Horys Hill

Ser Horys Hill was a bastard hedge knight who became a leader among the Poor Fellows during their armed opposition to King Maegor. He first appears at the head of western bands marching to join the Faith’s forces; after escaping defeat at the Great Fork of the Blackwater, he returned to the struggle and died in a failed attempt to rescue Poxy Jeyne Poore.

Identity and emergence

Horys was a hedge knight of bastard birth, a marginal figure who nevertheless commanded followers in the Faith’s rising against the crown. The western bands of Poor Fellows followed him as they converged on King’s Landing. Their departure from the encampment around Crakehall opened a route for Prince Aegon and Princess Rhaena to leave and seek protection at Casterly Rock, making Horys’s advance part of a wider movement that affected even the royal family’s immediate circumstances.

The march and the Great Fork

Horys later led a substantial host of the Faithful at the Great Fork of the Blackwater. His army numbered close to thirteen thousand Poor Fellows, reinforced by two hundred mounted Warrior’s Sons from Stoney Sept and the household knights and levies of a dozen rebel lords from the westerlands and riverlands. The wider host of the Faith was said to number twenty thousand.

The force faced an army of comparable size under Maegor, which had almost twice as much armored cavalry, longbowmen, and the king riding Balerion. The battle was a hard-fought defeat for the Faithful: the Fighting Fool, Lord Rupert Falwell, was killed, and the Poor Fellows were eventually driven into flight. Horys survived the rout, a fact that distinguishes his later return from the many leaders and followers lost in the fighting.

Resistance after defeat

The defeat did not end the Faith’s resistance. In the years that followed, Maegor’s forces hunted the outlawed Poor Fellows, while their supporters continued to find shelter among smallfolk and peasants. Horys re-emerged amid this persecution when Maegor ordered Poxy Jeyne Poore burned beside the Wendwater. Three hundred Poor Fellows and peasants came out of the woods to try to rescue her; the king’s men had anticipated the attempt and surrounded them.

Horys was among the last to die. Only then was he identified as the leader of the rescue force and as the bastard hedge knight who had escaped the Great Fork three years earlier. His survival had carried him from the Faith’s largest field army to a smaller, doomed effort to save one of its leaders.

Narrative role and ending

Horys’s brief arc links the great military defeat of the Faithful to the continuing resistance that followed it. At the Great Fork he commanded a mass movement assembled from Poor Fellows, mounted Warrior’s Sons, and rebel lords’ forces; at the Wendwater he led a rescue attempt by a much smaller group of followers and peasants. The contrast marks the change in the Faith’s struggle from open battle to endangered, localized resistance. Horys’s eventual death closes that personal trajectory, while the survival of the resistance around him shows that the defeat of its army had not ended the conflict.