A small, lean, barefoot septon whose given name is nowhere recorded, and who by his own account walked a circuit of half a hundred villages too poor to keep a sept or a septon of their own, naming their children, shriving their sins, and speaking their marriage vows, until the War of the Five Kings burned that whole circuit off the map. He came to King's Landing at the head of the sparrows, the ragged and furious poor who carried the bones of murdered holy men in a wagon and asked every anointed knight they met upon the road to forsake his worldly master for the Faith; Brienne of Tarth met him so on the Rosby road, and he called the Maiden's blessing down upon her before he let her pass. When the High Septon of Lord Tywin's making was smothered in his sleep and the Most Devout sat to choose a successor, Septon Luceon Frey stood nine votes from the crystal crown before the sparrows came through the doors of the Great Sept of Baelor with axes in their hands and their thin leader on their shoulders, and the Most Devout, in terror of the beggars at the door, named him instead.
His first act as Father of the Faithful was to sell the wealth of the Faith entire — the crowns of gold and crystal, the rings, the robes of cloth-of-gold and cloth-of-silver — and buy bread for the poor with the proceeds, clothing himself in undyed wool to the ankle and requiring the Most Devout to do the same; fat Septon Torbert he shut in a penitent's cell on bread and water for the sin of being plump in a starving city. He would not go up to the Red Keep to bless King Tommen, so Queen Cersei Lannister came down to him, and found him and his Most Devout upon their knees scrubbing the floors of the sept, work being a form of prayer most pleasing to the Smith. To buy his blessing and the forgiveness of the near million dragons the crown owed the Faith, she granted him what Jaehaerys the Conciliator had taken away two and a half centuries before and struck down King Maegor's laws, so that the sparrows rose again as the Poor Fellows and above a hundred knights took the star of the Warrior's Sons. The fool Moon Boy gave him the name the court has used ever since, though never to his face, and Ser Lancel Lannister renounced Darry and his lordship both to lay his sword at the man's bare feet.
He proved no one's creature. When Cersei sent Ser Osney Kettleblack to confess falsely to bedding Queen Margaery Tyrell and two of her cousins, the High Sparrow heard a man too pleased to be guilty, put him to the scourge, and drew from him the truth instead: that the queen he had bedded was Cersei, and that the old High Septon had been smothered on her order. Margaery he released in time into the custody of Lord Randyll Tarly against a holy oath to return her for trial, while Cersei he kept in a cell beneath the Great Sept until she confessed to what she judged survivable, and freed her only at the price of a walk of atonement, shorn and naked, from the sept steps to the gates of the Red Keep. He holds still that a sacred court of seven godsworn shall judge both queens, three of them of the female sex — a maiden, a mother, and a crone — and neither Ser Kevan Lannister as Lord Regent nor Mace Tyrell as Hand dares gainsay him, lest the pious of the realm be driven into the arms of some other claimant. As Lord Randyll put it to the Regent, what have we become, when kings and high lords must dance to the twittering of sparrows?