House Hollard was one of the lesser noble houses of the crownlands, sworn from old to the Darklyns of Duskendale, with whom their fortunes were so closely entwined that the three golden crowns upon their barry red-and-pink chief were said to echo the three sandstone-merlon towers of the Dun Fort itself. For centuries they served the lords of Duskendale as household knights, masters-at-arms, and stewards, their daughters married into Darklyn beds and their sons watching the walls of the Dun Fort beside their cousins. They held no great holdfast of their own that any maester now records, but in the narrow precincts of Duskendale they were as close to the lord's hand as any house in the realm.
Their ruin came in the Defiance of 277 AC, when Lord Denys Darklyn shut the gates of his town against King Aerys II, hoping to wring from his sovereign a charter of self-rule, and instead took him captive. The Hollards stood with their lieges throughout the six months of the siege; Ser Symon Hollard cut down Ser Gwayne Gaunt of the Kingsguard when the white knight came too close to the king's tower, and the rest of the line gave such service as kinship demanded. When Ser Barristan Selmy of the Kingsguard slipped into the Dun Fort at night and bore King Aerys out from under his captors' noses, he slew Symon along the way; the king's vengeance then fell upon all who had defied him, and Lord Darklyn, his lady wife, the Hollards, and their kin were put to the sword in the gardens of the Red Keep. Of the whole line only young Dontos Hollard was spared, on the white knight's plea — a boy too small to have lifted a sword in the Defiance, kept thereafter at court as a knight in name and a fool in truth, the last bearer of a name unmade.