House Gardener

Highgarden's wealth was always a target the Iron Islands could see from the water, and for centuries the Gardener kings answered ironborn reaving the only way that worked: with walls in the sea itself. King Garth Gardener, called the Goldenhand, drove ironborn raiders off the Misty Isles off the Reach's western coast and fortified the chain into what the Reach still calls the Shield Islands — Greenshield, Oakenshield, and their sisters — a permanent line of holdfasts meant to catch a longship before it ever reached the Mander. The shields have outlasted every Gardener who built them, garrisoned across the centuries since by cadet Reach houses whose whole purpose, generation after generation, has been watching the western water.

The defense was never complete. The sources consulted record at least one Gardener king, Gyles, taken captive in a raid his shield ships failed to stop and killed by his ironborn captors with a cruelty this chronicle declines to describe past the fact of it. Ironborn kings would test the Shield Islands again long after the Gardener line itself was gone — under Euron Greyjoy's later reign they fell in truth, and ironborn longships sailed the Mander unopposed — a reminder that a wall built against one age's raiders answers only that age, not the next.

For as long as the Reach and the westerlands shared a frontier near Horn Hill, Gardener and Lannister kings fought over it — border wars the surviving record reduces to epithets rather than campaigns, as when a King Garth of the Reach was remembered simply as Hammer of the Dornish for wars fought on the realm's opposite border while the westerlands frontier smoldered on unresolved behind him. Neither kingdom seems to have ever conquered the other outright; the border moved, generation after generation, and moved back.

What the centuries of mutual raiding could not produce, a common enemy did. When Aegon Targaryen's host came ashore in 2 BC, King Loren I Lannister of the Rock and King Mern IX Gardener of the Reach set aside a rivalry older than either line's living memory and marched their combined hosts to Goldengrove as allies — the largest army the Conquest ever faced, and the last time either crown would field one at all.

Not every threat to House Gardener came from outside its borders. King Garth Gardener, called Greybeard for the length of his reign, took the Oakenseat as a boy of seven and kept it into extreme old age, sinking by his final years into a senility so complete that the sources consulted describe him as a tool passed between whichever faction controlled his household that season. He had sired daughters and no sons; one had married into House Manderly, another into House Peake, and each husband meant his own wife to inherit — a rivalry that curdled into open war between Gardener bannermen while the king who might have settled it no longer understood what was happening around him.

Dorne read the chaos correctly. While Reach lords fought each other over a succession the senile king could not adjudicate, a Dornish king crossed the Mander, sacked Highgarden, and put it to the torch after stripping it bare — the Oakenseat itself, the living throne that had been House Gardener's pride for longer than count, chopped to pieces and burned with it. Garth Greybeard, the sources report, was found tied to his own bed, and the Dornish who cut his throat called it, afterward, an act of mercy. Highgarden was rebuilt, as it always would be; the Oakenseat, evidently, was not spoken of as lost forever, since a later chronicle still describes House Gardener ruling from it — whether the same seat rebuilt or a new one raised in its image, no source consulted says.