Jaime Lannister

Jaime Lannister took the white cloak of the Kingsguard as a young man of considerable skill and even more considerable arrogance, and spent the better part of two decades known throughout the Seven Kingdoms for a single act performed at the war's very end: cutting down the king he had sworn to protect. The realm decided, without asking his reasons, that a Kingslayer's oath meant nothing, and Jaime — proud, and perhaps unwilling to explain himself to men who had not been in that throne room — let the reputation stand rather than defend it. Held captive in the war that follows his father's schemes, he loses a hand and, with it, the one thing he had always been unambiguously good at, and finds the world newly willing to judge him on things other than a sword arm. A maester who has heard both the rumor and the fuller account finds the Kingslayer considerably harder to condemn than his epithet suggests.