House Corbray

House Corbray's decline into genteel poverty is old enough, and unremarkable enough by Vale standards, that the Citadel's sources decline to date it with any precision — a slow matter of dwindling harvests and unfavorable marriages rather than any single catastrophe worth a chapter of its own. What the family kept through it all was Lady Forlorn, a longsword of Valyrian steel whose provenance even Heart's Home's own household no longer claims to remember with confidence. A poor house holding a blade richer than most kingdoms could buy is, this chronicle notes, not the safest position a family can occupy; that House Corbray has kept both the sword and its head attached to its shoulders across so many generations of wealthier neighbors' envy says something for its swordsmanship, if little else.

Whatever else may be said of Ser Lyn Corbray, no one who saw him fight at the Trident called him a coward. Taking up his family's Valyrian steel in Robert Baratheon's cause, Lyn led a charge into the Dornish lines that the wounded Prince Lewyn Martell of the Kingsguard did not survive — a single stroke that did more for House Corbray's martial reputation than a century of Heart's Home's quiet poverty had managed to erase. His elder brother Lyonel rewarded the feat, on his own death some years after, by passing Lady Forlorn to Lyn rather than to any son of the main line — an inheritance that speaks more plainly than any words this chronicle could offer about which brother Heart's Home judged worthy of the blade.

Age has not made Ser Lyn more patient with men he holds in contempt. Riding among the Lords Declarant who confronted Petyr Baelish and the boy Lord Robert Arryn over the new regent's conduct of the Vale's affairs, Lyn grew impatient enough with the parley's slow diplomacy to draw Lady Forlorn in the Eyrie's own hall — a breach of hospitality his fellow lords were obliged to talk him down from before it became a second Red Wedding in miniature. That the sword stayed sheathed that day owes less to Lyn's restraint, by most accounts, than to cooler heads standing nearer the door. Whether Heart's Home's blade will draw blood again before the Vale's present troubles resolve is not a question this chronicle, writing while those troubles remain open, can yet answer.