It had been a sullen grey day when the Lannisters arrived at Banefort, the sea winds howling against the cliffs like wolves at a feast. While the lords spoke of banners and coin, Lady Valena had been tasked with the most tedious duty of all—entertaining the heir of Casterly Rock while her father hosted the Lord Lannister.

She did not take him hawking, nor to the feast hall with its tapestries of dead battles. Instead, she led him by candlelight into the bowels of Banefort itself, through a narrow door behind the sept and down stone steps slick with age and damp. "Here are they all burried. The Hooded Kings."

They stood now beneath the earth, surrounded by sarcophagi of old kings few remembered, each tomb crowned with the carved visage of a hooded man.

She stopped before a tall, darkened slab, her fingers tracing the worn engravings. "Morgon Banefort", the last Hooded king, defeated by the ancestors of the boy next to her. "Tell me," she began, her gaze still fixed on the tomb, "why do you think there was never a Hooded Queen?