Lyman Lannister

In 42 AC a band of Poor Fellows besieged Crakehall, where Prince Aegon and his sister-wife Princess Rhaena, the eldest children of King Aenys I Targaryen, had taken shelter. The king died during the siege, and once the Poor Fellows withdrew, the couple set out for the westerlands with no crown left to protect them.

At Casterly Rock, Lord Lyman Lannister took them in under the laws of hospitality and refused to hand them over when the new king, Maegor I, demanded it. That protection had its limits: Lyman never swore the siblings his sword or his loyalty, so his gesture stopped somewhere between shelter and commitment.

Aegon later died in the battle fought beneath the Gods Eye. With her husband and brother dead, Rhaena and her daughters left Casterly Rock and Lord Lyman's protection.

In 47 AC King Maegor I married Jeyne Westerling, and on that same occasion confirmed as Lord of Tarbeck Tower the son he had from an earlier marriage. The boy was sent to Casterly Rock, where he grew up as Lord Lyman's ward.

Two years later, in King's Landing, the young Jaehaerys Targaryen was proclaimed King of the Seven Kingdoms. The Lannisters then abandoned Maegor's cause and threw their support behind his nephew.

That same year, Lord Lyman and his wife Lady Jocasta traveled to Faircastle for the wedding of the widowed queen Rhaena Targaryen to Androw Farman, the younger son of his own bannerman, Lord Marq Farman.

Later, Lyman appeared in King's Landing at the head of three hundred knights from Casterly Rock, this time for the wedding of the queen regent Alyssa Velaryon, Rhaena's mother, to Lord Rogar Baratheon.

After Lord Marq Farman's death the following year, Rhaena and her party stayed at Casterly Rock for more than a month. Lord Lyman's generosity was not free: he hoped to marry his bastard son, Tyler Hill, or one of his trueborn sons, to the widowed queen, and through that match win dragons of his own for his house.

When Rhaena worked out what lay behind such hospitality, she left Casterly Rock. Before going she is said to have remarked: "They were kings once. He smiles at us, but he was raised on the tales of the Field of Fire; he won't have forgotten them."

That same year, after Lord Edwell Celtigar's dismissal, some of the king's councilors put Lyman's name forward for Master of Coin. The proposal went nowhere, and Lord Lyman never did sit on King Jaehaerys I's small council.

In 55 AC Rhaena Targaryen returned to Casterly Rock looking for any word of her missing daughter, or of Balerion, the dragon she had ridden away on. That same year King Jaehaerys I stopped at the castle during his royal progress through the westerlands.

Lord Lyman traveled once more to King's Landing in 58 AC, this time for the tourney marking the tenth year of Jaehaerys I's reign. He died the following year, in 59 AC, of a chill he never threw off.