An exiled knight of one of the two Fossoway branches — the chronicles do not say which, only that he was raised in the orchard country of the Reach and rode out of it under a stain his lord could not wash away. The singers called him Derrick the Bad Apple, a pun on the apple sigil of his house, and his black name traveled with him into the Free Cities, where he found his way at last into the company of the eight other exile captains whom Maelys Blackfyre summoned beneath the Tree of Crowns to swear an oath of mutual conquest. Derrick was one of the Band of Nine, the conspiracy that took the Stepstones in 259 AC and so loosed the War of the Ninepenny Kings upon the realm; whether he died in the marshes against Lord Ormund Baratheon's host or slipped away to die a sellsword's death in some distant city is not recorded.
