House Westerling

The Crag stands on the northwestern coast of the westerlands, an ancient First Men holding that predates the Casterlys' rise to overlordship of the region entirely — a fact the Westerlings, this chronicle notes, have never been shy about mentioning to their nominally senior neighbors. Twice in the centuries before this chronicle's own present, Westerling daughters married Kings of the Rock, and a third, an earlier Jeyne Westerling, wore a crown as queen to Maegor the Cruel — a marriage this chronicle records without further comment on that particular king's other domestic arrangements.

Robb Stark took the Crag from its Lannister-leaning garrison during his campaign through the westerlands and was wounded in the taking of it — an injury nursed, by every account reaching this chronicle, personally and attentively by Lord Gawen Westerling's eldest daughter, Jeyne. What began as a wounded king's convalescence became, within the season, a marriage neither the Crag's modest means nor the young king's own prior promise to House Frey had any right to survive. Robb's broken word to Walder Frey — a debt he had incurred to buy a bridge and an army in the war's earlier days — followed the Westerlings home from that wedding whether they had asked for the consequence or not.

What happened next, this chronicle records with the discomfort the record itself seems to share: Jeyne's mother, Lady Sybell Spicer, corresponded with Tywin Lannister in the months that followed her daughter's wedding, and the Westerlings' subsequent conduct — Robb marching to the Twins against Sybell's urging, the family conspicuously absent from the feast where the Red Wedding was sprung — has left this chronicle unwilling to call their survival entirely accidental.

Ser Raynald Westerling, Jeyne's brother, is reported to have freed Robb's direwolf Grey Wind from its pen before the slaughter began, and to have fallen wounded into the Green Fork in the chaos that followed — the last report of him this chronicle can locate, and no confirmation since of whether the river or a Frey blade finished what the crossbow bolt started. Jeyne herself survived the Red Wedding by the simple, damning fact of not having been invited to it, and remains, as of this writing, at the Crag under a family name this chronicle suspects she did not choose to keep quiet about.