When disciplining unruly vassals, most lords send armies.
My father, Tywin, only had to send a singer.
There's no faster way to dull a vassal's ambition or any festive occasion than hearing "The
Rains of Castamere."
House Reyne of Castamere was an old and proud house that was slowly sinking back into the
muck.
Their mines had run dry.
Without gold, they turned to a more common source of wealth.
Daughters.
Lady Ellyn Reyne was betrothed to my great uncle.
But when he fell in battle, Lady Ellyn sought comfort in his twin brother's bed, beating
out the other woman he had promised to marry.
Then the husband, who had shared his twin's wife, shared his twin's death on a different
battlefield.
Lady Ellyn flung herself at the new and married heir to the Rock, but my grandfather Tytos
was more kitten than lion.
He ran away and told his wife of Lady Ellyn's designs, and Lady Ellyn soon found herself
married off to Walderan Tarbeck, Lord of another failing house.
The Reynes and Tarbecks should have sunk into obscurity together, and they would have if
not for my grandfather becoming Lord of Casterly Rock.
At first, the Westerlands laughed with the "Laughing Lion," as the jovial Tytos was called.
But when men realized this lion had neither teeth nor claws, they started to laugh at
him.
None laughed harder than the Reynes and Tarbecks.
Though Lady Ellyn was no longer welcome at Casterly Rock, Tytos didn't refuse her brothers
Roger and Reynard Reyne, not even when they asked for extravagant loans.
Thanks to our family's gold, Lady Ellyn restored Tarbeck Hall to a splendor she hadn't known
since being cast out of our home.
When my grandfather broached the subject of repayment, Roger and Reynard only laughed.
And soon enough, my grandfather was laughing along with them.
Then my father Tywin returned from the War of the Ninepenny Kings, where he'd seen how
the rest of the realm sniggered at House Lannister.
Determined to restore our proper place, my father demanded the immediate repayment of
all debts to the Rock or a hostage from those who couldn't pay.
Reynard Reyne merely laughed when he received the raven.
Lord Walderan Tarbeck chose to ride to Casterly Rock, sure that he could cow Lord Tytos into
rescinding my father's commands.
He could have, except it wasn't Tytos who met him at the gates but my father, who had
Lord Walderan thrown into a dungeon.
Lady Ellyn protested.
The Reynes threatened war.
And finally, my grandfather broke and released Lord Tarbeck with an apology, no less.
As if bathing himself in shame, Tytos further forgave all the Tarbeck debts to our house.
To celebrate the end of hostilities, Lord Roger feasted Tytos at Castamere, and the
two lords proclaimed their friendship for eternity.
My father allowed eternity to last a year.
When he summoned the Reynes and Tarbecks to Casterly Rock to answer for their crimes,
they rose in revolt, exactly as he expected.
Their defiance gave him a pretext to call his banners and ride for Tarbeck Hall and
Castamere with an army behind him.
He didn't even bother to inform my grandfather.
My father's army descended on the Tarbecks so quickly that Lord Walderan had no time
to gather his forces, and rode against my father with only his household knights.
Soon his head, his sons' heads, and the heads of any man with Tarbeck blood adorned the
spears of the Lannister vanguard as it marched to Tarbeck Hall.
At their approach, Lady Ellyn Tarbeck closed the gates and sent ravens to her brothers
at Castamere.
She assumed they'd have more than enough time to muster their armies and break what would
be a long siege.
My father had trebuchets up in a day and brought down the keep within hours.
Lady Ellyn and her son were crushed in its fall.
When the Tarbeck forces surrendered, my father put their castle to the torch.
Roger Reyne arrived with his army just in time to see the flames consuming his sister's
home.
He charged my father's camp, hoping surprise would win out over my father's great numbers.
It didn't.
With half his men dead on the field and a cross-bolt in his back, Lord Roger fled back
to Castamere.
The Lannister host arrived at Castamere three days later.
Like Casterly Rock, the seat of House Reyne had begun as a mine.
When the gold gave out, the mine shafts were widened into halls, galleries, and bedchambers
deep beneath the earth.
The Reyne brothers didn't have the men to defend the castle walls and retreated into
their underground stronghold.
From this relative safety, they offered terms to my father to avoid a long siege.
My father didn't reply.
Instead, he commanded that the mines be sealed with stone and soil until there was no way
in and no way out.
When that was completed, it took less than a day to dam the stream beside the castle
and only two to divert it to the nearest mine entrance.
The Reynes had taken more than three hundred men, women, and children into the mines.
A few guards reported hearing faint screams and shouts below them one night.
But come dawn, the earth was silent once again.
And now the rain weeps o'er their halls, with no one left to hear.