House Rowan

The legend the Rowans tell of their own founding is stranger than most houses trouble to claim: Rowan Gold-Tree, a daughter of Garth Greenhand left desolate when her lover chose a wealthier rival, is said to have wrapped an apple in a lock of her own golden hair and planted it on a hill — and from the buried fruit grew a tree whose bark, leaves, and harvest were gold in truth rather than metaphor. Her descendants raised Goldengrove around the grove that followed, and to this day, so the Reach still insists, gold-barked trees grow nowhere in Westeros but within Goldengrove's own walls. The Citadel neither confirms nor denies the arboreal claim; it notes only that the family has never once, in all the centuries since, been under any obligation to prove it to a skeptic's satisfaction.

Mathis Rowan rode to war behind Renly Baratheon along with the rest of the Reach's great lords, and returned to the crown's peace, along with most of them, once Renly's murder ended the question of which Baratheon the Reach's swords belonged to. He did not merely return quietly: joining Lord Tywin Lannister's relief force at the headwaters of the Blackwater Rush, Mathis helped ferry a Reach army downriver by barge to fall on Stannis's besieging host from the rear, a maneuver that broke the siege of King's Landing as decisively as any single stroke of the battle managed, and earned him a hero's welcome in Joffrey Baratheon's own throne room. It did not earn him, when the Hand's seat later fell vacant, the appointment Ser Kevan Lannister thought his service had merited — Queen Cersei, judging Mathis too plainly one of Mace Tyrell's creatures to trust with the crown's business, gave the Handship to a more tractable man instead.

This chronicle records, with the reluctance such household matters generally deserve, a dispute that sent a singer named Dareon to the Wall: the young man claimed a daughter of Lord Mathis's had invited him to her bed and cried rape only when her father discovered them together, while the household's own account, so far as it survives, holds the opposite. No maester now writing was present to judge between the two versions, and this chronicle declines to render the verdict that Lord Mathis's own justice already settled by other means.