House Swann

House Swann's charge was never a glamorous one: hold the eastern Dornish Marches, keep the coast below the Red Watch clear of raiders, and answer Storm's End's summons without needing to be asked twice. The swan counterchanged on its arms is a marcher's sigil more than a courtier's — clean, legible at a distance, the sort of device a man wants recognized by his own bannermen in a hurry rather than admired at a tourney.

The Citadel's records credit the Swanns with exactly the kind of history this charge produces: generations of lords who mustered when summoned, held their stretch of coast, and left the more dramatic entries in the stormlands' chronicle to their neighbors at Nightsong and Blackhaven. It is not a history that flatters, but it is one that endured.

When the War of the Five Kings split the stormlands between two Baratheon claimants, Lord Gulian Swann's household followed Storm's End's usual pull and mustered under Renly, whose bright new host at Highgarden and Bitterbridge looked, for one crowded season, like the future of the Seven Kingdoms. Renly's death by means this chronicle will not pretend to settle with confidence — the record credits a shadow, and stranger claims have been made about that night that this chronicle is not prepared to repeat as fact — scattered the host that had gathered around him, Stonehelm's men among it.

Lord Gulian, like a great many stormlords that autumn, found his allegiance transferred to Stannis Baratheon by the simple mathematics of who still had an army. The transfer cost the Swanns nothing in blood that the record preserves, and rather less in dignity than it cost some of their neighbors, who had gone further out on Renly's limb before it broke.

Ser Balon Swann, Gulian's second son, took the white cloak of the Kingsguard in the reign that followed the war's opening battles — service that removed him, by custom and by law, from his family's succession and its politics both. He is remembered by this chronicle for two errands undertaken at Queen Regent Cersei Lannister's direction: a hunt through the riverlands for what remained of Gregor Clegane's disbanded company, and a journey south to Dorne bearing Ser Gregor's own skull as a grim gift to Prince Doran Martell, with the queen's daughter Myrcella to be quietly retrieved on the same visit.

Dorne, in the person of its Prince, proved better at delay than Balon was at haste — hunted, hawked, and feasted across the Boneway and Yronwood for the better part of a month before he was permitted to press his errand — and this chronicle records his mission's outcome, like a great many things touching House Martell in this decade, as unresolved rather than concluded. His elder brother Ser Donnel Swann remains heir to Stonehelm in his absence, the family's fortunes staked, for the moment, on one son who stayed home and one who cannot.