The Feast of Our Father Above executions

The Feast of Our Father Above executions were a mass punishment ordered by Unwin Peake in 133 AC. By turning a religious feast day into a public day of judgment, the new Hand made the Crown’s authority visible through the sentencing of prisoners from the city gaols and the Red Keep’s dungeons, while the young King Aegon III looked on without intervening.

A Day of Judgment

Septon teaching held the Feast Day of Our Father Above to be a propitious time for judgments. In 133 AC, Unwin Peake gave the day a harsher purpose: those already judged would now be punished. The gaols were crowded, and even the deep dungeons beneath the Red Keep were nearly full, so Peake ordered them emptied. Prisoners were brought to the square before the Red Keep’s gates, where thousands of people gathered. The King’s Justice carried out the sentences, assisted by Tessario the Thumb and his Fingers because there was more work than one sword could manage.

The Sentences

The punishments varied according to the offenses and the authorities’ judgments. Forty thieves were sentenced to have their hands removed, while eight rapists were castrated and sent to the Wall. A man suspected of being a Poor Fellow, convicted of preaching that the Seven had sent the Winter Fever to punish House Targaryen for incest, had his tongue removed. Two women accused of spreading pox were subjected to mutilation. Six servants convicted of stealing from their masters had their noses slit; another servant, who had made a hole in a wall to watch his master’s daughters undress, lost an eye. The range of cases joined ordinary property crimes and sexual offenses to religious dissent, disease, and violations of household privacy, all brought under the same public process.

Seven murderers were then presented. Most were hanged, but one innkeeper, who had killed guests he believed would not be missed and stolen their valuables over a period extending back to the reign of the Old King, received a distinct sentence before his execution. The final cases were those most likely to command attention: a man described as another Shepherd Reborn, the captain of a Pentoshi merchant ship convicted of bringing the Winter Fever from Sisterton to King’s Landing, and Grand Maester Orwyle, convicted of treason and desertion from the Night’s Watch. The King’s Justice, Ser Victor Risley, personally executed the first two by beheading; Orwyle was allowed to die by the sword, with his age, high birth, and long service given as the grounds for that distinction.

The King and the Witnesses

Aegon III remained on the gatehouse battlements throughout the proceedings, silent and apparently unmoved. Some of the condemned called up to him for mercy, but he gave no visible response. Septon Eustace described the king as seeming almost waxen; Grand Maester Munkun likewise recorded the distance between the king’s formal presence and any sign that he was attending to what happened below. Their accounts place the spectacle’s political weight elsewhere: Eustace regarded Unwin Peake as the figure who had directed and benefited from the day’s display, while Aegon stood by as its sovereign witness.

The accounts also contrast the purpose assigned to the feast with the crowd’s conduct afterward. Septon Eustace lamented that the gathered people did not return home to fast and pray, but instead filled the city’s alehouses, taverns, and brothels. Mushroom offered a more personal explanation of the same turn toward celebration, describing drink and company after witnessing a death as reminders of continued life. The different responses leave the executions suspended between public punishment and popular spectacle: the Hand intended a demonstration of authority, but the chroniclers record no corresponding collective penitence.

Aftermath and Political Significance

By midyear, Unwin Peake had the castle, the city, and the king firmly under his control. The smallfolk had grown quiet, the Winter Fever had receded, and Aegon III followed a private routine of training in the yard by morning and staring at the stars by night; Queen Jaehaera remained secluded in her chambers. Yet the kingdom’s wider troubles had not abated: trade had withered, war continued in the west, famine and fever afflicted much of the North, and Dornish raids were growing bolder. Peake therefore turned from punishment within the capital to a show of royal power beyond it. With eight of the ten great warships commissioned by Ser Tyland completed, he planned to reopen the narrow sea to trade, appointing his uncle Gedmund Peake to command the fleet and the experienced sellsail Black Bean Ned to advise him. The executions thus belong to a broader effort by the new Hand to impose order, even as the realm’s crises made the limits of that authority plain.