Tyron Maallard was the only nephew and male relative of Lord Waltyr Maallard, and thus heir to Hailstone Keep. For Tyron though, it might have been better to have been born a baseborn commoner. For House Maallard was known in all the Seven Kingdoms as the Craven House of the South. The cowardice of the Lords Maallard was legendary, and the subject of jest by the high and low born in the many halls and taverns of the Seven Kingdoms. Many generations of weak and effeminate Lords had reduced this once proud and wealthy House into a dept ridden poor reflection of its former glory, its lands and titles stripped from it by greedy neighbouring Lords while its masters cowered behind the Keep’s walls. Hedge knights refused to take up service at Hailstone; the peasants that lived in the Keep’s shadow sent their sons to swear their swords and honour to other Lords and their banners.

Tyron, a nervous man full grown and wedded at seventeen is now the Lord Maallard; master of Hailstone Keep and the Maallard banner; a green hummingbird on a shimmering red field. His Lord Uncle is dead, killed from a fall off his horse while hunting, much to the delight of the tale tellers and bards of the South, who said that a rabbit had frightened the effete Lord off his horse, who had screamed like a “maiden losing her maidenhead to a man bound for the headsman’s block”. No sooner had Tyron claimed his seat however, did Lord Bryon Briony, secretly send a small company of men into the Maallard lands, wearing no sign or sigil, under the command of his son, Petyr Briony. They launch a savage attack on Hailstone Keep, and because of the fact that they fly no banner, they are taken for bandits.

Hailstone Keep falls within a day and a night, through the betrayal by Tyron’s wife, the Lady Falynn of House Crane, who was secretly the lover of Petyr Briony. As he is led away in manacles and chains, humiliated and battered, Tyron watches Hailstone Keep razed to the ground; his soldiers and servants put to the sword, and his wife smiling in the arms of his enemy. The great banner of House Maallard is set ablaze, never to fly again. Tyron knew that Falynn would become the Lady Maallard at his disappearance, and if she marries Petyr Briony the Maallard lands would finally belong to House Briony.

Tyron is sold to a Tyroshi slaver, who sells him to a sadistic and cruel merchant prince, Raxo Dos, owner of a silver mine in Ashor Isahi, brought low and condemned to a life of pain and suffering through no fault of his own. But Tyron was not cut from the same cloth as the Lords Maallard before him. He vows his vengeance, he plans for it, and lives through every day of his captivity for it and its sake alone, awaiting his chance. And, finally it came. A group of slaves had planned a daring escape, and he joins them in their plan. It was an ill wrought plan by desperate men, and they were caught a quarter of a league away from the mine. Watching his companions being beaten to death by the guards by their master’s order, he stands and screams for a chance to fight for his freedom. Intrigued, the merchant prince sets his most skilled guard on him, with instructions “to make him beg for the sweet release of death.” Unfortunately for the guard, Tyron’s rage had taken him beyond fear and produced a savage monster in place of a man. In a few bloody minutes, the guard was lying dead in a pool of his own blood, his wrist and neck half torn out by Tyron’s teeth, his own blade in his stomach.

Dos, impressed despite himself, makes Tyron a special slave; after having him beaten near senseless first, he has him trained to fight and kill as a gladiator for the Great Arena of Ashor Isahi, where warriors came from far and wide to prove their might and skill. Tyron barely escapes death night after night but he survives every one, and continues to plan his escape to freedom. He becomes a popular champion through a combination of skill, ruthless savagery, cunning and pure naked luck.

Finally, the night came when he was to face the Grand Victor of the Arena. The champion was a much better fighter than Tyron, and he wounds him seriously, near running him through with the last thrust. Indeed he thought he had as Tyron collapsed. But using a last reserve of strength, Tyron shoves his sword up the Victor’s groin just before the Victor’s sword came down to behead him. He was crowned Grand Victor and given the expertly crafted long Valyrian steel blade that is passed from champion to champion of the Great Arena while still abed, recovering. It was then that he saw a way of escape. And he takes it. Since he was apparently invalid, a large guard was considered unnecessary and to help him recover faster, the iron collar that marked him for a slave had been removed. Killing the guards easily but still in great pain, he escapes the infirmary and into the city. However he is too weak to carry on after his escape and he collapses in a back alleyway, where just by sheer luck, he is found by a young woman, who is a harem girl in the Regnant of Ashor Isahi’s palace returning with the last of the Prince’s hunting party, instead of the city guard, which had been mobilised to find him.

