House Darry

Darry's arms — a plowman and his ox, working beneath an open sun — mark it as a house that never pretended to more than what it was: a small holding on the upper Trident, loyal to Riverrun, prosperous enough in fat years and unremarkable in lean ones. The Citadel's records find little to distinguish House Darry from a dozen similar minor riverlands lines across the centuries before this chronicle's own — which is, in its quiet way, the most any small house can generally hope a maester will say of it.

Ser Raymun Darry — never, this chronicle notes with the same precision the sources themselves insist on, formally styled Lord of Darry in any account, though everyone who dealt with him plainly treated him as one — is remembered chiefly for sheltering Tyrion Lannister under his own roof early in the war's opening moves, guest right observed with a scrupulousness that did his household no favors when the fighting reached his gates in earnest. Raymun did not survive the war his hospitality could not keep at bay; nor did his kinsman Lyman, both killed, by the more careful accounts this chronicle trusts, at Gregor Clegane's hand rather than at his brother Sandor's, whatever a wandering singer's later verses about the Hound's crimes chose to claim. Castle Darry, its lords dead and its holding depopulated by the fighting that killed them, passed out of the family's keeping within the same year.

King Joffrey Baratheon rewarded Ser Lancel Lannister's service at the Battle of the Blackwater with the lands, castle, and rights of the extinguished House Darry outright — a grant that made a Lannister cousin lord of a holding the plowman's sigil had marked for three centuries, and gave rise, however briefly, to something the maesters have taken to calling House Lannister of Darry rather than any restoration of the line it replaced. Lancel did not wear the title long: grievously wounded in the same battle that won it for him, and drawn increasingly toward the austere new zeal sweeping King's Landing's smallfolk, he renounced both his lordship and his unconsummated marriage to take vows among the Warrior's Sons — leaving Darry's lands, once again, without a settled lord this chronicle can name with confidence.