Nymeria

Driven away with stones to save her life, and now queen of a wolf pack hundreds strong.

The wolf itself

Nymeria is grey-brown and rough-coated, a plainer animal than her sister and a considerably more dangerous one, with gold eyes that go flat when she has decided something. She grew fast and ugly ÔÇö all legs and shoulder for the first year, no elegance anywhere ÔÇö and she has kept growing far longer than any wolf should. Full-grown she is the size of a small horse and heavier through the chest, and she can take a mounted man off his saddle without breaking stride. Her ears are notched. Her muzzle has scars on it from things that fought back.

Her temperament is her girlÔÇÖs, taken further than her girl has yet gone. She was never biddable. She would come when called if she felt like it, learned what she was taught and then declined to perform it, and had to be washed rather than groomed because she would not stand still. She is not vicious in the way that a badly kept dog is vicious; she simply does not accept that anyone has authority over her, and she never has, from the first week. Her voice is the one that starts the others ÔÇö a rising howl that gets answered from a long way off. Around hearths and halls and people who want to put a collar on her she is impossible. Out in the country at night she is entirely at home.

The bond

Arya named her wolf after a Rhoynish warrior queen who took ten thousand ships across the sea and burned them behind her, which tells you everything about what a nine-year-old girl thought she was going to be. The two of them were the least manageable pairing in the litter from the start, and the most alike.

Then Arya drove her away ÔÇö threw stones at her own wolf, hard, screaming at her, because a tame wolf near that road would have been killed within the hour and a wild one might not be. It is the first genuinely adult decision anyone in the story makes, and it is made by a child of nine who understood the arithmetic perfectly and did it anyway with a rock in her hand.

What survives the separation is the warging, and Arya has it more strongly than anyone in the family except perhaps her youngest brother. It comes in sleep and she does not summon it: she is running through wet woods with a pack strung out behind her, the smells are enormous and layered and legible, the pain in her own life is a long way off, and she wakes with her jaw aching and the taste of something in her mouth. She calls them her wolf dreams and treats them as a private comfort rather than a power. They are the one thing that never leaves her, through every name she is made to answer to and every place she is made to be nobody in, and it is not a coincidence that the story keeps handing her that particular dream whenever it has taken everything else away.

Queen of the riverlands

What Nymeria did with her freedom is the most extraordinary thing any of the six animals achieved. She did not go feral and starve. She went into the riverlands during the worst years those lands have ever had ÔÇö burned villages, unburied dead, no lord enforcing anything, every road a hazard ÔÇö and she built an empire out of it, gathering the abandoned dogs and the ordinary wolves and whatever else would follow, until she led a pack numbered in the hundreds.

The smallfolk speak of that pack the way they speak of weather: not as an animal that might be hunted, but as a condition of the country, something you plan a journey around. There are stories of it pulling riders down, of it taking a villageÔÇÖs livestock in a single night, of a she-wolf at the head of it bigger than any wolf has a right to be. Some of those stories are exaggerated. The important ones are not, and the men who set out to deal with the problem have generally come back with fewer people than they left with.

It should be said what this actually represents. Every other wolf in this litter spent its life beside a human being. This one was thrown out with stones into the worst place in Westeros at the worst possible moment, and made herself the ruler of it.

The meeting in the woods

Years later, girl and wolf come across each other again, on a road in the north with the pack somewhere in the dark and a fire between them. Arya knows her at once. She says her name, and asks her to come ÔÇö asks her to come home, in as many words, back to the thing they were.

The wolf looks at her for a while. Then she turns and goes, and the pack goes with her.

AryaÔÇÖs reaction is the most honest piece of self-knowledge in her entire story: an acknowledgement, out loud, that an animal like that does not belong beside anybodyÔÇÖs fire, and that asking it to was the wrong question. She is not talking about the wolf. Both of them have been out in the country too long to come in, both of them have built something out there that would not survive a hall, and the scene works precisely because neither of them is wrong.

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

The chronicle records no ending here ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.