The Fingers

Four stony peninsulas clawing into the narrow sea ÔÇö sheep pellets, salt wind, and the smallest lordship in the Vale, whose most famous son named himself for it and climbed all the way to the king's council.

The fuller tale

The Fingers are four stony peninsulas clawing into the narrow sea from the ValeÔÇÖs coast ÔÇö sheep pellets, salt wind, flint towers and seaweed bread, by their most famous sonÔÇÖs own affectionate accounting. The smallest lordship on the smallest Finger raised Petyr Baelish, whose boyhood nickname mocked the holdingÔÇÖs size and who spent a lifetime making the mockery expensive: the boy from the Fingers rises through GulltownÔÇÖs ledgers to the kingÔÇÖs council, and his title inflation ÔÇö from Littlefinger to Lord of Harrenhal to Lord Protector of the Vale ÔÇö is the storyÔÇÖs cleanest satire of what the realm actually rewards.

The story visits once, memorably: Littlefinger brings a smuggled Sansa Stark to his ancestral tower ÔÇö a holding so modest the sheep outnumber the household ÔÇö and marries her aunt there in the taleÔÇÖs bleakest wedding-night comedy. The Fingers explain the man better than any council scene: a childhood spent staring at richer shores across the water, learning that the gameÔÇÖs pieces are debts, appetites and other menÔÇÖs pride, and that a man who owns nothing worth taking can bet everything, every time.

The chronicle here

• 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)

Born here

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place ÔÇö if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.