“"Righteous in Wrath."”
The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Hornwood — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
A steady bannerman house that lost its lord, its heir, and finally its lady inside a single war — House Hornwood's line does not merely end with this chronicle's own present century; it is extinguished by it, in a manner the North has not forgiven and this chronicle does not intend to soften.
Hornwood's lords held their lands at the northern edge of the wolfswood as steady, unremarkable bannermen of Winterfell for generations — the brown bull moose of their arms a plain enough sigil for a house whose history, until very recently, gave the Citadel little cause to write more than a paragraph about it.
Lord Halys Hornwood marched south with Robb Stark's host in the war's opening campaigns and died in the fighting on the Green Fork; his son and heir, Daryn, fell in the same campaign's earlier engagement at the Whispering Wood. Between one battle and its sequel, House Hornwood lost both its lord and the son meant to succeed him, leaving Lady Donella Hornwood a widow with no living child and a considerable stretch of northern land that every ambitious lord within reach of Winterfell suddenly found reason to remember he had a candidate for.
In the chronicle
The succession dispute that followed occupied Winterfell's own harvest feast at some length — Wyman Manderly proposing himself or his son, Leobald Tallhart proposing his younger son Beren take up the Hornwood name, Bran Stark himself weighing the claim of Larence Snow, Halys's own bastard son, against every trueborn contender. The debate, this chronicle notes with the bitterness the outcome deserves, settled nothing before events settled it far worse.
Lady Donella was seized on the road home by men in Bolton service and married, under duress this chronicle has no interest in dressing up as anything gentler, to Ramsay Snow — a match that made him her heir by her own hand before her household discovered, too late to matter, that she had been locked in a tower of her own hall and left to starve. House Hornwood's lands passed by that marriage to a Bolton bastard, and its name, as a line of living Hornwoods, effectively ended with her.
The lords, ladies, and branches of Hornwood the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Lord of the Hornwood
d. 299 AC, on the Green Fork
Halys's son and heir
d. 299 AC, at the Whispering Wood
Halys's widow, Lady of the Hornwood after his death
d. 300 AC, starved in captivity
Halys's bastard son, a candidate in the succession dispute
fl. 299 AC
A steady bannerman house that lost its lord, its heir, and finally its lady inside a single war — House Hornwood's line does not merely end with this chronicle's own present century; it is extinguished by it, in a manner the North has not forgiven and this chronicle does not intend to soften.
House Hornwood holds Hornwood, in The North. The chronicle traces the house from its founding down to its part in the present tale, marking legend as legend wherever the songs run ahead of the record.
Book canon. This history follows George R. R. Martin's novels first, then the histories — Fire & Blood and The World of Ice & Fire — and does not follow the television series where it diverges.