Lady

The best-behaved of the litter, killed for something another wolf did.

The wolf itself

Lady is grey and silver, lighter in the coat than her brothers, with a paler ruff at the throat and yellow eyes that are somehow the mildest yellow eyes in the litter. She is the smallest of the six after the runt, and the prettiest, and she carries herself the way well-bred dogs in a warm hall carry themselves: head up, tail level, unhurried, perfectly aware that she is being looked at. Even half-grown she was already too big for the rooms she was kept in, and she managed it gracefully, folding herself down beside chairs and under tables and never once knocking anything over.

Her temperament is her girlÔÇÖs, and both have been unfairly judged for it. Lady is courteous. She was the easiest of the six to train and the only one who never had to be corrected twice; she came when called, walked to heel without a lead, took food without snatching and did not bark. She never bit anyone in her life. Her voice is a soft whine at a closed door rather than a howl, and her instinct when a room turns tense is to press herself against her girlÔÇÖs leg rather than to move forward. That is not weakness ÔÇö she is still a direwolf, and a hundred and fifty pounds of one ÔÇö but she was raised to be pleasant among people, by a child who wanted very badly to be pleasant among people, and she succeeded at it completely.

The bond

Sansa named her Lady, which everyone remembers, usually while smiling at how very Sansa it is. It is also, quietly, the only name in the litter that describes an ambition rather than the animal ÔÇö the others named what they saw, and she named what she hoped to be.

The bond between them is the least examined of the six, and that is not an accident of the storytelling. Sansa is the Stark child who never learns what the connection is for. Where the others slip into their wolves in sleep and come back knowing things, she has almost no time at all with hers before the two are separated, and what she is left with afterwards is an absence rather than a skill. There are moments ÔÇö a dream that seems to belong to a different set of senses, a moment of certainty about someone that arrives from nowhere ÔÇö and then nothing, for years.

It is the cruellest of the six arrangements. Every other Stark child gets an animal that carries them through the worst part of their story. She gets manners, a court, and no instinct she can trust.

The kingsroad

What happened on the road south was not LadyÔÇÖs doing in any respect. There was a quarrel by a river between a prince and a butcherÔÇÖs boy and two younger children, and another wolf ended it by taking hold of the princeÔÇÖs arm, and then that wolf was driven off into the woods before anyone could catch her. A wolf had bitten a royal person. SomebodyÔÇÖs animal was going to answer for it, and the queen was not in a mood to be told that the correct one had run away.

Sansa was asked, in front of the king, to say what she had seen, and gave an answer that made everybody unhappy ÔÇö a frightened girl of eleven caught between a betrothed she had been taught to adore and a sister she had been fighting with all week, choosing to remember nothing. It has been held against her by readers for a long time. It is worth remembering how old she was, and that no answer she could have given would have changed the outcome, because the outcome had already been decided by someone who wanted a Stark to lose something.

Lady was chained at the time, some distance away, and had done nothing whatsoever. That is the entire point of her. The gentlest animal in the story is held to account for the wildest oneÔÇÖs crime, by people who cannot tell one wolf from another and would not care if they could ÔÇö and the man who has to settle the matter is the one Stark who genuinely believes that a sentence should never be handed to a stranger.

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

Lady is the first of the six to die, and the first real proof that the story will not protect the innocent. Ned Stark did it himself, with the family greatsword, rather than let a butcher's man do it badly ÔÇö and her bones were sent north to be buried at Winterfell, the only one of the six to go home.

Her death is also, quietly, why Sansa spends years without the instinct the others keep ÔÇö she is the Stark child who lost her wolf before she ever learned to use it. There is an argument, never made out loud in the books, that everything done to Sansa afterwards was possible because the animal that would have objected was already dead.