Merrett Frey

As a boy, Lord Walder Frey sent him away from the Twins to serve as a page with his mother's family at Crakehall. There the elderly Lord Sumner Crakehall soon took him on as his squire, and everyone assumed he would be Ser Merrett within a few years.

At Crakehall he crossed paths with a boy his own age, Jaime Lannister, though the two never got along well: Jaime disliked how Merrett treated those beneath him, and by some accounts made him pay for it once when Merrett tried to push him around.

His luck turned during the campaign against the Kingswood Brotherhood, when he caught the pox from a camp follower. Not long after, he was taken prisoner by Wenda the White Fawn, who branded him with her mark, a fawn, on one buttock.

During his rescue a mace blow left him senseless for two whole weeks, and the headaches that followed never left him afterward. Lord Crakehall sent him back to the Twins without the knighthood everyone had promised him, and there his own father, rather than pity him, gave him the nickname that would follow him for life: Lambhead.

Lord Walder arranged his marriage to Mariya, a daughter of Lord Darry, and at the time it was seen as a fine match for the Freys. House Darry's fortunes, however, collapsed soon after the wedding, when the house sided with King Aerys Targaryen in the war against Robert Baratheon.

The marriage was slow to produce an heir: before Walder the Small was born there were five daughters, one dead as a child and another stillborn. Of those who lived, Amerei brought shame on her parents through her loose ways, and Walda through her appetite; Merrett himself, deprived of the knighthood he had been promised and forever aching in the head, settled into a reputation as the hardest drinker in the Twins.

By the time Catelyn Tully arrived at the Twins to treat with Lord Walder, Merrett was just one more among the many sons and grandsons filling the castle, without much weight in anything decided there.

On the night of Edmure Tully's wedding, his half-brother Lothar gave him a simple task: keep the Greatjon Umber too drunk to fight when the moment came to kill Robb Stark. Merrett took up the drinking contest, but he was the one who passed out first, while Umber, steadier than he looked, still had strength enough to bring down two men before he was overpowered.

After the slaughter, the Brotherhood without Banners captured his great-nephew Petyr Frey, and Merrett offered to pay his ransom: if he brought him back alive, he thought, he might win his favor before Petyr's father Ryman inherited the Twins and turned the rest of the Freys out of the castle.

When he arrived, Petyr had already been hanged for his part in the massacre, and the Brotherhood made ready to do the same to him. Merrett swore he had taken no part, that the whole thing had been planned by his father, Roose Bolton, and his nephew in revenge for Robb's marriage to Jeyne Westerling, and that all he himself had done was drink. But they had a witness willing to contradict him: a Catelyn Tully returned from the dead, who lied in naming him guilty. He was hanged on the spot.