“They can’t hurt me, they’re dying. She took her cup from her bedroll and went to the fountain.”
Synopsis: Arya and the Brotherhood Without Banners visits Stoney Sept, where they debate the ethics of the death penalty and whether Gendry should bone his half-sister, before Arya meets someone from her past.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all…
He had him tortured, and Marillion broke. Everyone does.
Marilion’s presence is a great example of Littlefinger getting super, super lucky, because if he didn’t exist Littlefinger would have had to create him, and Littlefinger clearly had no plans to.
Like, let’s look at the setup for murdering Lysa. Littlefinger had clearly been planning to do that at some point, but just as clearly hadn’t been planning on doing it so soon; Lysa was useful to him alive for much longer.
So let’s look at this setup. Littlefinger has been bragging openly for months and almost certainly privately for years that he had Lysa’s maidenhead, and Lysa is widely known to be unstable, flighty, prone to strong emotional outbursts she then follows up on. And part of the reason she’s known for that is that Littlefinger has been emotionally manipulating her for years to encourage those tendencies in her.
So Lysa is already established both as someone the Lords of the Vale don’t much care for AND as someone with a pre-existing romantic and sexual interest in Petyr Baelish, as well as someone who would do something super impulsive like marry him instantly the second she’s capable of doing so. Cool. This sets up Petyr as the eminence grise in the Vale.
It also sets him up as THE prime suspect if anything at all happens to Lysa. The upjumped coin-counter with a spurious claim to Harrenhal who is known as a silver-tongued cunning bastard that nobody really likes or trusts marrying so far above his station? Yeah, if Lysa dies everyone is gonna be looking at him. Everyone DID look at him! There was an armed rebellion that he had to dance really fast to get out from underneath.
So to get rid of Lysa, he needs a patsy. A convincing patsy. And he has, as near as I can tell, taken NO steps to set one up. Marillion’s presence is an enormously lucky break for him; a singer (already a suspect social class; randy, passionate, untrustworthy singers are practically a stereotype in Westeros) who has attached himself to Lysa’s entourage, who is roundly loathed by all the Vale Lords because he constantly mocks them and hides behind Lysa’s skirts, always near her. He didn’t arrange for that to happen; it happened without any input from him whatsoever.
Without Marillion, Littlefinger is in an awful, awful spot when Lysa has her final mental break. (There are many who say this break was deliberately provoked by Baelish creeping up on Sansa; I say bollocks to that, Littlefinger has enormously poor impulse control and likes to do flashy, unwise shit to prove how powerful and in-control he is, and he’s clearly been salivating to get his hands on Catelyn 2.0 for ages.) Lysa is babbling all kinds of ridiculously incriminating shit and threatening to kill Sansa, who is the key to all of Petyr’s future political and sexual plans, and without the enormously lucky break of Marillion standing literally right there, Littlefinger is in a CRAZY bad spot, because Lysa unspooling right in front of him also represents the unspooling of his plans (what if she has a similar breakdown in front of, say, Bronze Yohn Royce at some point?), and if he kills her without a patsy even HE probably can’t salvage anything from that.
Only the gods provided not only a patsy, a patsy that Lysa, again with no input from Littlefinger, placed right where he needed to be for Littlefinger to take full advantage.
Littlefinger is the luckiest goddamn schemer in all of Westeros.
Follow up to inflation question on further thinking: it seems especially strange if there are no periods of crisis level inflation on a third century Rome level given the rudimentary knowledge, lack of financial governing (esp. between kingdoms pre-conquest) and the need to outbid rivals for swords given the very regular inter- and intra-kingdom violence. I admit to being no financial expert but that seems like a nice mixture for devaluation and inflation. Thanks.
As people have pointed out, GRRM is not super-consistent on this stuff. For example, in a time of plenty, Dunk sells his horse for 2.3 dragons; in the midst of bloody civil war, with people increasingly unwilling to take coin (which you can’t eat) for horses (which you can), Brienne buys two horses for 1.5 dragons each.
On the other hand, at times, GRRM is better at depicting the impact of the War of Five Kings on prices. For example, when Tyrion arrives in King’s Landing just as the Tyrells have cut off the city from the south (a major supply shock) and the city has become swollen with refugees (a major increase in demand), we see hyper-inflation in action:
“The markets were crowded with ragged men selling their household goods for any price they could get … and conspicuously empty of farmers selling food. What little produce he did see was three times as costly as it had been a year ago. One peddler was hawking rats roasted on a skewer. “Fresh rats,” he cried loudly, “fresh rats.” Doubtless fresh rats were to be preferred to old stale rotten rats. The frightening thing was, the rats looked more appetizing than most of what the butchers were selling. On the Street of Flour, Tyrion saw guards at every other shop door. When times grew lean, even bakers found sellswords cheaper than bread, he reflected.”(Tyrion I, ACOK)
“Muddy Way was crowded, but soldiers and townfolk alike made way for the Imp and his escort. Hollow-eyed children swarmed underfoot, some looking up in silent appeal whilst others begged noisily. Tyrion pulled a big fistful of coppers from his purse and tossed them in the air, and the children went running for them, shoving and shouting. The lucky ones might be able to buy a heel of stale bread tonight. He had never seen markets so crowded, and for all the food the Tyrells were bringing in, prices remained shockingly high. Six coppers for a melon, a silver stag for a bushel of corn, a dragon for a side of beef or six skinny piglets. Yet there seemed no lack of buyers. Gaunt men and haggard women crowded around every wagon and stall, while others even more ragged looked on sullenly from the mouths of alleys.“ (Tyrion IV, ASOS)
So there you go.
