Val

Their story

Val enters the story as an afterthought of grief: sister to Dalla, the wife of Mance Rayder who dies giving birth to his son the same night Stannis’s knights shatter the wildling host. The southerners who take her captive look at her — tall, fair, striking — and reach for the only word their world has for a king’s beautiful sister-in-law: princess. The free folk find this hilarious. Val belongs to no one and confers no claim, and the tale mines a rich seam of comedy and menace from the parade of kneeler lords who court her as though she were a title deed with braids.

Captivity does not much dent her. Held at Castle Black as a hostage to wildling good behavior, she keeps her own counsel, tends her dead sister’s newborn, and studies her captors with the patience of a hunter in a blind. Stannis proposes to dispose of her hand as a reward for his lords; Val’s own position, expressed with total clarity, is that a man who wants her should be warned she has knife skills and opinions. Jon Snow, who deals with her as an envoy rather than a prize, gets the measure of her better than the kings do.

Her great errand proves the point. When Jon needs Tormund’s wandering remnant found and brought to terms — thousands of starving free folk, somewhere in the haunted forest, with winter closing — it is Val he sends, alone, over the Wall on a garron with no escort and no guarantee she will ever come back. She rides out like the north made flesh, keeps her word, and returns with the job done: the so-called captive princess accomplishing, unarmed and unaccompanied, what the Watch could not do with ranging parties.

Val’s sharpest scene is a warning. Meeting Shireen Baratheon, she recoils and tells Jon plainly that beyond the Wall the girl’s greyscale would mark her for death — that the free folk know the grey death sleeps and wakes, and kill the touched before it wakes. It lands as superstition and reads, in the books’ gathering pattern, like foreshadowing the south is too civilized to hear. That is Val’s function in one line: she says the things the free folk know and the kneelers have forgotten, and the story keeps quietly proving her right.

Where the page and the screen part

Val does not exist in the show. Her narrative estate was broken up and distributed: the wildling princess Stannis’s camp wants to marry off vanishes entirely; the hostage-envoy work goes to Tormund; and Mance’s wife and son — the reason for her presence at the Wall — are cut with her, which is why the show’s Mance can burn with no heir for Melisandre to covet and no baby for Jon to smuggle. Book-readers rate her among the most vivid characters the adaptation dropped: a point-of-view-less figure who nonetheless steals every chapter she enters, last seen alive and at liberty at Castle Black — where, on the night of the mutiny, she remains one of the fifth book’s many loaded, unfired guns. She is alive in the published books.