House Spicer

Where most westerlands houses trace their standing back to the First Men or the Casterly overlordship that followed them, the Spicers trace theirs to a mine and a ledger. The family made its fortune in ore within a generation or two of this chronicle's own present, wealth enough to marry a daughter, Sybell, into the ancient and cash-poor House Westerling of the Crag — a match that suited both families' needs and neither family's older neighbors, who have never quite let the Spicers forget which side of the bargain brought the coin.

Ser Rolph Spicer, Sybell's brother, served as castellan of the Crag on his sister's family's behalf through much of the War of the Five Kings' western campaigns — a position that put him, and by extension his sister, close to the center of the Westerling household precisely when that household's fortunes turned on a wounded king's convalescence and a hasty marriage neither Spicer had arranged, but both were quick enough to use.

The reward for whatever part House Spicer played in the Westerlings' conspicuous survival of the Red Wedding was a bargain Tywin Lannister struck himself, though he did not live to see it paid: it fell to Ser Kevan Lannister, governing in the boy king Tommen's name after Tywin's own death, to put the crown's seal on the decree that raised Rolph Spicer to lordship and granted him the ruined seat of Castamere — a grim irony this chronicle cannot pass over in silence, since the great cautionary song of House Lannister's own vengeance takes that same ruin's name, and Tywin's choice to hand it to a family so freshly enriched by his own gratitude reads, to this maester, as either a very pointed joke or none at all.

What coin and a borrowed lordship cannot buy back is the westerlands' good opinion; House Spicer's rise, however swiftly rewarded, is recorded by its neighbors — and by this chronicle, in the interest of an even hand — as bought rather than earned.