The Rhoynar were a proud and ancient people who dwelt in great cities along the mother Rhoyne, worshipping the many gods of the river and the Old Man of the River and the goddess called the Mother Rhoyne herself. As the Valyrian Freehold pressed ever eastward in search of new lands and slaves, it came at last to the Rhoyne, and the two peoples warred over the river and the trade that flowed along it. The Rhoynar were skilled in the water arts and their princes were subtle, yet the dragonlords would not be denied, and the wars ground on across generations.
The last and greatest of these struggles the maesters name the Second Spice War, wherein Prince Garin of Chroyane, called Garin the Great, raised the largest host the Rhoynar had ever mustered, a quarter of a million strong by the boastful reckoning of the singers. Garin won victory upon victory and drove the Valyrians back to the walls of Volon Therys, but the Freehold answered with three hundred dragons, and his host was broken utterly upon the riverbank. Garin himself was taken and hung in a golden cage to watch his people led away in chains, and it is said that with his dying breath he called down the wrath of Mother Rhoyne upon his conquerors. Whether by curse or by pestilence, a grey death followed after, and the ruins of Chroyane are shunned to this day as the abode of the Sorrows. The survivors of Garin's people fled south and west under the warrior queen Nymeria, who gathered them into ten thousand ships and led them at last across the sea to Dorne.