Lysa Arryn

Catelyn's sister, widow of Jon Arryn, shut up in the impregnable Eyrie with her sickly son — nervous, possessive, and not entirely in her right mind.

The fuller tale

Lysa Tully grew up at Riverrun as the second daughter — second in age, second in beauty, second in her father’s calculations, and second in the heart of the boy she loved. Petyr Baelish, the minor ward with the quick tongue, wanted Catelyn; Lysa wanted Petyr; and out of that simple, unrequited geometry the story eventually builds two wars. She gave herself to him, loved him without reservation or return, and never in her life recovered from the discovery that love is not a thing you can earn by wanting it hardest.

What her family did next made her. The books lay it out plainly: when Lysa was found to be carrying Petyr’s child, Lord Hoster forced moon tea on her — the drug called tansy — and then married her, damaged goods discreetly repackaged, to a widower older than her father. The Arryn marriage was duty in its purest form: Jon needed Riverrun’s swords, Hoster needed the stain covered, and nobody needed Lysa to consent to anything. Years of stillbirths and miscarriages followed in a cold mountain castle, until one frail boy finally lived — and Lysa, who had lost every other thing she ever held, gripped him hard enough to bruise.

Widowhood turned her strange in ways the Vale learned to tiptoe around. She fled the capital with her son the moment her husband was dead, shut the Eyrie’s gates, and refused every summons of the war — no swords for her nephew Robb, none for anyone, the Vale’s knights rusting in the mountains while the riverlands burned. Visitors found a nervous, imperious woman nursing a boy well past nursery age, holding court from a weirwood throne beside a hole in the floor. Tyrion Lannister, delivered to her by Catelyn, got the full experience: a sky cell, a farce of a trial, and the Moon Door yawning under a sellsword’s duel.

Then Petyr Baelish came back, and Lysa got, at last, exactly what she had always wanted — which is the cruelest thing the story ever does to her. She married him in indecent haste, giddy as the girl she never got to be, unable to see that she had been a tool of his for years: the poison, the letter, the war itself had all been played through her willing hands. Her reward was to watch her new husband look at her niece Sansa the way he had once looked at her sister.

Lysa matters because the story’s great secret runs through her twice. Hers were the hands that killed the Hand of the King and hers the pen that blamed the Lannisters — the two acts that set every army marching — and she committed both for a man incapable of loving her back. She is the tale’s saddest study in what the marriage market does to the people it trades: not a villain born, but a girl bartered, drugged, and shelved until the damage compounded into something dangerous. Her sister got the songs. Lysa got the Moon Door.

The page and the screen

The bones of her story match across the tellings, but the books supply the childhood that explains her — the tansy, the forced marriage, the aborted child, all confessed in her final raving at the Moon Door — where the show sketches the obsession and lets the history stay dim. The aftermath differs too: in the books Littlefinger frames the singer Marillion for her death and extracts a confession, while the show has him talk his way past the Vale lords with Sansa’s tearful, calculated testimony as his shield. Book-Lysa is also a shade more dangerous — her jealousy of Sansa turns physical at the Moon Door itself, snow swirling into the hall while she screams the whole conspiracy aloud.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Lysa Arryn marries Littlefinger within the hour of his arrival — and shrieks the truth of Jon Arryn's murder. (S4·E5)
• Tywin's council reorders the realm like a ledger: Littlefinger is priced at the Vale and Lysa Arryn, and Tyrion inherits a wedding's bills and a city's drains. (ASOS 13)
• 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. (ASOS 69)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Fell from the Eyrie (S4·E7)

The books: Out the Moon Door (ASOS, ch. 81)

The Lady of the Vale confessed she'd poisoned her own husband at Littlefinger's word, and threatened Sansa at the Moon Door in a jealous fury. Petyr calmed her, kissed her once — 'I have only loved one woman' — and pushed her through it.

She dies at the Moon Door she loved to feed. In the show it comes moments after she has watched Petyr kiss Sansa in the snow: she drags her niece to the open door, raving, until Petyr talks her gently back — and then tells her he has only ever loved one woman, her sister, and pushes her through. In the books the scene runs the same course at greater length, Lysa confessing the poisoning of Jon Arryn and the lying letter in front of the one witness who matters, before Petyr pries her fingers loose with a single word — “only Cat” — and lets the sky have her.

Either way, the man she killed for was the man who killed her, and her death is the story’s first full confession: everything the realm believed about the war’s beginning was authored by the two people standing at that door. Only Sansa hears it, which is the point — from that moment the girl knows exactly what her protector is.