Sunspear

Seat of House Martell

The winding-walled seat of House Martell at the edge of the eastern sea, shaded and slow to anger.

The fuller tale

Sunspear rises at the desert's eastern edge where Dorne meets the sea ÔÇö less a castle than an argument between two peoples, resolved in sandstone. The old Martell keep got its slender Spear Tower and the great dome of the Tower of the Sun when Nymeria of the Rhoyne landed her ten thousand ships, wed Mors Martell, and burned the fleet so no one could suggest going back; the banners over the gates quarter her sun with his spear, and the house that rules from beneath them styles its head neither king nor lord but Prince, in the Rhoynish fashion. Around the castle's walls huddles the shadow city ÔÇö winding mud-brick alleys, bazaars and the long climb of the Winding Walk ÔÇö because Dorne's capital grew like Dorne itself: not planned, not conquered, accreted out of heat and stubbornness.

The house words are the region's history compressed: Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken. Alone of the Seven Kingdoms, Dorne never fell to the dragons ÔÇö Aegon's conquest broke against sand, thirst and a war without battles, and a queen's dragon fell from the sky over the Hellholt to prove the point. Dorne came into the realm a century later by marriage, on terms, keeping its princes and its laws, and Sunspear has never let the Iron Throne forget the difference between a kingdom conquered and a kingdom courted. The pride cuts both ways: it was a Princess of Dorne, Elia Martell, who married the last dragon prince and died with her children in the sack of King's Landing ÔÇö the wound beneath every Martell scene in the tale, nursed for seventeen years in the Water Gardens' shade.

The tale's Sunspear is a court of concealed motion. Prince Doran, gout-ridden and unreadable, rules from his rolling chair with a patience his own subjects mistake for surrender; his brother Oberyn is the family's public temper, the Red Viper who rides north to the capital for a wedding, a trial, and the duel that reopens every old wound at once. The fury that follows ÔÇö the shadow city clamoring for war, the prince's own blood plotting around him ÔÇö is the books' great Dornish movement: a paralyzed ruler revealed, in the tale's most quietly devastating reversal, to have been playing the longest game on the board, his children seeded toward crowns and his enemies toward each other. Vengeance, justice ÔÇö the old prince's whisper names the price of seventeen years of stillness, and the books leave Dorne cocked like a crossbow.

In the show, Sunspear's story is briefer and bloodier: the viper's paramour and daughters answer Oberyn's death by murdering the peace ÔÇö a poisoned kiss for a princess, a blade for the prince who counseled patience ÔÇö and Dorne enters the great war as a faction of vengeance under no banner but grief, spending itself in a queen's cause far from home. Between the tellings, one truth holds: Sunspear is the capital of the realm's one unconquered people, and the tale uses it to ask its most Dornish question ÔÇö whether patience is wisdom or just slow anger, and whether there is a difference once the spear finally flies.

The page and the screen

No region divides the tellings like Dorne. The books build Sunspear a full political world ÔÇö Doran's decade-spanning plot to marry his children into a Targaryen restoration, Arianne's queenmaker scheme with Myrcella, Quentyn's doomed errand east, the Sand Snakes as distinct dangerous women dispatched on separate missions ÔÇö all narrated with the region's own point-of-view chapters. The show compresses this to a revenge plot: Doran is a genial obstacle removed in a single scene, Trystane with him, and Ellaria and three interchangeable Sand Snakes seize Dorne offscreen, then dissolve into Daenerys's war. Book readers regard the adaptation of Dorne as the show's most complete demolition; even the show's partisans mostly grant the point, and the books' Dornish game ÔÇö still unresolved ÔÇö remains one of the strongest reasons the two tellings will end by different roads.

The chronicle here

The Sand Snakes come to Sunspear demanding vengeance for Oberyn, each with her own war; Prince Doran cages his nieces and watches, and waits, and aches. (AFFC 3)
Ser Balon Swann brings the Mountain's skull to Sunspear; Doran smiles at the gift, deflects a summons ÔÇö and sends his Sand Snakes to King's Landing, each with a task. (ADWD 39)