Something in his eyes persuades her to help him. She takes him back with her to the palace disguised on the back of a cart and smuggles him into a disused underground cellar. Releaha is her name: and she nurses him back to health. Her life at the palace was comfortable and her only chore was to pleasure the ageing Regnant when he chose her for his bed, a duty she had been trained for since childhood as is Ashor Isahi tradition. As Tyron heals, they grow closer, and she falls in love with him and begins to share his bed in the secret underground cellar, until he is fully recovered.

Tyron, still the most wanted man in all Ashor Isahi, does not leave yet. He had a dept to pay. He steals a sword and steals into the huge home of Raxo Dos who was offering a large reward for his capture. With his bare hands he bloodily slays his owner in his bed. To his surprise, he finds the Grand Victor’s Valyrian steel sword in the merchant prince’s chambers. As his owner, Raxo Dos had taken the sword and displayed it to visitors as his own. He takes it and leaves. He goes back to the palace to bid Releaha farewell; she had refused his request to go with him. She however helps him steal a somewhat sickly horse and gives him some silver coins she had saved. Riding away from Ashor Isahi, Tyron feels the need to return to the place of his captivity in the mines, where the news of the death of their master had not yet reached them, just to see it again.

Seeing the mines again with the chained slaves does something to him; and unable to ignore it he goes in at night and manages to take all the guards captive. He then shatters the manacles of all the slaves within and manages to keep them from tearing most of the captured guards to pieces. He realises that the newly freed slaves look to him as a leader and that he may have put them into deeper peril. Escaped slaves were beaten or burnt to death as punishment, and as the pederastic Raxo Dos had no issue his property now belonged to the Regnant of Ashor Isahi, who was a ruthless and covetous man.

Arming them with the weapons of the captured guards and mounting those who could ride on their horses, Tyron strikes out for the edge of the Kingdom across the Golden Grass Desert, where the borders of the Kingdom of Teghar Ayadi, the sworn enemy of Ashor Isahi began. They cannot move fast as most of them are on foot and there are not gone two days from the mine when the first of the Regnant’s recovery forces, forty out of the total two hundred, reach them.

Tyron is forced by circumstances to be the commander of a starving and weak army, and the desperate slaves manage to drive and kill them off, at great cost to their numbers. They press on, aided by the attack forces’ surviving mounts and weapons and ironically by their reduced numbers. The Golden Grass Desert was a desert of red sand dotted by large patches of a breed of tall golden grasses which choked off any other form of plant life; and furthermore they were inedible. They gave the desert its name. It was also unbearably hot. Tyron starts planning for the inevitable second attack, which would be stronger and more ruthless. The second attack, a hundred twenty men, is launched as they are on one of the giant many leagued patches of golden grass. The attack forces meet a rude surprise, though; Tyron had made the escaping slaves weave long and thin ropes out of the tall golden grass’ blades and line them up in successive lines on the sighting of the second attack. With three men and women holding the ropes at either end, their orders were to pull taut their grass ropes as soon as they receive the signal. The mounted guards, expecting an easy slaughter charged headlong at the seemingly helpless escaped slaves. When the guards’ front line was almost upon them, the ropes were pulled and almost all the horses tripped and crashed to the ground, many landing on their riders and killing or wounding them. The few dazed riders that managed to find their feet were easily overwhelmed by their prey.

Further strengthened by their vanquished enemies’ supplies, Tyron and his army of slaves press on; but they knew the final and most savage attack from the remains of the Regnant’s recovery force would come very soon afterwards. They barely manage to stay ahead of the advancing predators for a day. Noticing the direction of the wind, Tyron though weak and barely able to ride orders the rest to run ahead out of the golden grass patch as he and a few of the stronger slaves set fire in a circle around the force’s camp site in the middle of the oasis of golden grass. They make it out of the patch just in time as most of the remaining force is incinerated in the giant fire. But the worst was not over yet.

The old and infirm not yet killed by the attacks start to die in large numbers from heat, lack of food and water. Water in the desert was hard to come by, tepid and dirty, and many fell ill from it. The food they had taken from the mines and Regnant’s attack forces when they escaped was fast running out. Tyron, heartsick at the deaths he had unwittingly caused, forces them on for day after day, sleeping by day and moving by cool night, almost having lost hope when they come within sight of the Asyai Forest that marked the borders of Teghar Ayadi. Only slightly more than a third of the escaped slaves had survived the attacks and the desert crossing.

