House Tarth

Tarth is an island house in more than geography: set apart in the narrow sea south of the mainland stormlands, it has kept a title — the Evenstar — that predates the Storm Kings it later served and the Baratheons who succeeded them, and the family's own account traces blood to both, and more recently, through marriage, to the Targaryens as well. The Citadel's own scholars decline to adjudicate how much of this is descent and how much is a very old house's very old habit of claiming the best available ancestors.

What the record confirms without dispute is sapphires — mined from the island's hills in a trade old enough that Tarth's wealth, unlike its lineage, needs no hedging.

Lord Selwyn Tarth buried three of his four children before any of them reached an age to be remembered for much beyond their deaths: two daughters, Alysanne and Arianne, died in infancy, and a son, Galladon, drowned at eight years old within sight of his own family's hall. What remained to him was a daughter, Brienne, taller and stronger than most of the knights her father might once have hoped would marry her, and entirely uninterested in being married to any of them.

Brienne's own ambitions ran to knighthood rather than a husband — an ambition no law of the Seven Kingdoms formally permitted a woman, and no custom of the stormlands much encouraged either. She found her way instead into the entourage of Renly Baratheon, whose newly formed Rainbow Guard of seven hand-picked household knights made room, unusually, for a woman who could outfight most of the men proposing to protect him.

Brienne stood nearest Renly Baratheon when he died in his own tent — killed, by her account, by something with Stannis Baratheon's face and no body the guards outside ever found — and was, inevitably and unfairly, the first person his household suspected of the murder. She fled the accusation rather than answer it, and found a different oath to keep instead: sworn sword to Catelyn Stark, and after Catelyn's own death at the Twins, bound by that same oath to search the riverlands for Sansa Stark on Jaime Lannister's authority and, this chronicle notes without further comment, increasingly on her own account as well.

Jaime armed her for the search with a Valyrian steel blade forged from what had been Ned Stark's own sword, and she has carried it — renamed Oathkeeper, a name this chronicle finds unusually direct for a house otherwise fond of hedging its own claims — through a search this chronicle cannot yet report the end of. What she has found along the riverlands' back roads, and who she may since have found leading outlaws there, remains, as of this writing, beyond any page this maester will commit to print.