“None recorded, and this chronicle doubts one was ever needed — a family this recently risen from trade has had rather more urgent things to spend its coin on than a motto.”
The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Spicer — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
Seat
None recorded — the family holds no ancestral castle of its own
Region
The Westerlands
Founder
Unnamed. A family of merchants and mine-owners who made their fortune, by most accounts, in tin and other westerlands ore, and married their way into the lesser nobility within living memory rather than by any older claim.
New coin in a region that measures its houses in centuries, House Spicer's rise has been swift, resented in the usual quarters, and — this chronicle records with the caution the family's recent conduct demands — considerably more consequential to the wider war than its size would suggest.
I
Ore Before Lineage
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.
The present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
Castellan of a Borrowed Castle
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.
In the chronicle
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
The present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
Lord of Castamere
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.
In the chronicle
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
The people of House Spicer
The lords, ladies, and branches of Spicer the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Sybell Spicer, Lady Westerling
daughter of House Spicer, married into House Westerling
fl. 298–300 AC
Rolph Spicer
Sybell's brother, castellan of the Crag, later Lord of Castamere
fl. 299–300 AC
What is House Spicer known for?
New coin in a region that measures its houses in centuries, House Spicer's rise has been swift, resented in the usual quarters, and — this chronicle records with the caution the family's recent conduct demands — considerably more consequential to the wider war than its size would suggest.
Where is the seat of House Spicer?
House Spicer holds None recorded — the family holds no ancestral castle of its own, in The Westerlands. The chronicle traces the house from its founding down to its part in the present tale, marking legend as legend wherever the songs run ahead of the record.
Is House Spicer in the books or only the show?
Book canon. This history follows George R. R. Martin's novels first, then the histories — Fire & Blood and The World of Ice & Fire — and does not follow the television series where it diverges.