However, only two days after entering the forest, caught unawares, they become prisoners again. Unbeknownst to the runaway slaves, the Asyai forest was the home of fugitives from the Teghar Ayadi King’s wrath and justice. Their captors were a bunch of criminals; rapists, murderers, and thieves forged into one outlaw gang by the strong and brutal hand of Red Gaithe, who had been a soldier, a thief and rapist before being sent to the gallows. He had escaped and using fear and his brutal strength managed to form a disordered band that raided trading caravans that passed near the forest and small villages that lived close enough to it. Gaithe decides to sell them to a slaving caravan that was due to pass soon (more money could be gained that way than by attacking it), but not before he and his followers mistreat them badly enough that some die from the rapes and beatings. Tyron, who had killed four of their captors single handed during their capture is marked for extra special treatment by one of Gaithe’s lieutenants, Rwythe, but he survives on. The slaves begin to lose hope all over again, and some of them begin to curse Tyron for leading them to this fate.

Then, suddenly, after many days of travel through the unforgiving forest, Gaithe’s band is attacked by another rival band in the forest; as was wont to happen among the many outlaw groups in the forest. The victors usually sell their beaten enemies to slavers. In the confusion, Tyron killed the man dragging him through the forest and picks up his sword; Gaithe had taken his Grand Victor’s blade. But instead of freeing his former slave companions he goes to fight with Gaithe’s band against their foes. In particular, he aims for and kills the leader of the other band. Gaithe is impressed and decides to let Tyron become a member of his band, despite Rwythe’s objections. To test his loyalty, Gaithe orders him to kill one of his former slave companions. Tyron, without hesitation, does it. Tyron, now mounted and armed as well, continues on through the forest, becoming one of the slavers, and among the most brutal. But, just before they reached the edge of the huge forest to reach the slave caravan, Tyron offers Gaithe a plan that would bring more gain to the band. Gaithe agrees to it and in two days, Tyron’s former slave fellows are sold to a brutal slave dealer’s caravan.

But as the caravan bedded down for the night, Gaithe’s band attacks. The guards all go to guard the treasure wagons which are the usual target of outlaw attacks. However, led by Rwythe, some of the band head for the almost unguarded slave pens and entering, free and arm the strongest of them. The caravan’s guards are suddenly outnumbered and they are overwhelmed. None escape. Tyron, in the middle of the fight, calmly slits Rwythe’s throat and takes over command of the group under Rwythe. As they finally return back to the forest, far richer than they would have been, Gaithe makes Tyron one of his junior lieutenants and releases Tyron’s slave companions and makes them part of his band, so as to be assured of their loyalty when they to do the same to another caravan, by Tyron’s suggestion. Gaithe’s band begins to grow larger and more powerful as they win victory after victory against other bands and triumphant raids against trade caravans, a lot of which give up rather than face the “kanyle Andal,” (Andal demon) Tyron, who was the real mind behind the band’s success, and the most imposing force on the battlefield.

Gaithe and his senior lieutenants, seeing Tyron’s increasing power, plot to kill him. Gaithe sends him on a patrol and lays an ambush in his path as he returns. Tyron, escapes it, and later in the night returns and raising his former slave companions, kills all of Gaithe’s lieutenants. Gaithe challenges him to a sword fight when he realises that Tyron’s authority had outgrown his even among the original members of the band, when they refuse to seize him at his order. The fight is long and bloody, but Tyron slices his stomach open and as Gaithe falls to his knees, he beheads him. Tyron collects his Grand Victor’s blade from Gaithe’s limp hand, now the leader of the largest outlaw band in Teghar Ayadi. They continue mounting daring raids far and near to the forest until the “kanyle Andal” is the stuff of merchants’ nightmares. Particularly slave dealers as he killed them out of hand and then freed their slaves, most of whom join his band.

