The Catspaw Dagger

The smallest blade on this list, and the one that decides the most.

The blade itself

It is a dagger about the length of a forearmÔÇÖs bone, and it is the plainest object in this collection and the most expensive-looking. The blade is Valyrian steel ÔÇö dark, faintly rippled, tapering to a point fine enough to be uncomfortable to look at ÔÇö and it has no ornament at all, no engraving, no inlay, nothing but the waves in the metal. The hilt is dragonbone: black, smooth, slightly warm to the touch, and worth on its own more than most knights own. There is no crossguard to speak of. The whole thing is meant to be worn under a coat and used at armÔÇÖs length in a small room.

It weighs almost nothing. It goes through leather like cloth and through mail as though the rings were unlinked, and it has never needed a stone taken to it. A knife like this is an absurd thing to give a hired murderer ÔÇö the equivalent of sending a man to break a window with a jewel ÔÇö and everybody who ever handled it understood that, which is why the question of who owned it became so much more important than the question of who held it.

The reason for that value is the same reason the whole of this list exists: Valyrian steel cannot be made. It came out of the FreeholdÔÇÖs forges with dragonfire and sorcery, the Doom ended both, and no smith alive can produce so much as a new nail of it. Which means that unlike a sword, which announces itself, a Valyrian dagger can be carried through a crowd unseen and still be traced afterwards by anyone who knows the short list of people wealthy enough to have owned one.

Sent to a sickroom

The dagger enters the story in the hands of a hired killer, sent into a quiet room in Winterfell where a crippled boy lay senseless, with instructions to cut his throat and make it look like anything else. The attempt failed ÔÇö badly, and against a direwolf ÔÇö and the killer left the weapon behind him, which is the single most consequential piece of carelessness in the entire saga.

Catelyn Stark took the knife south to KingÔÇÖs Landing to find out whose it was. That journey, and the answer she was given, put the Starks and the Lannisters at each otherÔÇÖs throats and lit the war. The whole plot of the first book runs through this one small object, and the extraordinary thing is that it does so entirely as evidence rather than as a weapon.

Whose was it?

The answer she received was a lie, and a very good one: she was told the dagger had been won at a tourney wager by a certain Lannister, in a bet on a Kingsguard knightÔÇÖs joust, and the man who told her that had been the one holding the losing side of the story. The accusation was aimed to detonate, and it did.

Working out the truth is harder and the story is deliberately unhelpful about it. One account, offered later and with some plausibility, holds the knife belonged to the king himself and was taken out of his armoury by a son who wanted to please him and had no sense of proportion ÔÇö a boy hearing a drunk father wish aloud that an injured child would just get on with dying, and deciding to arrange it. The other reading points at the man who told the lie in the first place, on the grounds that a liar who names a false owner is usually protecting the real one, and that the war that followed was extremely convenient for him.

Both explanations have supporters. The books have not settled it, and the two tellings of the story do not agree: on the screen the dagger is unambiguously the property of the man who lied about it, and he hands it on himself, years later, as a gift with a great deal of calculation behind it.

Passed along

After KingÔÇÖs Landing the knife travelled. It changed hands more times than any other blade in this collection, mostly in circumstances nobody recorded properly ÔÇö pulled from a body, taken as loot, carried in a boot, given away in a courtyard to a boy in a chair who had every reason to know what it was and said nothing about it. It went north again in the end, back to the castle it had been used in, which is not the sort of thing objects usually do.

That is what makes the dagger the strangest item here. Every other blade in this collection is an heirloom: it belongs to a house, it has a name, it passes from father to son and its history is a list of surnames. The catspaw dagger has no house and no proper name ÔÇö it is called after the hired man who dropped it. It has spent the entire story being carried by people who acquired it by accident, and it has arguably decided more than all the great swords put together.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

The same dagger, years later and several owners on, is the thing Arya Stark drives into the Night King in the godswood at Winterfell. A weapon sent to murder a Stark child ends up in a Stark child's hand ending the war it was never meant to be part of.

It is also, by then, the only blade in this collection to have been used for the purpose the whole material apparently exists to serve. The great houses spent three centuries hanging their Valyrian steel on walls. The thing that finished it was a knife that had been passed hand to hand like a stolen purse.