Waymar Royce
The stars began to come out. A half-moon rose.
[…]
A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt [...] Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran like moonlight on water with every step it took.
[...] "Come no farther," the lordling warned. His voice cracked like a boy's. He threw the long sable cloak back over his shoulders, to free his arms for battle, and took his sword in both hands. The wind had stopped. It was very cold.
The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a longsword [...] It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to vanish when seen edge-on. [...]
Ser Waymar met him bravely. "Dance with me then." He lifted his sword high over his head, defiant. His hands trembled from the weight of it, or perhaps from the cold. Yet in that moment, Will thought, he was a boy no longer, but a man of the Night's Watch.
The Other halted. Will saw its eyes; blue, deeper and bluer than any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice. [...]
They emerged silently from the shadows, twins to the first. Three of them … four … five … Ser Waymar may have felt the cold that came with them, but he never saw them, never heard them. [...]
The pale sword came shivering through the air.
Ser Waymar met it with steel. When the blades met, there was no ring of metal on metal; only a high, thin sound at the edge of hearing, like an animal screaming in pain. [...]
Behind him, to right, to left, all around him, the watchers stood patient, faceless, silent, the shifting patterns of their delicate armor making them all but invisible in the wood. [...]
Again and again the swords met, [...] Ser Waymar was panting from the effort now, his breath steaming in the moonlight. His blade was white with frost; the Other's danced with pale blue light.
Then Royce's parry came a beat too late. The pale sword bit through the ringmail beneath his arm. The young lord cried out in pain. [...]
The Other said something in a language that Will did not know; his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking.
Ser Waymar Royce found his fury [...] and he came up snarling, lifting the frost-covered longsword with both hands and swinging it around in a flat sidearm slash with all his weight behind it. The Other's parry was almost lazy.
When the blades touched, the steel shattered.
A scream echoed through the forest night, and the longsword shivered into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like a rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered his eyes. Blood welled between his fingers.
The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been given. Swords rose and fell, [...] Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voices and laughter sharp as icicles.
[…]
Will rose. Ser Waymar Royce stood over him. […] A shard from his sword transfixed the [...] pupil of his left eye.
87 notes
·
View notes
There is something vaguely heartbreaking about Sansa's crush on Waymar Royce.
He has the Stark look. We all joke about how Sansa has a type and about how Jon looks like Ned and how Freudian it all is.
But Waymar is not just an image of Jon but also an image of Ned, but young and handsome and - most importantly of all - surrounded by an air of self-sacrificing nobility. A Black Knight of the Wall. Pure and ideal. No flaws. A Stark hero prototype.
I mean, Sansa essentially fell in love with an image of who she thought Ned was - before she realized "what bastard meant". The unblemished version of the man Ned used to be in her eyes, a faithful and fully honorable man.
What a strange relief it must have been for baby romantic ten-year-old Sansa to see that ideal from the songs embodied in someone who looked like home - a Ned-alike, seeking a Northern life, aiming to live his chivalric values in the land of the old gods, where she had been disappointed in them by her own father's infidelity.
No wonder she fell wildly in love.
256 notes
·
View notes
I would like to think that the reason Waymar Royce avoided sleeping under Craster’s roof was more noble than selfish. After all, we have in the examples of Waymar’s (male) family members men who, while certainly not immune to the sort of personal and political ambitions common to Westerosi blue bloods, uphold a certain moral standard at the same time. If Ser Robar Royce sought out a place in Renly’s Rainbow Guard to win the sort of personal glory denied to nobly born second sons, and approached war with a lightness that disturbed Catelyn, he still prioritized honor enough to sacrifice himself so that two innocent women could escape the site of (and blame for) Renly’s murder. If Lord Yohn Royce sought and cultivated the favor and control of both the young Lord Arryn and his somewhat older heir presumptive, Bronze Yohn nevertheless exploded with fury at Lyn Corbray’s (staged) attempt to breach the ancient tradition of guest right during their conference at the Eyrie. Nor was Waymar himself personally bereft of a sense of honor, as demonstrated in his fatal determination to defend the Night’s Watch even against a supernatural enemy he could not have hoped to defeat.
So perhaps Ser Waymar, coming across Craster’s Keep on his very first command ranging, decided that he was not going to condone the same blind-eye allowance of Craster’s rape and slavery of his daughters and “wives” which other Night’s Watch officers allowed when they stopped over with Craster. How, perhaps Waymar might have thought, could he respect the chivalric charge to protect women and the innocent (as Robar Royce would do for Catelyn and Brienne) while sitting by as Craster verbally and physically abused the women and girls in his household? (To say nothing of Craster’s sacrifice of his sons, which admittedly Waymar does not seem to have known about.) Did Waymar, as Jon would in ACOK, decide that Craster was akin to an unjust bannerman, more fit to be hanged than to be trusted as even an uncertain ally? Consequently, did Waymar make the choice Jon would - to reject the obligations of guest right, that socio-political tradition which would in the future be so vigorously defended by his own father?
Of course it’s possible that this refusal was simply a reflection of Waymar’s aristocratic arrogance - that Ser Waymar found the midden heap of Craster’s Keep too humble and impoverished to house him, the knightly son of a great lord of the Vale and an officer of the Night’s Watch. Yet I feel like the more interesting reading is to view Waymar as a sort of proto or imperfect Jon Snow. Just as Ser Waymar was another privileged but extraneous aristocratic scion whose socio-political position virtually required that he pursue a career in the Night’s Watch - and as Waymar and Jon both hold to the fundamental mission of the Night’s Watch against the Others, with Jon perhaps eventually succeeding where Waymar (not for lack of trying) failed - so perhaps Waymar and Jon shared a feudal/chivalric disgust in the unjust actions of Craster.
93 notes
·
View notes
"He was a guest at Winterfell when his son rode north to take the black." She had fallen wildly in love with Ser Waymar, she remembered dimly, but that was a lifetime ago
42 notes
·
View notes