House Arryn
The purest blood of the Andal kings, Wardens of the East, enthroned in the Eyrie high in the Mountains of the Moon above the rich and sheltered Vale of Arryn. A white moon-and-falcon on sky blue, their mountain seat is reckoned impregnable — and their lady this generation, Jeyne the Maiden of the Vale, holds it against every cousin who thinks a woman cannot.
The fuller tale
The Arryns hold the Vale from an eyrie no army has ever taken by force, purest Andal blood in the Seven Kingdoms by their own reckoning, and their words — As High As Honor — describe both the fortress’s elevation and the family’s opinion of itself with equal literalness. By the Dance the house’s influence on the crown is already older than the war: Aemma Arryn was Viserys’s first queen, dead in the birthing bed that opened the succession question in the first place, which makes every Targaryen claimant in this conflict at least partly Arryn by blood, whether the Vale ever raises a sword for either side or not.
The Vale itself is ruled, through the whole of the crisis, by Jeyne Arryn — the Maiden of the Vale, unmarried for decades against the wishes of cousins who assume a woman cannot hold a mountain seat any longer than it takes to marry her off it. She proves them wrong for the length of an entire reign, and her example sits in the background of the whole war like an argument already half-won: a woman can rule, has been ruling, and the realm’s great quarrel over whether a queen can sit the Iron Throne is one the Eyrie settled quietly, without a single dragon, years before it ever came to Dragonstone’s attention.
Jeyne declares for the Blacks early and lends the cause more than swords — the Vale becomes a place to send what the war cannot risk losing, sheltering exiled or endangered Targaryen children behind mountains no enemy can easily climb, dragon and rider both kept out of reach of a capital that has already proven it will burn its own nurseries.
When the war’s final reckoning comes, it is Vale ships out of Gulltown, commanded in Jeyne’s name, that reach King’s Landing at nearly the same hour as the northern host and the riverlands’ levies — three loyalties that spent the whole war looking like separate stories converging, in the end, on the same tide. Jeyne outlives the fighting to sit among the small council of regents that steadies the realm for its boy king, proof by administration rather than argument of the very question the war was fought to decide.
The page and the screen
The Vale’s role in the show leans more visibly on Rhaena Targaryen’s time there than the book’s comparatively brief treatment allows — a dramatized hunt through the Vale’s high passes for a wild dragon to claim, expanded for the screen into its own subplot with tension and set-pieces the chronicle format of Fire & Blood was never built to sustain. Jeyne Arryn herself receives considerably less spoken dialogue on screen than her long, quietly consequential rule earns her on the page.
