House Cerwyn

Castle Cerwyn's proximity to Winterfell — close enough that the two houses' fortunes have rarely diverged across the generations this chronicle can trace — made the Cerwyns among the most dependable of Stark bannermen, and among the first summoned whenever the direwolf banner called the North to arms. Their own sigil, a black battle-axe on silver, is plain enough heraldry for a house whose value to Winterfell was never in question.

Lord Medger Cerwyn marched south with Robb Stark and was wounded in the fighting on the Green Fork, surviving the battle itself only to succumb to his injuries afterward, far from home, while held under guard at Harrenhal. His son Cley, still young enough that his lordship came as an interruption to boyhood rather than its natural end, inherited Castle Cerwyn in his stead and the war along with it.

The young Lord Cerwyn brought three hundred men to the relief of Torrhen's Square when the ironborn attacked it, and later marched with Ser Rodrik Cassel toward Winterfell's own relief when Theon Greyjoy's occupation of the Starks' seat drew the North's remaining lords north in earnest. Cley did not live to see that relief completed: Bolton men struck at the winter town before Winterfell's walls, and Cley Cerwyn was killed there, his body returned to the field with an arrow through the eye — a detail this chronicle records only because the war that produced it has, by this point in its own history, made restraint feel less like tact and more like an evasion.