“None the Citadel can confirm from any printed page. If Heart's Home ever wrote its motto down, the copy has not reached this maester's shelves.”
The seat, the words, the line, and the tale of House Corbray — drawn from the novels and the Citadel's fuller histories, with the television series set aside wherever it parts from the books.
Seat
Heart's Home
Region
The Vale of Arryn
Founder
Unnamed. An old house of the Vale, reduced by generations of thin harvests and thinner alliances to a poor one — its single enduring fortune being a blade no poverty has yet forced the family to sell.
Poor in land and rich in exactly one thing: Lady Forlorn, a Valyrian steel longsword old enough that no one now living at Heart's Home can say for certain how the family came to hold it. Whatever else has slipped through Corbray fingers over the centuries, the sword has not, and the family's fortunes have risen and fallen with whichever son proves worthy of carrying it.
I
A Poor House with a Rich Sword
House Corbray's decline into genteel poverty is old enough, and unremarkable enough by Vale standards, that the Citadel's sources decline to date it with any precision — a slow matter of dwindling harvests and unfavorable marriages rather than any single catastrophe worth a chapter of its own. What the family kept through it all was Lady Forlorn, a longsword of Valyrian steel whose provenance even Heart's Home's own household no longer claims to remember with confidence. A poor house holding a blade richer than most kingdoms could buy is, this chronicle notes, not the safest position a family can occupy; that House Corbray has kept both the sword and its head attached to its shoulders across so many generations of wealthier neighbors' envy says something for its swordsmanship, if little else.
II
Lady Forlorn on the Trident
Whatever else may be said of Ser Lyn Corbray, no one who saw him fight at the Trident called him a coward. Taking up his family's Valyrian steel in Robert Baratheon's cause, Lyn led a charge into the Dornish lines that the wounded Prince Lewyn Martell of the Kingsguard did not survive — a single stroke that did more for House Corbray's martial reputation than a century of Heart's Home's quiet poverty had managed to erase. His elder brother Lyonel rewarded the feat, on his own death some years after, by passing Lady Forlorn to Lyn rather than to any son of the main line — an inheritance that speaks more plainly than any words this chronicle could offer about which brother Heart's Home judged worthy of the blade.
In the chronicle
The present tale
This chapter carries the house's fortunes into the novels' events — veiled until you choose to read on.
§
A Sword Drawn Under a Guest's Roof
Age has not made Ser Lyn more patient with men he holds in contempt. Riding among the Lords Declarant who confronted Petyr Baelish and the boy Lord Robert Arryn over the new regent's conduct of the Vale's affairs, Lyn grew impatient enough with the parley's slow diplomacy to draw Lady Forlorn in the Eyrie's own hall — a breach of hospitality his fellow lords were obliged to talk him down from before it became a second Red Wedding in miniature. That the sword stayed sheathed that day owes less to Lyn's restraint, by most accounts, than to cooler heads standing nearer the door. Whether Heart's Home's blade will draw blood again before the Vale's present troubles resolve is not a question this chronicle, writing while those troubles remain open, can yet answer.
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 Corbray
The lords, ladies, and branches of Corbray the books name — the notable, the infamous, and the merely unlucky.
Lyonel Corbray
Lord of Heart's Home, elder brother to Lyn
fl. late 3rd century AC
Lyn Corbray
knight, wielder of Lady Forlorn, veteran of the Trident and of the Vale's fractious present
fl. 283–300 AC
What is House Corbray known for?
Poor in land and rich in exactly one thing: Lady Forlorn, a Valyrian steel longsword old enough that no one now living at Heart's Home can say for certain how the family came to hold it. Whatever else has slipped through Corbray fingers over the centuries, the sword has not, and the family's fortunes have risen and fallen with whichever son proves worthy of carrying it.
Where is the seat of House Corbray?
House Corbray holds Heart's Home, in The Vale of Arryn. 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 Corbray 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.