Arianne Martell
Doran's eldest child and heir to Dorne, bold and sensual and impatient with her father's stillness — a princess who means to be reckoned with (book only).
The fuller tale
Arianne Martell is the heir to Dorne — not a courtesy title but the law, for Dorne alone of the kingdoms follows Rhoynish custom and seats eldest children regardless of sex — and the books build her out of that inheritance and one corrosive doubt about it. Small, dark, lush and clever, adored in the shadow city, she found in her father's desk as a girl a letter that seemed to promise Sunspear to her brother Quentyn, and grew up certain that Doran meant to rob her of her birthright. The truth of that letter — that her father's plans for her ran so much higher than Dorne that he dared not write them plainly — arrives years too late to prevent what her wound sets in motion.
Her conspiracy is the fourth book's Dornish spine. Certain she must seize her future before it is signed away, Arianne steals Myrcella Baratheon from the Water Gardens and rides for the Greenblood to crown her under Dornish law — a queenmaker's stroke that would split the realm's succession and force Dorne into the war on her terms, with a besotted Kingsguard knight, Arys Oakheart, drawn into treason at her side. It fails as conspiracies of the passionate fail: a friend betrays it, her father's captain is waiting at the river, and the wreckage is immediate — a dead knight, a maimed princess, her companions scattered to cells and exile, and Arianne herself walled up in the Spear Tower with only her thoughts, which is precisely the sentence her father intends.
What follows is the saga's best chamber piece: Doran letting his daughter stew until fury cools into thinking, then unfolding, one truth at a time, the plan she was born into — the Braavosi pact, the crown she was always meant for, the brother sent to bring her a dragon. Vengeance, justice, fire and blood, whispered with his swollen hands in hers, converts Arianne in a night from her father's opponent to his instrument, and the winds-of-winter chapters already published find her transformed: Dorne's envoy riding north to weigh the young man who calls himself Aegon Targaryen, her country's spears — and her own unmarried hand — the stakes on the table. She is alive, central, and by the books' unfinished evidence, only beginning.
The page and the screen
Arianne is the largest single casualty of the show's Dorne: cut whole, along with the plot she carries. The series erased Doran's heir, handed Dorne's future to the Sand Snakes' coup, and redistributed her narrative organs — the Myrcella peril went to Ellaria's poison, the Dornish-law crowning vanished, and no character inherited her interiority: the queenmaker chapters are told from inside her skin, pride and doubt and grief in equal measure, and nothing in the show's Dorne is told from inside anyone. Book readers rank her with Stoneheart among the adaptation's most consequential omissions — remove Arianne and Dorne stops being a country with a plan and becomes a set with knives on it.
Mentioned in the chronicle
- In the shade of Dorne, Ser Arys Oakheart lets Arianne Martell talk him out of his white cloak and into a plot: crown Myrcella, and let Dorne rise. (AFFC 14)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.