The local Lords and even the King begin to send their forces against him, but within the forest they are helpless and Tyron was Lord, who maintained a harsh disciplined orderliness among his outlaws. Tyron soon becomes the most wanted man in Teghar Ayadi. This changes however when the newly crowned Ashor Isahi Regnant declares war on Teghar Ayadi. Because of the war, less trade caravans exist to be raided by Tyron’s band. The trade route finally dries up. Facing starvation, Tyron seeks the King and sells his and his band’s swords to the King’s service. The King, seeing the opportunity to rid himself of an old thorn in his side and add more strength to his forces in one fell swoop, accepts. Tyron and his forces are put in the vanguards of their first battles, and many of them are killed. Tyron, enraged, demands that he follow his own plans as long he does not interfere with the Lord Commander’s. Meeting with his lieutenants, he plans and later executes a breathtaking manoeuvre on the battlefield that stuns the Ashor army and wins the Teghar the battle. Three more clashes and Tyron and his fighters execute one new move after another, each leading to victory. The Lord Commander of the Teghar army decides that putting him in the van was putting a valuable asset at risk and Tyron is promoted and soon he and his fellow outlaws become among the elite of the Teghar forces. Given command of an elite force, he is sent into Ashor Isahi to harry their forces on their own soil, to prepare the ground for a Teghar invasion. He goes one better…he smashes two defending armies and almost reaches into the capital and failing that, lays siege to it instead. When the rest of the advancing Teghar Ayadi forces are sighted by the Ashor, the Regnant and his grown heirs are killed by their own guards and the gates of the city opened. Tyron is the first of the conquerors into the city; but when the regicidal guards present themselves to him in expectation of a reward, he beheads them himself for their treachery.

As he rode through the city to the Regnant’s palace, a woman threw herself at him with a knife. She is nearly killed by one of his guards’ arrows. It was Releaha, who had married since he left and whose husband, a soldier, had been killed by Tyron’s forces. In Ashor tradition, a Regnant heir has his own harem trained for him; when he becomes Regnant, the old Regnant’s odelisks are sent off and the new ones brought in. Releaha had been sent off when the old Regnant had died and she had married her soldier, now dead facing Tyron’s armies. Unable to fend for herself, she had fallen into whoring, blaming the loss of her love on the “kanyle Andal”, whom she didn’t know was Tyron. He orders her taken to his chambers in the palace where he takes care of her himself and nurses her to health, like she did to him. Releaha, who had thought of him often since his escape, is not sure how to feel about him.

He presents the city to the Teghar Lord Commander, Lord Hetan, a lowborn soldier who, being an honourable man tells of his deeds truthfully to the King. The King himself raises Tyron to a titular Lordship and the second highest military rank in the kingdom, against the protests of his nobles, who consider Tyron as nothing more than a glorified thief, and a foreigner at that. Releaha, whom he took everywhere with him, begins to fall in love with him, and starts to share his bed after seducing him during the night of the Gedilah, an Ashor and Teghar tradition when women express their love for the man dearest to them. She soon becomes the envy of many of the noble ladies at court.

Soon after though, the ailing Teghar Ayadi King dies and his two eldest children begin to squabble for the crown. They were born only a month apart by different mothers, both the King’s wives. The elder was female and the younger, male, Princess Thyrara and Prince Torathyn. Thyrara had more lords including Lord Hetan, rallying to her banner and Torathyn, after many battles, looked to be losing...until he sought out Tyron to serve as his Lord Commander. Thyrara had rescinded his Lordship and had ordered him to leave the kingdom, penniless and bound, because she shared the same sentiments about him as the nobles. Torathyn’s agents attack the escort party assigned to place Tyron on a ship for the Free Cities and rescue him. Hearing that their “kanyle Andal” was behind the Prince, many of his old companions and subordinates during the Ashor War rally to Torathyn’s banner. Victory followed victory for both armies until two forces, one under Tyron, and the other under Hetan, meet. Torathyn’s forces win the battle at great cost, and Hetan is captured. Tyron stops Torathyn from executing the old warrior, for they had a great respect for each other from their old alliance. Thyrara comes to bend the knee to Torathyn soon afterwards and she is exiled, Hetan returned to a high post as a Teghar Army Lord Commander, under Tyron. But Tyron remains wary. And his circumspection is proven worthwhile when he learns that Torathyn meant to have him killed, afraid that Tyron’s renown would rival his own. Tyron flees to the edge of the kingdom, to take a ship for the Free Cities. This gives Torathyn the opening he needs and he declares Tyron a traitor and sends Hetan to bring back his head with a large elite force, many of whom were Tyron’s men. Tyron himself is travelling with a company of serving men, companions from the Ashor Isahi mines and the Asyai Forest, who refused to leave his side even at his insistence, to his confusion. And Releaha. As they hid one night, in an open field, Hetan breathing down their necks, Releaha, professes her love for Tyron and reveals that she is with his child. He confesses his love for her as well and swears to marry her should they survive. They continue desperately on.

