Petyr Baelish
Littlefinger: a lord of small birth and enormous ambition who rose from nothing to Master of Coin, financing the crown and his own schemes in equal measure. He knew Catelyn Tully as a boy and never forgot her.
A soul born at The Fingers, sworn to House Baelish.
The fuller tale
Season Three
In The Climb ÔÇö The ladder is all there is.
Season Four
In First of His Name ÔÇö The whole war, it turns out, started with his lie and Lysa's letter. In Mockingbird ÔÇö "Only Cat." And the Moon Door swallows a jealous heart.
Where they stand. The Eyrie.
Season Five
In High Sparrow ÔÇö Sells Sansa north the way he sells everything: smiling.
Where they stand. Winterfell and King's Landing.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Judged and executed at Winterfell (alive in the books) (S7┬ÀE7)
The man who started the whole game ÔÇö Jon Arryn's poison, the dagger, the letter ÔÇö was tried in Winterfell's hall by the sisters he'd spent years playing against each other. Sansa passed the sentence; Arya's blade crossed his throat mid-plea.
The show ends him in the hall of the family he spent a lifetime dismantling. At Winterfell, believing his sister-against-sister campaign is working, he attends what he thinks is Arya Stark's trial ÔÇö until Sansa, presiding, turns the charges on him: murder, and treason. The indictment is the series' full accounting, delivered by his victims' daughters with the realm's memory sitting witness ÔÇö Lysa's poisoning of Jon Arryn at his word, the dagger, the betrayal of Ned, the sale of Sansa ÔÇö with Bran supplying the details no living witness could. Littlefinger cycles through every tool that ever worked: denial, bargaining, a plea to Sansa's history with him, and finally, on his knees, begging. Sansa passes the sentence ÔÇö she is a slow learner, she tells him, but she learns ÔÇö and Arya opens his throat with the Valyrian dagger that began his game, mid-plea. In the published books he is alive, unsuspected, and winning: Lord Protector of the Vale with the realm's most valuable heiress on his arm and his fingerprints still invisible on every body. His show death is the series' promise about how his story must end; the books have yet to sign it.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The show's Baelish is the books' Baelish with the mask half off. On the page he is charm all the way down ÔÇö a small, quick, endlessly amusing man whom nobody believes dangerous, which is the entire trick; readers learn his depths only when point-of-view characters fall through them. Aidan Gillen's version telegraphs menace from the first season, and the show compensates by handing him scenes the books never staged: the chaos-ladder monologue, the direct confessions to Sansa and Ros, the open sparring with Varys across the throne room. The largest divergence is structural ÔÇö the marriage of Sansa to Ramsay Bolton is pure invention, and book readers note it requires show-Littlefinger to do the one thing his book self never does: surrender his most valuable asset into hands he cannot control, uninformed.
In the published novels his game is still very much afoot. He rules the Vale as Lord Protector, keeps Sansa hidden in plain sight as his bastard daughter Alayne, and is maneuvering her toward a marriage with the Vale's heir, Harrold Hardyng ÔÇö a plan whose endpoint, revealing Sansa Stark to claim both North and Vale at a stroke, the show compressed and discarded. Book readers therefore know a Littlefinger who has not yet made a single fatal mistake.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.