whitewalls forfeit — to be pulled down stone by stone. Bloodraven, a thousand eyes and one, lets a certain hedge knight and his squire ride free — with a nod that says he knows everything. (TMK 12)

Born here

Souls the story brings here

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

• Black Tom Heddle — Cut down by Dunk at the gates of Whitewalls (the books' telling)
• Ser Alyn Cockshaw — Went down a well at Whitewalls, with help (the books' telling)