““We Remember.” Short as Vale winters are long, and — this chronicle notes with the family's own evident satisfaction — never once forgotten by the house that swears it.”
The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Royce — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
Seat
Runestone
Region
The Vale of Arryn
Founder
Unnamed. House Royce is reckoned First Men stock at Runestone since before the Andals ever crossed the narrow sea, and one of the vanishingly few such houses in the Vale to have kept both name and seat through the Andal conquest — by marriage and alliance, the Citadel's best guess holds, rather than by the sword that undid most of its neighbors.
Where lesser Vale houses bent the knee to the Andals and took new gods, new words, and often new names along with them, the Royces kept their bronze, their runes, and their seat on the high road between the Vale and the riverlands beyond it — and have spent every generation since being consulted by Arryns who could not quite manage the Vale without them.
I
Bronze Before the Andals
Runestone's lords have gone to battle in bronze armor etched with warding runes since an age old enough that the Citadel no longer trusts its own oldest guesses about it. The armor is said to have come down from the family's First Men forebears entire, unaltered, proof against blade and curse alike — a claim this chronicle repeats with the same caution it applies to every relic old enough to have outlived the men who could verify its provenance. Maester Denestan, in his Questions, wondered aloud whether armor that has failed to save quite so many Royces across quite so many centuries can truly be as ancient, or as warded, as the family insists; the family, so far as the record shows, has never troubled to answer him.
What is not in serious dispute is the house's survival. When the Andals crossed the narrow sea and broke most of the Vale's First Men lords in turn, House Royce kept Runestone — through alliance rather than annihilation, the Citadel's best surviving guess holds, though the particulars of how a First Men house came to sit comfortably among Andal-blooded neighbors for a thousand years afterward are not spelled out in any source this chronicle has found convincing enough to print as settled fact.
The present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
Bronze Yohn and the Bought Lord
Yohn Royce, called Bronze Yohn for the armor his house has never stopped wearing, has spent the years since the War of the Five Kings as the one Vale lord the ambitious cannot buy, threaten, or quietly remove — a distinction Petyr Baelish, newly risen to the Eyrie's regency, is recorded as finding especially inconvenient. Where Lady Lysa Arryn held the Vale to a rigid, self-serving neutrality through the whole of the war, Yohn was its loudest voice for marching to Robb Stark's aid, a course the Vale never took and Yohn has not, by this chronicle's understanding, forgiven.
His suspicion of Lord Baelish deepened rather than faded after Lysa's death, and it was Yohn, encountering the girl introduced to the Vale's court as Alayne Stone, who found her face nagging at a memory he could not immediately place — the two having met once before, years earlier, when Yohn brought his youngest son to take the black and stopped at Winterfell along the way. Whether that half-recognition will ripen into open accusation is a question this chronicle, writing from within events still unresolved, is not positioned to answer.
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
The present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
Two Sons the Bronze Did Not Save
Bronze Yohn's household has paid for the Vale's wars in sons rather than in armies. His youngest, Waymar, a ranger newly commissioned and, by the account of the two men who rode out with him, rather too pleased with his new black cloak, led a routine ranging beyond the Wall that ended before this chronicle's own history properly begins — cut down, if the sole surviving witness is to be believed, by something the Night's Watch had stopped training its rangers to expect. It is the sort of report the Citadel is generally inclined to doubt entirely; this one, given everything that has followed it, the Citadel has stopped doubting.
His second son, Robar, took the rainbow cloak of Renly Baratheon's chosen guard and wore it, by every account, with more loyalty than the arrangement strictly required — loyalty that did not save Renly from the shadow that killed him in his own tent, nor Robar from the challenge a grieving Ser Loras Tyrell offered the Rainbow Guard afterward, in the belief that one of their number had failed the king they were sworn to protect. Robar accepted, and died for accepting. The runic bronze his house trusts to ward off harm has now failed two of Bronze Yohn's sons in successive years, a coincidence this chronicle records without further comment.
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
The people of House Royce
The lords, ladies, and branches of Royce the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Yohn Royce, “Bronze Yohn”
Lord of Runestone, the Vale's most vocal advocate for joining Robb Stark's cause
fl. 298–300 AC
Andar Royce
eldest son and heir to Runestone
fl. 298–300 AC
Robar Royce, “Robar the Red”
second son, a knight of Renly Baratheon's Rainbow Guard
d. 299 AC, slain by Ser Loras Tyrell
Waymar Royce
youngest son, a ranger of the Night's Watch
d. 297 AC, beyond the Wall
Nestor Royce
cousin to Yohn, Keeper of the Gates of the Moon and High Steward of the Vale
fl. 298–300 AC
Myranda Royce, “Randa”
Nestor's daughter, mistress of the Gates of the Moon in her father's absence
fl. 300 AC
Albar Royce
Nestor's son and heir
fl. 300 AC
What is House Royce known for?
Where lesser Vale houses bent the knee to the Andals and took new gods, new words, and often new names along with them, the Royces kept their bronze, their runes, and their seat on the high road between the Vale and the riverlands beyond it — and have spent every generation since being consulted by Arryns who could not quite manage the Vale without them.
Where is the seat of House Royce?
House Royce holds Runestone, in The Vale of Arryn. 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.
Is House Royce in the books or only the show?
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.