But it is too late. Just before the harbour city, Hetan comes upon his camp and against Tyron’s wishes, who wished to surrender due to the odds against them, his companions go on the attack, forcing Hetan’s men to defend themselves. In anguish at seeing his men fall about him, unarmed and wounded from a stray arrow shot to the leg, Tyron calls a halt to the fighting. He sets his Grand Victor’s blade from the Arena to the ground and kneels, to hold a dying companion’s hand, who says he is happy to have died for his Lord “Kanyle.” He starts crying as the pain and guilt of being the cause of so much death, from the people who had served his House in the Seven Kingdoms to the soldiers under his command in the wars and now the man whose hand he held, washed over him. He hears Hetan draw his blade and not looking up, lowers his head for it to be done, still holding the dead man’s hand.

Hetan raises his sword...and lays it in front of Tyron. He kneels and he speaks the words “I swear my life, sword, shield and honour to you, my Lord. To serve you in any way you will it. To live for you and to die for you if need be. This I swear from now and until I draw my last breath.” One by one, all the men swear the same. Tyron protests go unheard as each kneels. All the men had brought their families with them, to escape the King’s rage as they had planned to do this from when they had received the royal command. At the end of it all, he faints from the loss of blood from his arrow wound and his new sworn men, alarmed, quickly carry him into a stolen warship and kidnap a healer to heal him aboard ship as they sail to the Free City of Lys. Tyron awakens aboard ship, and the first thing he does is call for Releaha and they are married immediately, with him abed. Walking along the deck with Hetan as they neared Lys, he decides to tell him about how he came to be a slave and about his vow to return to the Seven Kingdoms and reclaim his birthright, and punish those who had stolen it from him. Hetan swears to him that he would serve him in seeing his vow come to pass.

Tyron is well upon reaching Lys, but even with his ship, they are penniless and would not be able to travel further without money and food. Docking the ship, they ride out to seek employment as a band of sellswords. Their service takes them through all the Free Cities, from Lys, to Lorath, Braavos and Qarth fighting all manner of foes. However, a magister employer of Braavos plays them false and tries to have them killed after they had protected his trading caravan on a long trading journey. He then has Releaha and their son Jacen captured. Tyron is enraged and with some of his men steals into the magister’s palace, and after rescuing his wife and child kills the magister in his bed. He and his band then loot all the treasure from the palace and escape Braavos that night. Now knowing that he had gathered enough wealth and followers (all of whom Hetan had made swear oaths of service to Tyron and the House Kanyle) Tyron decides to sail on to the Seven Kingdoms.

Tyron buys a small castle in Lorath and leaves most of his warriors there under the command of Jhonadyn, a companion from their days of slavery, and now one of his most loyal liege men, and commands him to continue sellswording in his name. He and a ship of followers then set sail for Westeros, following the rivers to Highgarden and make landfall, the masts flying the device of the newly made House Kanyle; a two-headed phoenix to represent the birth of a new House from the ashes of the old, half black and half gold down the middle to represent the good and bad deeds, depths of tragedy and heights of glory that led to its birth, upon a white field. Tyron and his household go in private to bend the knee to the King in Highgarden. Revealing and proving his noble birth as a noble son of Maallard, Tyron asks the King to grant him the right to take back what is his by rights and punish those who had taken it from him. The King, knowing the tales of the cowardice of the Maallards, decides to test Tyron to see if he could do what he says. He makes him fight one of his Kingsguard to prove the truth of his claim. It is a long and hard fight but Tyron wins and spares the knight’s life. The King, whose Lords, especially Briony, were growing worryingly powerful and more insolent, decides to unleash Tyron and his blade Bane upon them. He gives him his permission and promises not to interfere, publicly granting him the tiny seat of the Blackthorn, which consisted of a small castle that used to house a large garrison that marched to repel raiders from Dorne, and a tiny patch of land around it, on the South Western side of the Southern Kingdom, on the sea shore between Oldtown and Highgarden, on the edge of the Briony and the ancient Maallard (now Briony) lands, which belonged to the King. Fooled by the new colours and banner and his many scars an beard, no one recognise him, even Falynn, Tyron’s treacherous former wife, now wife to Lord Petyr Briony, who was visiting the Royal court and was present at the bestowal of the honours. Tyron sees and recognises her though. She was able to maintain her honour and standing in high society because her part in the destruction of House Maallard was kept secret. Petyr Briony had all the men who had been with him killed.