In terms of devaluation, you have the example of the Gardener coins that Olenna uses to cheat merchants with, which are small and thin compared to post-Conquest dragons.
Unless they’re choosing the same men over and over again, I would think it was more the case that your odds of being chosen in any given year weren’t particularly high, but over time, they would add up.
But then again, I’m a historian asked to do math. What do I know?
It’s a term I borrowed from alternate history circles for use in discussing “what ifs”, to help distinguish between the events of the books and the events of any alternate time line.
Almost certainly. Given that they’re out in the wild, I imagine at the very least part of their work is hunting game for food, gathering wood for fires, etc.
And when it’s too cold/snowy to go out and range, I imagine they’re retasked to do boring but important work at the Wall: helping to maintain/repair the Wall (after all, they have to patrol the thing), maintaining and repairing arms and armor (they have the experience to know how important it is to have your fighting gear in good nick), and so on.
Those were some of the reasons. There were others:
First, there was no physical evidence and very few witnesses, who all told the same story. So even if they wanted to do an in-depth investigation, there wasn’t much to go on.
Second, even if they had wanted to, I’m pretty sure that Nestor Royce, as High Steward and Keeper of the Gates of the Moon, would have jurisdiction over the crime. And since Littlefinger had bought him off…
Third, Marillion had confessed to the crime, and Marrillion was disliked for his arrogance and for singing satirical songs about various noblemen who came courting Lysa.
So I would start from the question: who benefits if the assassination attempt had gone as planned? Let’s say that Belwas doesn’t come to the fighting pit that day for whatever reason, and Drogon doesn’t unexpectedly show up in the middle of Daznak’s Pit.
Now, given the sloppiness of the method, it’s not clear whether Dany would have died from eating a few locusts or whether she just would have been made badly ill, but in either case the result is that Dany is out of commission (whether temporarily or permanently), which leaves Hizdahr running Meereen. And we know what happens in OTL when that happens: Hizdahr takes the Great Palace, installs his cousin as commander of the Brazen Beasts, tries but fails to take command of the Unsullied, and tries to placate the Yunkish to the point of considering killing Dany’s dragons. The main difference between OTL and our new timeline is that there would be much less confusion about where Dany was and whether she’s coming back, as she’d either be dead, dying, or “confined to her sickbed” or the like.
Overall, this follows the interests of the pro-slavery faction in Meereen – although notably there’s a bit of a difference between them and the Yunkish army outside, since while the Great Masters want Dany gone and slavery restored, they don’t want their city sacked, whereas the mercenaries want to loot the city and the Yunkish have promised loot to the Volantenes and others. So we should look for suspects to members of that faction:
Hizdahr is plausible. He’s the one who arranged the box, he’s the one who offers the poisoned locusts, he’s the one who benefits the most materially from Dany’s sidelining. On the other hand, he’s the most obvious candidate, and he’s the most implicated in all of it. Personally, I lean towards him being a catspaw or patsy rather than the overall planner.
The Harpy is also plausible. Now that Hizdahr is married and in line to take over with Dany gone, the Sons of the Harpy have a strong motive to complete their work by getting Dany out of the way and having Hizdahr carry out the counter-revolution. To me, the main counter-argument is that the Harpy tend to be a lot more stabby with their assassinations. OTOH, if the point is to get Dany out of the way subtly, so that Hizdahr can take over without opposition, I could see it.
Reznak, assuming he’s not the Harpy, is an outside possibility. There is the whole “beware the perfumed seneschal” prophecy, he’s definitely part of the pro-slavery faction, although definitely more on the collaborationist end than the militant end. He was in the box, close enough to whisper in Dany’s ear, and could have poisoned the locusts…although if he was that close to Dany, why not poison her wine?
Galazza Galare only really works if you think she’s the Harpy. She was all the way across Daznak’s Pit from Dany at the time, so a good deal of prior organization would have been needed for her to mastermind the assassination attempt. OTOH, if she is the Harpy, she’s way more subtle than we often think of the Sons as being, so her being in a perfect position to observe Dany without being suspected is quite interesting.
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