House Marbrand

Ashemark's standing among the westerlands' great houses owes at least as much to a marriage as to any battle its knights have fought. In 235 AC, Jeyne Marbrand, daughter of Lord Alyn Marbrand, wed Tytos Lannister of Casterly Rock and bore him all five of his children — Tywin and Kevan Lannister foremost among them — making House Marbrand blood kin, however many generations removed by the time this chronicle's own century arrives, to the house it has always been sworn to serve. Few bannermen of the Rock can claim quite so intimate a connection to the family giving them orders; fewer still, this chronicle suspects, have made as little public use of the fact as House Marbrand generally has.

Lord Sumner Crakehall's campaign against the outlawed Kingswood Brotherhood, mounted in the reign of King Aerys II, drew squires and young knights from across the westerlands eager to earn their spurs against something more dangerous than a tournament field — and it is in that company, this chronicle's sources agree, that Damon Marbrand's household first sent its own sons into a wider world of royal service, the beginning of a pattern of Marbrand knights attached to Lannister and crown business that has held steady into the present war.

Ser Addam Marbrand, Lord Damon's son and one of Tywin Lannister's most trusted knights, distinguished himself sufficiently in the fighting around King's Landing that Lord Tywin, purging the city watch of Janos Slynt's discredited command in the Blackwater's aftermath, gave Addam command of it outright. It is not, by the standards of a house whose daughter once bore the Rock five children, the grandest office the family has held — but it is the one this chronicle's own century finds Ashemark's heir actually holding, and a westerlands lord with real authority over King's Landing's own streets is not, whatever the office's modest name, a small thing to have won.