Jeyne Poole

The steward's daughter and Sansa Stark's closest childhood friend, who travels with the Starks to the capital (book).

The fuller tale

Jeyne Poole starts the story as the most ordinary girl in it: the steward's daughter, Sansa's inseparable best friend since the nursery, a giggling co-conspirator in the serious business of ranking knights by handsomeness. She is the one who coins 'Arya Horseface,' which the tale files away as evidence that ordinary girls carry ordinary cruelties. She rides south with the household for the great adventure — a tourney! the court! — and is beside Sansa for all of it, right up until the day the adventure turns out to have been a trap for everyone wearing grey.

The purge of the Stark household makes her an orphan in a single hour, and the books then hand her to the worst possible custodian: Littlefinger, who takes the hysterical girl off Cersei's hands and sees, where everyone else sees a nuisance, an asset — a wellborn face nobody important will miss. What is done with her in his keeping the books leave in cold implication. She vanishes from the story for two volumes, which for a girl in Littlefinger's inventory is not the same as being safe.

Her return is the books' most harrowing plotline. The Boltons, needing a Stark to legitimize their theft of the North, produce 'Arya Stark' for Ramsay to marry — and it is Jeyne, coached and terrified, wed in Winterfell's godswood to a monster while northern lords who knew the real Arya hold their tongues and their grief. Her salvation comes from the tale's most broken man: it is for Jeyne that Theon Greyjoy, hollowed into Reek, finds the last unburned piece of himself, and the two of them go off the castle wall into the snow together — the abused rescuing the abused, the saga's bleakest storyline bending at last toward something like grace.

She matters because the tale insists she matters: a nobody, borrowed as a prop by every power that touches her, whose suffering is the true price of the great houses' games. The books built one of their most furious moral arguments on the girl the court forgot — nobody sings about stewards' daughters, and the story makes you feel exactly what that omission costs.

The page and the screen

The show cut Jeyne after a handful of first-season scenes — and then, needing her plotline anyway, gave it to Sansa: the false-bride marriage to Ramsay, the horrors at Winterfell, the escape over the wall with Theon are all Jeyne's book story wearing a Stark's face. The substitution is the adaptation's most debated single choice: it traded the books' argument (the machinery of power grinding an anonymous girl) for the screen's (a beloved principal enduring it), gaining immediacy and losing the point that the realm never even noticed Jeyne. In the published books she is alive — spirited away from Winterfell and sent, frostbitten and traumatized but breathing, toward safety in the company of Stannis's men, her story still open.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Winterfell hosts a wedding in the snow: Ramsay Bolton takes “Arya Stark” — Jeyne Poole in a stolen name — and Reek gives the bride away into horror. (ADWD 33)

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.