Tyron, now Lord Kanyle of the Blackthorn, names Hetan his castellan and sends for a maester from the Citadel and travels to his new seat. He goes into the streets of Highgarden that very night and calls for any who wish to take up service with him at the Blackthorn or become his smallfolk, living in his lands and under his protection. As he travels, many of the people from the poorest villages in the Kingdom join his train and some hedge knights come to swear their swords to his service. Raiders, secretly sent by the other Lords to test the new Lord’s capabilities, attack them, and the raiders are vanquished totally, to the discomfiture of the Lords who sent then. This further cements the smallfolk’s awe of Tyron, and when he reaches the lightly inhabited windswept and mountainous grasslands that were under his dominion, he had a significant number of subjects and Knights that named him their Lord. The Blackthorn,so named because it was built of the same greyish black stone as the rocks in the region, was nestled between two large green hills, near the end of the valley they formed between them. The valley grew very thin and steep at its ends but widened out in the middle. The seaward ends of the hills jutted out into the western sea forming a tiny cove that could only contain a single galley of any significant size, full of dangerous rocks.

When the maester, Maester Arlen arrives at the Blackthorn from the Citadel, the first task he is set to do is design a town and a castle to Tyron’s specifications. Tyron immediately sets to seeing that his subjects begin building the town at the foot of the castle, on the seaward side, in the middle of the valley where it widened out. To make his town prosper because only a few crops could be grown on the hard soil, he buys trading caravans and sends them to the nearest towns and cities, buying and selling and bringing what the town needed back. As he intended, over the years a trade route slowly opens through his domain. During this time, he sets about rebuilding the castle into a seat worthy of a great House. It all takes four years and almost exhausts the wealth he had taken from the Braavosi magister’s palace, but his liege men across the sea generate enough gold for him through their sellswording for him to continue. His people tirelessly continue to build when he himself, and his knights, under his command, put their own hands to the task. His second and third children, Alsha and Marqen are born during this time. The Blackthorn becomes a grand seat of middling size, with ninety foot walls, thirty feet thick at the bottom and ten at the top, with murder holes and arrow slits. Surrounding it was a wide shallow moat with metal caltrops and blades on its floors and water running in and out of it from a nearby spring. Inside, directly beneath its walls all around, was a field of steel blades and spikes. The field is guarded by twenty foot tall iron railings. The castle itself is a collection of five interconnected wide towers. The thickest is in the center with stone catwalks and walkways to the four smaller towers arranged haphazardly around it, each connected to another as well. It used to be the castle of the Blackthorn all by itself and it now contained the Lord’s chambers and audience hall. The other towers contained all the other things that were necessary for a castle to be what it should be, granaries, armories, stables, and so on. When he takes up residence at the Blackthorn of Blackstone (the Town’s name) at last, Tyron calls his liege men from across the sea, his smallfolk and his knights into the castle and throws a feast to celebrate his return to Westeros. He was now 31 years old, 14 years since he was sold by the Briony...and finally ready to make them pay the price for that mistake.

During the time that he was building his seat, he had twice made journeys with Releaha to Highgarden to pay homage to the King, carefully coinciding his visits with those of Petyr Briony. Releaha often dressed in the Ashor fashion as he knew she would, long skirts and a top shift that left one shoulder and her midriff bare. Knowing of Petyr Briony’s passion for women, and knowing that her foreignness and the unconscious sensuality she gave off, drilled into her since childhood, would draw him even more as it drew all the men at court. Unbeknownst to her, Tyron makes sure that Releaha catches the Lord Briony’s eye and watches his attempts to seduce her. Even though Petyr Briony was a breathtakingly handsome man Releaha only has eyes for her husband, but her unwittingly flirting behaviour leads the arrogant and cruel Briony lord to believe that she would welcome an illicit dalliance with him. During this time, Tyron had set about seducing Falynn, at one time sharing kisses with her in the sept of the royal castle in Highgarden. It was as far as he wanted to go, but it is enough to have Falynn, who never recognised him with his beard, lusting after him.

