Guest right: bread and salt

The oldest law

Of all the customs the men of Westeros keep, none is older or more sacred than guest right. It is not written in any lord's law-book, for it is older than lords and law-books both; it is held holy by the old gods of the First Men and the new gods of the Andals alike, in a land where the two seldom agree on anything.

• Bread and salt

  When a guest eats of a host's bread and salt beneath his roof, guest right is invoked, and host and guest are bound to do each other no harm for so long as the guest remains. The sharing of food and drink is the outward sign of the bond, and the offering of bread and salt at a threshold is its most solemn form. A host who shelters and feeds a man has sworn, without words, to keep him safe; a guest who breaks bread has sworn the same of his host. Both gods watch to see the oath kept.

  SourcesA Storm of SwordsA Clash of Kings

• The weight of it

  Men who would think nothing of a lie or a broken betrothal grow uneasy at the thought of violating guest right, for the whole of the realm agrees that to do so is to damn oneself before every god there is. It is the thin thread of trust that lets an enemy be received in a rival's hall, a traveller be sheltered in a stranger's keep, and a lord treat under a roof not his own. Break it, and no hall in the Seven Kingdoms is safe again — for if bread and salt mean nothing, nothing keeps the knife from any guest's back.

  SourcesA Storm of SwordsThe World of Ice & Fire

The Rat Cook

• The cook of the Nightfort

  The oldest tale the Watch tells of guest right is that of the Rat Cook. In the days when the Nightfort still held men, a cook there took some grievance against a king who was his guest, slew the king's son, and baked the boy into a great pie of bacon and onions which he served to the father, who ate of it and praised the taste and asked for a second slice. For this the gods turned the cook into a monstrous white rat that could eat only its own young, and cursed him to hunger forever. Mark well what he was damned for: not murder, and not the horror of a father fed his son — men have done as much and worse — but for the killing of a guest beneath his own roof. That, the gods do not forgive.

  SourcesA Storm of Swords

When the law is broken

History is not without its violations, and the chronicles treat them as the blackest deeds a man can do — remembered long after the wars that occasioned them are forgotten.

• The Red Wedding

  The most infamous breach of the age was worked at the Twins, where the young King in the North and his following were received as guests, feasted on bread and salt, and then cut down at the wedding board. That the hosts had first extended guest right made the slaughter not merely a crime but a sacrilege, and the name of the house that did it is now a byword for oathbreaking wherever the tale is told.

  In the chronicleThe Red Wedding

  SourcesA Storm of Swords

  These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.

  Unveil the divergences

• Why the deed was farmed out

  The cold sense of it, for those who ordered it, was that a war might be ended in an evening rather than dragged out for years of blood and coin — a dozen slain at dinner weighed against thousands slain in the field. But the lord who wished it done could not be seen to break guest right in his own name without staining his house past cleansing, and so the infamy was left to fall upon the hosts who actually offered the bread and salt and then drew the knives. The reckoning came to them all the same: gods old and new keep a long memory, and men do not soon trust a house that has feasted its guests and murdered them.

  In the chronicleThe Red Wedding

  SourcesA Storm of Swords

  These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.

  Unveil the divergences