House Royce

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.

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.

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.