A Storm of Swords — Sansa VII

Snow falls in the Eyrie's garden: a castle built of memories, an unwanted kiss witnessed — and Lysa raving at the Moon Door until Petyr's “only Cat” sends her through it.

The chapter retold

In the Eyrie's high garden, built from memory and snow to resemble the world Petyr Baelish loved and lost, Sansa Stark — still living as Alayne Stone — receives an unwanted kiss from Littlefinger that is witnessed by his new wife, Lysa Arryn, at the worst possible moment. Lysa's jealousy, already primed by a lifetime of loving a man who has never fully returned it, ignites into a rage that drags Sansa toward the Moon Door, the Eyrie's infamous execution drop, in a fit of murderous hysteria.

Littlefinger talks his wife down with practiced tenderness, calming her fury just long enough to get her alone beside the open door — and then pushes her through it himself, murmuring, as she falls, that there has only ever been one woman he loved, and her name was Catelyn, not Lysa. Lysa Arryn dies on the Vale's stones far below, and the singer Marillion is produced as a convenient culprit, his false confession to her murder extracted through torture rather than truth — mutilation standing in for justice, and Littlefinger's crime buried under someone else's ruined mouth.

The chapter completes Littlefinger's transformation, for the reader if not yet for Sansa, from ambiguous protector into a man who murders wives the way other men discard letters — efficiently, without visible regret, and always with someone else positioned to take the blame. Sansa watches the aftermath from close enough to understand, at last, exactly what kind of man has been shaping her disguise and her safety this whole time.

This movement: Gold, Ice, and the Hanged Woman

• Jaime frees his brother; Tyrion detours through the Tower of the Hand: Shae in the bed, Tywin on the privy, a crossbow for both.
• Lysa Arryn flies from the Moon Door screaming about tears and dark words; Littlefinger blames a singer.
• Jon Snow is elected Lord Commander of the Night's Watch on Sam's clever tongue.
• Epilogue at the Twins: the Brotherhood hangs Freys for a hooded woman whose throat gapes — Lady Stoneheart remembers.

The fallen — spoilers

• Lysa Arryn — Pushed through her own Moon Door by the man she killed her husband for.
• Marillion — A singer blamed for a lady's fall — his confession bought with pieces of himself.