The Eyrie

Seat of House Arryn

A castle of white stone atop the Giant's Lance, reached by a goat path and defended by the sky itself.

The fuller tale

The Eyrie is the smallest of the great seats and the least takeable object in Westeros. Seven slim white towers stand on a shoulder of the Giant’s Lance, thousands of feet above the Vale, reached only by a goat track that climbs past three waycastles — Stone, Snow and Sky — and finishes as a chimney climbed in baskets. An attacking army arrives single file, exhausted, in bowshot the whole way; in recorded history no one has ever bothered to finish the attempt. The price of impregnability is paid in winters, when the castle ices shut and even the Arryns descend to the valley floor. The Eyrie is not a home so much as a statement, made in white stone, that House Arryn is above it all.

The Arryns are the oldest Andal line in Westeros, kings of Mountain and Vale for millennia under the moon-and-falcon, their words — As High as Honor — the only great house motto that is neither threat nor boast. Jon Arryn embodied them: the realm’s honest broker, foster father to Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon, the man whose refusal to surrender his wards started a rebellion and whose death in King’s Landing starts the story. The whole tale is, in one reading, the probate of Jon Arryn’s estate.

What the story finds at the top of the mountain is the realm’s strangest court. Lysa Arryn, widowed, fearful and long-used by cleverer people, keeps the Vale’s knights home through the whole war while nursing her son — a trembling boy lordling whose favorite entertainment is watching things exit the Moon Door. The Eyrie’s celebrated fixtures do their work on every visitor: the sky cells, open-sided dungeons whose sloping floors let the mountain wind argue nightly for jumping, nearly break Tyrion Lannister — until he talks his way into a trial by combat and a sellsword’s pragmatism beats an armored knight, the tale’s first great demonstration that the old forms are hackable.

In the later tale the castle becomes Littlefinger’s aviary. He marries the widow, pockets the Vale, and brings a hidden Stark girl to the one castle in Westeros where no enemy can follow — then removes his besotted wife through her own Moon Door when her jealousy turns dangerous, and talks the Vale’s lords into believing his account of the fall. The Eyrie’s lesson curdles accordingly: a fortress that cannot be stormed can still be taken, by marriage, in an afternoon, by a man who never wore armor in his life.

The Vale’s swords, hoarded through every battle of the war, are the story’s last unspent army — and when they finally ride, it is a Stark girl, not her keeper, who directs the spending. The Eyrie ends the tale as it began: aloof, intact, and above it all, the one great seat the war never touched — which is either the Arryn words vindicated or an indictment of them, depending which side of the Bloody Gate you ask.

The page and the screen

The tellings disagree about the Moon Door itself: in the books it is a narrow weirwood door in the wall of the High Hall, opening on six hundred feet of sky, through which condemned men step; the show rebuilds it as a hatch in the floor, a stage trapdoor for the castle’s two great exits. The books also keep the story at the Eyrie longer and lower — the court descends to the Gates of the Moon for winter, and Sansa’s life as Alayne Stone, managing Sweetrobin and Littlefinger’s tournament politics, continues past the point where the show has already moved her north. Lysa’s fall is staged differently too: on the page a singer takes the blame, with Marillion’s confession bought and paid for; on screen Littlefinger’s lie is simpler and Sansa’s testimony saves him.

The chronicle here

The Eyrie's champion Ser Vardis Egen fights Bronn for the gods' verdict — and follows his shield through the Moon Door. (AGOT 41)
The Eyrie empties down the mountain for winter; Littlefinger unveils the next move — Harry the Heir for Alayne, and with him, one day, the Vale's knights for Sansa Stark. (AFFC 42)