So when Tyron invites the Lord Briony and his Lady wife to visit the Blackthorn when it is finally completed, the Lord comes for more than a courtesy call, having to do with Releaha and to see how he could lay claim to the Blackthorn, as it had become wealthy due to its trading caravans. He comes alone. Lord Briony, just as immediately seeks Releaha out in private moments and showers her with flattery and expensive gifts. Tyron begins to fret that Releaha would betray him; and when he sees Petyr and Releaha kissing in the godswood, he locks himself in his chambers, feeling his world begin to crumble once more. But before he could give him in to his rage and go and kill them both, Releaha (not knowing that he had seen them) comes to meet him and asks him to find a way to diplomatically cut short Lord Briony’s visit, giving him no reason why. This proof of her fidelity saves her life, and the knowledge of what he would have done to her tears at his heart. Head bowed, he quietly tells her his life story; how he became a slave in Ashor Isahi and Petyr Briony’s part in it. Releaha realises then that Tyron had been using her so he could lure the Lord Briony into his trap and she storms away from him, angry. Later that same night, Petyr finds his way in the dead of night to Releaha’s chambers and meets Tyron and his guards there. Tyron accuses him of being a dishonourable guest, imprisons him for the night, and then unceremoniously kicks him and his party out of the Blackthorn. That same day, Releaha vows that she would never forgive him for using her to start a war. She still loved him and as his wife she would support him, because she understood why he did it, but she would never forgive him. Tyron only kneels before her in response...and she kisses his brow, granting him her favour as in Ashor tradition.

As Tyron intended, Lord Briony vows revenge. The humiliated Petyr gets back to his seat, Sunfort Glen, and orders his soldiers to scorch the Kanyle lands and to seize Tyron’s trade caravans that pass near his lands. He has the traders burnt to death, a brutality Tyron never expected and with now even more rage, declares war on House Briony. At first the Briony forces far outnumber the Kanyle’s, even when Tyron calls for Jhonadyn and his liege men from across the sea. Petyr Briony was a seasoned war commander but Tyron, given his history was much his superior. A disastrous defeat at Tyron’s hands, despite the numbers, forces the Briony Lord to ask some of his other Lord friends to assist him. The King refuses to put his hand in it as he understood that it was Lord Briony’s fault as he sought to seduce Tyron’s wife in the first place.

Tyron faces the Lords’ armies that come to support Lord Briony, and wins much more often than not. But after using tactics alien to the Southron Lords and defeating three Houses’ combined armies in one great battle, many of the Lords leave the unfortunate Lord Briony by himself. Briony soldiers are forced to retreat after another defeat, but using a tactic used in the Teghar War, Tyron chases them all the way back to the Sunfort, depleting their numbers and laying siege to the castle. During the war, Tyron had started sending love letters to Falynn, professing love and urging her to help him to defeat her husband so they can be together (he almost gets into trouble when Releaha almost reads one of the letters). An avaricious and opportunistic woman who sees that the tide of the battle was in Tyron’s favour and who had been strongly attracted to him since from the royal court and even more through the tales of how he continued to rout her husband’s armies, she agrees. She also wished to punish her husband for his many infidelities.

So when Petyr Briony came back to Sunfort Glen, expecting to settle in for a siege, he is unaware that his wife planned to do to him what she had done to her former husband long ago. A night later as her husband lay asleep, she orders the gates open. When the Kanyle men bring Petyr Briony down from his chambers in chains, he sees his wife smirking at him. But when Tyron arrives, her smile disappears to be replaced by a look of horror as he rides in flying the Maallard banner and is clean shaven. Both she and Petyr recognise him then. He gives Petyr a choice, to be beheaded or to take the Black. Petyr takes the Black. Her has Falynn returned to her family’s seat with the Briony heirs, whom he has adopted into House Crane after he threatens to make public Falynn’s treachery both to him and Petyr Briony. House Briony dies utterly. Razing the Sunfort to the ground he reclaims the Maallard lands and takes over the Briony’s most prosperous holdings, in one fell swoop becoming one of the most powerful Lords in the South. To assuage the King’s fears of his new found ascendancy, he goes to Highgarden to bend the knee and swear his loyalty before finally going back to the Blackthorn. He burns the Maallard banner for the final time, his vow of vengeance fulfilled. He soon sends Jhonadyn back to the Free Cities to continue sellswording, this time with his son and heir Jacen, whom he wants groomed to take the title of Lord of the Blackthorn when he dies, and to ensure the far away liege men’s continued loyalty to House Kanyle, even after his death. From then on, he decreed that when a Kanyle son reaches his fourteenth name day, he is to be sent to ride with the companies of sellswords that would fight and earn for his House across the sea, spending a year with the sellswords and another at the Blackthorn, continuing this until he or his elder brother assumes the seat as Lord Kanyle. But no matter what, there was always to be a Kanyle riding with their faraway liege men, or else they come back to stay at the Blackthorn.

