Sisterton, the principal town of the Three Sisters, was one of the first communities devastated by Winter Fever after the Dance of the Dragons. The epidemic killed half the town’s population, and its passage from the islands across The Bite to White Harbor connected Sisterton’s local disaster to a wider crisis that claimed thousands of lives and changed the government of the North.

Setting and Place in the Outbreak

Sisterton stood within the Three Sisters, an island group exposed to traffic by sea. Late in the year, Winter Fever swept across the islands and killed half the population of Sisterton. The account places the town in a chain of coastal outbreaks, but does not establish that the disease originated there or identify how it first reached the settlement.

The Whaler and the Survivors’ Explanation

Those who survived believed the fever had come ashore on a whaler from Port of Ibben. In response, they killed every Ibbenese sailor they could seize and set the sailors’ ships on fire. This was the islanders’ explanation and retaliation, not proof of the disease’s source: the wider account describes Winter Fever moving from port to port while leaving its origin uncertain.

From Sisterton to White Harbor

The violence did not prevent the disease from crossing The Bite to White Harbor. There, prayers and the maesters’ potions proved powerless, and thousands died. Among them were Lord Desmond Manderly and his son Ser Medrick, whose deaths came only four days apart. Medrick had no children, so the lordship passed to his brother Ser Torrhen Manderly, who had to leave the council of regents to rule White Harbor. Sisterton’s outbreak was thus part of a disaster whose effects reached beyond mortality, reshaping both a northern inheritance and the regency council.

Significance

Sisterton’s brief appearance in the history of Winter Fever shows how a community’s fear of contagion could turn into violence against suspected carriers, even while the disease continued its course. The reported loss of half the town gives the island outbreak a distinct scale; its spread to White Harbor, meanwhile, makes clear that the consequences were not confined to the place where the survivors first sought an explanation.