Orys Baratheon Hand of the King

Before the war, Orys was mostly a shadow at Aegon Targaryen's side: people called him Aegon's one true friend, the man who watched over him before his future was decided. No one questioned his loyalty; what they argued about was his blood.

Rumor held that his father was no common man but Lord Aerion, lord of Dragonstone, which would make Orys a Targaryen bastard. Years later, Jaehaerys I himself would say the connection was common knowledge at court, though even he did not know the circumstances of the birth — he allowed that Orys might have been conceived through a lord's right of the first night, without being able to confirm it.

That question was never settled. Orys never took the Targaryen name or claimed anything from that blood; he remained, in every practical sense, a captain without a house of his own until the war gave him one.

Days after Aegon's coronation, Orys marched at the head of the main army toward Storm's End, with Queen Rhaenys and her dragon Meraxes flying overhead. Crossing the Wendwater, the men of Storm's End ambushed them, killing over a thousand before vanishing back into the trees; Rhaenys answered by setting the woods alight with Meraxes.

With the queen reporting every enemy movement from the air, Orys took position in the hills south of Bronzegate and waited. King Argilac Durrandon, certain his numbers doubled Orys's and his cavalry was fourfold, refused to wait out the rain and attacked anyway. The battle ran into the night, and when Orys finally reached him, Argilac was still standing among the dead, choosing to die cursing rather than yield.

Storm's End did not surrender with its king. Argilac's daughter Argella proclaimed herself queen and swore to hold out, but it was her own garrison that handed her over, stripped and chained, to Orys's camp. He gave her back her clothes and her dignity, told her how her father had died, and ended up marrying her. With that marriage came the Durrandon sigil, words, and lands: the Lord of Storm's End was born, and with him, the King's Hand.

Orys joined Aegon's war against Dorne and led an assault of a thousand knights along narrow, treacherous mountain paths, under a rain of stones thrown from above by defenders no one ever saw. At the Wyl's ford, the Dornishmen struck at night with arrows, rocks, and spears as the column crossed a bridge; a rockslide sealed off the retreat, and most of the force died there.

Orys and a dozen lords were kept alive, worth more as ransom. The Wyl of Wyl held them captive until 7 AC, when Aegon agreed to pay each man's weight in gold. Only then were they freed, and not whole: their sword hands were cut off first, so they could never raise them against Dorne again. From that day he was called Orys the Onehand.

Aegon answered by burning the Wyl strongholds with Balerion, though the Wyls themselves escaped into caves beneath the mountains. Orys was never the same afterward: he gave up the office of Hand and returned to the Stormlands a bitter man, fixated on Dorne. When Princess Deria Martell came to King's Landing to negotiate peace, it was Orys who argued she should be sent back to her father with one hand fewer.

Years later, under Aenys I's reign, a Dornish outlaw known as the Vulture King gathered a large host and struck the lands north of the Red Mountains, hitting Blackhaven and Nightsong. When Lord Walter Wyl — son of the very Wyl who had taken Orys's hand — laid siege to Stonehelm with part of that army, Orys rode out from Storm's End one last time.

His men broke the besiegers beneath the castle walls, and Walter Wyl was brought before him, wounded but alive. Orys had both his hands cut off, then both feet, calling it his "usury," and kept them as trophies.

On the road back to Storm's End, the wounds he had taken in the fighting killed him. As his son Davos would later tell it, Orys died content, smiling at the sight of his enemy's rotting hands and feet hanging in his tent.