Lyonel Baratheon

Still a simple knight, Ser Lyonel rode in the Ashford Tourney of 209 AC and challenged Ser Robert Ashford in the opening joust. The two broke nine lances without a decision and were unhorsed together on the tenth pass; they kept fighting on foot, sword against mace, until a battered Robert conceded. Lyonel was named champion.

In the lesser bouts against minor opponents, Lyonel would burst out laughing the moment a lance touched his shield, and if the loser wore some showy crest — enamel, gold, silver — he would tear it from the helm and toss it to the crowd. The commons loved him for it, though the men he beat rather less, and soon only knights with nothing to lose on their helms would dare face him.

On the third day, when Ser Duncan the Tall had to answer Prince Aerion Targaryen's charge in a Trial of Seven, Dunk's squire, Prince Aegon, asked Lyonel to stand with him. Lyonel agreed at once — no trial of seven had been fought in a hundred years. Before it began, he knighted Raymun Fossoway, finishing what Dunk had hesitated to do.

Convinced that marrying siblings did his house more harm than good, King Aegon V, with Queen Betha's help, chose to wed his children into the great houses of the Seven Kingdoms instead of following Targaryen tradition. The betrothals were sealed in 237 AC, while the princes were still children, and among them was that of Prince Duncan, heir to the Iron Throne, to a daughter of Lord Lyonel.

When Duncan defied his father and broke the match, Lyonel flew into a rage and rose in a rebellion as brief as it was talked-about, proclaiming himself King of the Storm. Ser Duncan the Tall, by then a Kingsguard knight, defeated him in single combat and ended the matter. To make amends, Aegon V promised his youngest daughter, Rhaelle, to Lyonel's eldest son.

Rhaelle was sent to Storm's End as cupbearer and companion to Lyonel's wife, to wait until the promise was kept. It came true in 245 AC, when Rhaelle married Lord Ormund Baratheon, by then the new Lord of Storm's End — the same year, by the chroniclers' reckoning, though the date is disputed, that Lyonel died.