Randyll Tarly

Randyll Tarly inherited Horn Hill and married Melessa Florent, sister of the lord of Brightwater Keep. As a bannerman of Mace Tyrell, he took up arms for House Targaryen when the War of the Usurper broke out.

At Ashford he faced Robert Baratheon's forces and beat them back. During the fighting he killed Lord Cafferen, one of the rebel lords, with Heartsbane, his house's ancestral Valyrian steel greatsword.

Randyll and Melessa's first child, Samwell, was born in 283 AC. Three years later came the daughters, among them Talla, and afterward a second son, Dickon. Randyll poured into Dickon everything he expected of an heir: strength, a taste for arms, no trace of fear.

With Samwell he tried everything. He hired a dozen arms masters, dressed him in women's clothes to shame him, made him sleep in a mail shirt, and once threw him into a pond to teach him to swim; Ser Hyle Hunt had to fish him out. When the boy cried at the sight of a chicken having its throat cut, Randyll gave up trying and began looking the other way.

He forbade Sam from sharing a bed with his sisters, took him as a page to the Arbor and then brought him home instead of leaving him there, and when the boy asked to go to the Citadel he had him chained to a wall for three days to knock the idea out of him. At fifteen, while skinning a stag in the woods, he gave Sam a choice: take the black at the Wall, or die in a hunting accident the next day. Sam chose the Wall.

When Renly Baratheon claimed the crown, Randyll marched with the Tyrells in his service. In camp he learned from his own son Dickon that several knights were betting on who would be first to force himself on Brienne of Tarth; he told her so himself, and used the moment to say a battlefield was no place for a woman.

Beneath the walls of Storm's End he urged Renly to attack Stannis before Stannis grew stronger, but the king was murdered before the battle could be fought. Randyll then followed the Tyrells over to Joffrey's side: he seized the supply lines that had been Renly's and put to death several men who had sworn to House Florent, his own wife's family.

At the Battle of the Blackwater he commanded the center of the army that broke Stannis's siege of King's Landing. He was rewarded with land for his service, though Brightwater Keep, the Florent seat, went to Garlan Tyrell instead.

With the realm now secured for the Lannisters and Tyrells, Randyll was granted land by Joffrey's small council as reward. He crushed a northern raid on Darry, captured Harrion Karstark and Robett Glover, and left their commander dead on the field.

He then took Maidenpool together with Lord Renfred Rykker, imprisoned its lord, William Mooton, and secured the Kingsroad for the new king.

At Castle Black, far from that war, Samwell suggested to Jon Snow that Gilly and her son might be sent to live at Horn Hill, hiding the fact that he wasn't the boy's father. Sam thought his father might secretly be proud that he had fathered a bastard; Jon wasn't so sure.

After Tywin Lannister's death, Ser Kevan put Randyll forward as a possible Hand of the King; Queen Cersei flatly refused to name a Tyrell bannerman, not realizing the refusal weakened that house more than it strengthened her own position.

Randyll set about rebuilding Maidenpool and dispensing his own brand of justice: a thief had fingers cut off, a baker who stretched his flour with sawdust was whipped, a whore accused of infecting his soldiers with the pox was locked up. There he crossed paths again with Brienne of Tarth, whom he scolded for letting Renly die and for wearing armor, though he let her go on her way after reading the letter she carried from King Tommen.

He set a watcher on her, Ser Hyle Hunt, to trail her toward Sansa Stark and bring the girl back if Brienne found her. When outlaws in the region became a problem, Randyll hanged several dozen and forbade Brienne from setting foot in the city again while he held it. The moment he heard Margaery Tyrell had been imprisoned by the Faith, he broke camp and marched for King's Landing.

Randyll's army was the first to reach King's Landing, ahead even of Mace Tyrell's. The Faith placed Margaery and her cousins in his custody after he swore to return them for trial.

Kevan Lannister, trying to mend the alliance with the Tyrells after the damage Cersei had done it, named him Lord Justiciar on young King Tommen's small council. In Kevan's eyes he was the more dangerous of the two Tyrell lords, more so than Mace himself.

When word reached the capital of Griffin's Roost falling and the Golden Company's landing, Randyll openly doubted that Jon Connington was who he claimed to be, and called the boy calling himself Aegon Targaryen a pretender. He trusted the sparrows no more than that.

In the novels, as far as the story has been told so far, Randyll Tarly is still alive. The television series gives him a different fate, having him die in 304 AC — a divergence between the two versions that the sources behind this entry note without spelling out further.