A Storm of Swords ÔÇö Sansa VI
The Fingers and a wedding: Lysa Arryn gets her Petyr at last, shrieking joy through the night, and Sansa becomes Alayne Stone, the Lord Protector's bastard daughter.
The chapter retold
In the Fingers, the isolated coastal lands of House Baelish's modest ancestral holding, Petyr Baelish marries Lysa Arryn at last ÔÇö a match Lysa has wanted since long before Jon Arryn's death, one she believes she killed her own husband to make possible. She shrieks with a joy that carries through the walls on their wedding night, unrestrained in a way that unsettles everyone else in the household, not least Sansa Stark, watching her protector's new wife come undone with happiness that reads more like hunger than love.
For Sansa the wedding means a formal change of identity: she becomes Alayne Stone, Petyr Baelish's supposed bastard daughter, a disguise meant to keep the Lannisters and the rest of Westeros from finding the missing Stark girl hiding in plain sight at the top of the Vale. The chapter completes Sansa's transformation from a captive with a name into a fiction with none, one more layer of protection that is also, unmistakably, one more layer of control exercised over her by a man whose motives remain deliberately murky.
This movement: The Purple Wedding and the Trial
- Joffrey chokes at his own wedding feast, purple as his namesake; Sansa vanishes with a fool and a hairnet lighter by one stone.
- Tyrion stands trial for kingslaying; Shae's testimony cuts deepest; he demands trial by combat.
- Oberyn Martell fights the Mountain for a confession ÔÇö and wins everything but the ending.
- Petyr Baelish sails Sansa to the Vale as his "daughter Alayne"; Lysa marries him inside a week.