Hoster Tully

Before he inherited Riverrun, Hoster fought in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, where he struck up a friendship with the father of a young man named Petyr Baelish — a bond that would come back to trouble his own family years later. As a young man he was remembered as tall and strongly built, blue-eyed, with hair somewhere between brown and red, restless and fond of traveling.

After the war he tried to arrange a marriage between his brother Brynden and a lady of House Redwyne. Brynden refused outright, and the insult opened a rift between the two brothers that took decades to close. With his wife, Minisa Whent, Hoster first had two daughters, Catelyn and Lysa, then two sons who did not survive birth; his heir, Edmure, came later still. Minisa died trying to give him a second son, and the loss left a wound in Lord Hoster that never fully healed.

Hoster set his sights on Casterly Rock for his younger daughter and opened talks with Tywin Lannister to marry her to his heir, Jaime. When the boy spent a fortnight at Riverrun as little more than a youth, Hoster made sure to seat him beside Lysa at every meal, leaving nothing to chance. In 281 AC he traveled to King's Landing, where Tywin served as Hand, to settle the terms of the dowry. The plan collapsed when King Aerys named Jaime to the Kingsguard before any agreement was signed. Tywin then offered his other son, Tyrion, and Hoster told him he wanted "a whole man" for his daughter, closing the door on the match for good.

His other daughter brought a different kind of grief. Lysa had fallen for Petyr Baelish, and when Hoster learned she was carrying his child, he forbade the marriage, threw Petyr out of Riverrun, and forced his daughter to lose the baby. Sometime in these years he also took Catelyn on a journey to Sotodeoro — one of the few memories that survive of him as a father, rather than as a man arranging matches.

Catelyn was betrothed to Brandon Stark, heir to Winterfell, when Robert's Rebellion broke out. Brandon's execution in King's Landing, on King Aerys's order, pushed Lord Hoster to join the rising. He then married Catelyn to Eddard Stark, the brother who had inherited both Winterfell and the broken betrothal, and gave Lysa to Jon Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie.

Not every bannerman followed him: Houses Mooton, Goodbrook, Ryger, and Darry stayed loyal to the Targaryens, and Hoster found himself fighting them as enemies rather than commanding them as vassals. In one of those battles he was wounded by Jon Connington, then Hand of the King.

With Edmure grown, Hoster began pulling the same strings he had once pulled for his daughters, this time to find a wife for his heir. Walder Frey offered one of his daughters, barely older than the boy, but Hoster turned him down. He also invited Princess Arianne Martell, heir to Dorne, to Riverrun to meet Edmure; Prince Doran never let the match go anywhere.

In 296 AC Lord Hoster fell ill, and with the Lannisters pressing his borders he decided no one should know. By then he had grown fat and worn, a far cry from the tall, sturdy young man he had once been, and the sickness only sped that decline along. He kept to his bed while Jaime Lannister's army laid siege to Riverrun, barely aware of the battle being fought for his own castle.

When it was over, Catelyn came to see him and found him already badly weakened. Brynden was at his bedside too, having returned to fight alongside the Starks; after so many years apart, the two brothers finally made their peace.

The months that followed brought no recovery, only further retreat. Lord Hoster's mind was failing faster than his body, and he understood less and less of what was happening around him — armies on the move, sons making decisions, a kingdom coming apart without his ever quite grasping it.

In his final weeks he barely spoke, and when he did the words came in scattered pieces, hard to follow. Edmure was already ruling Riverrun in his stead. In his delirium Lord Hoster kept returning to Lysa and the child she had lost, mixing up names — "Atanasia," he would say, and talk of blood — so that at first even Catelyn could not follow him. Catelyn and Edmure wrote to Lysa asking her to come before it was too late; the ravens reached the Eyrie, but no answer ever came back.

Lord Hoster died at Riverrun in 299 AC, and his son Edmure succeeded him as lord of the castle. At the funeral, King Robb Stark and six bannermen — Jonos Bracken, Tytos Blackwood, Karyl Vance, Jason Mallister, Marq Piper, and Lothar Frey, who took Desmond Grell's place at the last moment by Robb's own request — carried his body downriver in a boat. By Tully custom, a flaming arrow had to light the funeral candles as the boat pulled away. Edmure, his hand unsteady with grief, missed three times in a row; it was Brynden who finally took up the bow and struck true, sending his brother's boat downriver already wrapped in fire.