alphas pair vs omegas pair edition, lmao.

The death of Bold Jon Roxton Artwork by Ertaç Altinöz  

In King's Landing, there are two sorts of people. The players and the pieces.

Jon: Lord Hammer, my condolences.

Hugh: For what?

Welcome to House Words Wednesdays! Each week, I take a House without known canon or semi-canon words and present what I think could make sense as that House’s motto. You’re free to suggest more as well, if your favored House has not yet been suggested; take a look at this link to see what has already been suggested, and shoot me an ask if you have another House you’d like to see done.

House Roxton of the Ring is a noble House of the Reach, though whether it is still extant, where the Ring is, or who the head of the House is today are all equally unknown. (It's probable, however, that House Roxton is a landed knightly House; Gyldayn writes in “The Princess and the Queen” that Lord Peake and Hobert Hightower summoned “eleven other lords and landed knights” in their conspiracy, and since Ser Jon Roxton was a part of this conspiracy, it stands to reason he was a landed knight.) Maester Yandel writes that the Roxtons were one of the “many” Houses which trace their ancestry back to Andal adventurers given lands and First Men brides by the Three Sage Kings of House Gardener (along with upcoming HWW feature House Cuy). Whether that means the Roxtons, like the Cuys, were made vassals of some already-established reacher House is impossible to say, but the Roxtons were sufficiently important enough that at some point, the family acquired a Valyrian steel sword (the charmingly named “Orphan-Maker”).

By far the most important Roxton - he's the only one we know, he has to be - is Ser Jon Roxton, presumably the Knight of House Roxton, who fought on the side of the “greens” in the Dance of the Dragons. “Bold Jon” first saw action at the Battle of the Honeywine, in which he slew the “black” Lord Owen Costayne. He seems to have stuck with the reacher force led by Lord Ormund Hightower, for Ser Jon next appears in the aftermath of the First Battle of Tumbleton, among the conspirators known as the Caltrops. It was Bold Jon who “settled the dispute” about what to do with the dragons commanded by the Two Betrayers, suggesting that they “kill the bastards now” and afterward have “the bravest of us claim their dragons” (a strategy that worked wonderfully for Steffon Darklyn and Gormon Massey, of course).  Ser Jon never got the chance to try for a dragon, but he did manage to win lasting fame as the slayer of Hugh Hammer - “opening the bastard from groin to throat”, how nice - and killing three of the Hammer's men before himself being overwhelmed and slain during the Second Battle of Tumbleton. What happened to House Roxton in the aftermath of the Dance and Ser Jon's death cannot be said; however, there is a fun, if rather minor, theory that the Golden Company serjeant Chains (seen in “Arianne II” of TWOW) is a descendant of House Roxton (sort of a kin theory to the idea that the Windblown sellsword Webber is a descendant of House Webber).

For the Roxton words, I went with Proven True. As with the Yarwyck words, I took inspiration from a Bible verse - in this case, the Book of Wisdom, which reads in part “as gold in the furnace he proved them”. Given the gold chains present in the Roxton sigil, I thought it a fitting motto for the Roxtons to adopt - they, like the gold they show, would be proven by trial (though not, perhaps, in a literal furnace, unless Ser Jon had gotten his draconic wish) until they showed that they were true, loyal subjects. They had won lands from the Three Sage Kings by proving they would be loyal to Gardener rule and peaceful assimilation of Andals into the First Men of the Reach, and during the Dance, Jon Roxton proved that House Roxton would stay true to the green cause - not seeking a crown for himself, as the Two Betrayers wished, but swearing allegiance to young Prince Daeron and dying for his claim.