Nettles's Bond with Her Dragon Sheepstealer

Nettles’s bond with Sheepstealer is established by the account of their escape together from the Vale’s mountains. The record identifies Nettles as the dragon’s rider, but offers no further detail about how she came to ride Sheepstealer or the nature of their relationship.

The Recorded Encounter

During Ser Robert Rowan’s march through the Vale, a dozen men climbed toward a cave in search of shelter from the wind. Bones lay scattered at its entrance, but the men pressed on and roused Sheepstealer. In the ensuing fight, sixteen men died and sixty more were burned before the angry brown dragon took flight with Nettles clinging to its back.

The encounter places the bond in a moment of danger rather than explaining its beginnings. Nettles was with Sheepstealer as it escaped, and the account’s description of her holding on is the clearest direct evidence of their connection.

The Last Sighting and Later Stories

The annals of Westeros record this as the last known sighting of Sheepstealer and Nettles. They do not establish what became of either after the dragon flew deeper into the mountains, leaving the pair’s fate unresolved.

Mountain clans, however, continued to tell stories of a fire witch who had lived in a hidden vale far from roads and villages. In those tales, youths brought gifts to her and proved their courage by returning with burns from facing the dragon woman in her lair. These traditions preserve a local memory of Nettles and Sheepstealer, but do not confirm the pair’s later whereabouts or actions.

What the Evidence Establishes

The surviving account supports a specific, limited claim: Nettles rode Sheepstealer, and the two were together when the dragon fled the soldiers. The later stories extend that image into mountain folklore, where the rider becomes a fearsome figure associated with the dragon. They do not supply a fuller history of the bond, so its beginnings and eventual end remain unknown.