Tyron finally dies at age seventy, three years before his beloved Releaha.

Jhonadyn Kanyle, Tyron’s great grandson, a quiet man, was the Lord of the Blackthorn when Aegon Targaryen set sail from Dragonstone to forge his kingdom. He called his liege men from across the sea and those on the land to fight for King Mern in Highgarden, but before he could march, the King had been killed in the Fields of Fire and the Tyrells declared the Wardens of the South. He withdrew back to the Blackthorn and refused to go to Highgarden to pay homage to his new Liege Lord. Hearing of this stubborn Lord, Aegon sends his sister Rhaenys with her dragon, Meraxes to deal with him. However, Rhaenys had a few surprises when she ordered the attack to begin and unleashed Meraxes at the Blackthorn.

Jhonadyn had ordered his soldiers to sink tens of steel run piles deep into the hard ground around the Blackstone and the Blackthorn. At the top of each pile was a steel ring to which was attached extremely long and thin steel chains at the ends of which were sharpened Valyrian steel grappling hooks and a Valyrian steel spear blade at the top. He had his smiths build a type of horse drawn catapult that could launch the spear topped hooks hundreds of feet into the air. He had made his riders and shooters practise at firing and reloading the chains for weeks before the battle. As Meraxes swooped down on them, the Lord Kanyle himself led the shooting forces to bring down the dragon while his brothers led the Blackthorn’s forces against the Targaryen’s forces on the ground. The dragon’s breath kills a lot of his shooters and soldiers on the first pass, but then one of the spear hooks gets and pierces through a spread wing. The dragon screamed in pain, the hooks digging into its skin and impeding its turn as the chain attached to the hooks and the ground held it in place, halting her in her place for a moment. The moment was enough, the remaining riders and shooters, Lord Kanyle included, shoot more spear hooks at the wounded stationary dragon. The hooks and their chains wrap around the dragon’s limbs, her head, tail and wings, further imprisoning her in place, wounding her with their cruel spear tops and sharpened hooks. In the space of a few heartbeats, Meraxes was bleeding profusely from hundreds of wounds all over her body, covered with a thousand chains whose hooks and blades would tear her apart should she try to move. The dragon’s fiery breath is no help as her head is locked in place. The wounds overwhelm her and she crashes down heavily, weakened and dying. Seeing this, the Targaryen army breaks and flees the battle. They regroup at the river, while Rhaenys considered the new development, stunned at the loss of her dragon. It was then that Jhonadyn, flying a flag of truce, came to parley.

He offers her an understanding; his House would cede a majority of the Kanyle lands, pay the Targaryens tithe for as long they remain Kings, and never raise a sword against them so long as he does not bend the knee and swear to no one, including them. The Kanyles would be bannermen to no one, even the Royal House. Else he would order his maester to send ravens all over the Kingdoms, telling them how to kill the dragons, after killing Meraxes. He was prepared for his House to die, if his condition was not agreed to. He knew that with the Targaryen’s numbers, even if he killed Vhagar and Balerion, he could never win. But Rhaenys accepts and swears that House Targaryen would leave the Lords of the Blackthorn and their lands alone forevermore, but only if the Kanyles fight for the Targaryen’s cause. Jhonadyn agrees and releases Meraxes, who heals quickly as is the nature of dragonkind. Afterwards, the House Kanyle fights on the side of the Dragon Kings, winning many victories for them. The day Aegon finally sits the Iron Throne, Jhonadyn and his brothers quietly return to their seat, unacknowledged but free. During Robert Barratheon’s rebellion against the Targaryens, 300 years later, the Kanyles never moved from the Blackthorn, and answered no one’s call to arms. They are hardly numbered as a House in the Seven Kingdoms because of this.