Torrhen Manderly

When the Dance of the Dragons was just beginning, Prince Jacaerys Velaryon traveled through the north seeking support for his mother's claim to the Iron Throne, stopping at both White Harbor and Winterfell. Desmond Manderly answered by sending two of his sons, Ser Medrick and Ser Torrhen, at the head of a fleet loaded with soldiers that reached King's Landing in 130 AC to reinforce Queen Rhaenyra.

The size of the force they brought earned them a seat on the queen's council. When two of her dragons fell to treacherous riders, it was the Manderly brothers who urged Rhaenyra to stop trusting the two riders she still had, Addam Velaryon and Nettles.

The city turned dangerous before any battlefield did: during the riots, Torrhen's northmen ran into streets held by Ser Perkin's knights, and lost one man in four trying to fall back to the Red Keep. When Rhaenyra fled the capital after the storming of the Dragonpit, the Manderlys went with her; Medrick urged her to take shelter in White Harbor, but the queen chose Dragonstone instead, and the brothers did not follow her there.

In 131 AC Torrhen joined the first regency council of Aegon III, a body of seven members. He did not last a year in the post: in 132 his father and brother died of a winter fever, and he had to leave the regency to take charge of White Harbor.

After Queen Jaehaera's death he proposed that the young king take a Manderly bride, invoking the old marriage pacts binding the two houses. The proposal went nowhere.

He returned to the capital in 136 AC, summoned to the Great Council the king called after a secret plot against him. He arrived with fifty knights and several cousins, and the council named him Hand of the King precisely because he had no enemies south of the Neck.

His first task was to preside over the conspirators' trials, which dragged on for thirty-three days. He personally questioned the three maidens involved, without managing to get them to give up Lady Clarice Osgrey.

Next came Lotho and Roggerio Rogare, Lady Larra's brothers, accused of fraud and theft after the collapse of the Rogare Bank. There was no evidence they had taken part in their brother Lysaro's crimes in Lys, but Lotho was held responsible for failing to repay the money so many lords had entrusted to him, and Torrhen gave him a choice between taking the black or losing his right hand as a thief; Lotho chose the latter. Roggerio he sentenced to seven lashes with no evidence beyond his being, as Torrhen put it, a thrice-convicted Lysene.

As Hand he governed with a firm hand and plain honesty: he pushed through a fiscal reform and filled the court's empty posts. He never had King Aegon's regard, nor Aegon his, though he built a good relationship with Prince Viserys and Queen Daenaera. From King's Landing he wrote often to his daughter, left behind in White Harbor.

Together with the regents he prepared a royal progress across the realm to mark the king's sixteenth nameday and the end of the regency. The preparations were nearly finished when Aegon came of age, appeared before the council, and announced there would be no progress at all — and with that dismissed Torrhen as Hand.

"The Hand of the King should be whoever the king chooses," Aegon told him. "You have served me well, no doubt, as you served my mother before me, but it was my lords who named you. You may return to White Harbor." Torrhen answered: "Gladly, my lord. I have not tasted a decent ale since I came to this black pit of a castle." Within a fortnight he was back in White Harbor, still stung by the way he had been dismissed; he took it as a personal humiliation, and went from one of the king's most loyal servants to his enemy.