Arianne Martell

Arianne is born in Sunspear in 276, the first of three children born to Prince Doran Martell and Lady Mellario of Norvos. She spends much of her childhood at the Water Gardens, growing distant from her younger siblings, Quentyn and Trystane, whom she never comes to feel close to.

As a small girl she adores her father — running to him whenever she's hurt, never sleeping without his goodnight kiss. Her companions are Andrey Dalt, Garin, and Sylva Santagar, and above all her cousin Tyene Sand, with whom she shares nearly everything; in time she also grows close to her older cousin Nymeria Sand. She's seven when Robert's Rebellion ends; the following year she comes down with a red-spotted fever that takes her a long time to shake off. Her uncle Oberyn, father to Tyene and her other cousins, fascinates her in a way she half-recognizes as infatuation.

At fourteen, Arianne stumbles on an unfinished letter her father is writing to Quentyn, then fostered at Godsgrace. In it, Doran talks of his son taking his place one day, as if she didn't count as heir to Sunspear at all. From then on her relationship with her father sours, she turns defiant, and around this time she loses her virginity to Daemon Sand.

When she comes of age to marry, Doran offers her a string of elderly suitors, Walder Frey and Eldon Estermont among them, while turning down Lord Hoster Tully's offer to betroth her to his son Edmure. Arianne refuses every one of them and asks to travel to Highgarden to meet Willas Tyrell instead; when her father refuses, she tries to slip away there with Tyene, only for her uncle Oberyn to intercept them at Vaith.

She also tries her luck with Renly Baratheon during his visit to Dorne, without success. Between the letter, the suitors on offer, and the coldness she reads in her father, Arianne becomes convinced Doran hates her. Over these years she takes several Dornish lovers, including her childhood friend Andrey Dalt and Gerold Dayne, while her friendship with Daemon cools after she turns down his proposal.

Without Arianne's knowledge, her uncle Oberyn travels to Braavos and signs a betrothal in her name to the exiled Viserys Targaryen: Dorne will back his claim to the Iron Throne, and in exchange Arianne will marry him. It's this secret pact, not any contempt for his daughter, that leads Doran to reject every serious suitor and stay so guarded around her.

Doran's actual plan isn't the one Arianne imagines — he means for Quentyn to rule Dorne while she becomes Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. But she won't learn any of this for years, and in the meantime all she sees is a father shutting her out of decisions that are hers by birth.

In 298, when Doran moves to the Water Gardens, Arianne stays behind in Sunspear — but the post she's given is nowhere near a castellan's: she's left arranging feasts and tourneys while her uncle Oberyn holds the real power at court. Oberyn visits Doran twice a fortnight; her father summons her twice a year, which only confirms what she already suspects — that he doesn't want her as his heir.

Around this same time, Myrcella Baratheon — sent to Dorne as a ward and betrothed to Trystane — becomes close friends with Arianne, something Ser Arys Oakheart, the girl's sworn shield, reports back to Lord Tywin Lannister in King's Landing. By now Arianne has long since decided that her father governs with too much caution, and too much fear.

Oberyn's death in King's Landing changes everything. Arianne starts moving with Sylva Santagar and Gerold Dayne as allies, convinced her father will do nothing to avenge him or defend the family's claims. With King Joffrey dead and Tommen already crowned in the capital, Arianne wants to proclaim her sister Myrcella queen, as Dornish succession law allows, and force open war with King's Landing.

To make it happen, she seduces the knight guarding Myrcella and promises that once the girl is queen, she'll let him break his vows and marry her. The plan falls apart: the knight dies, Myrcella is badly wounded, and Arianne and her fellow conspirators are taken.

Doran locks his daughter in a tower — comfortable, but watched, and cut off from everyone. Arianne tries to win over the servants just to have someone to talk to, until at last she's brought before her father. Weak as she is, she accuses him of standing by while their family was killed and of denying her what was hers by birth.

That's when Doran finally tells her what he's kept from her for years: the Braavos pact, the betrothal to Viserys, and a plan laid long ago to return the Iron Throne to House Targaryen and settle the debt owed for Elia's death and her children's.

At the banquet welcoming Ser Balon Swann to Sunspear, Arianne sits at her father's right hand. Tyene and Nymeria are there too, along with much of Dornish nobility, gathered to watch the Mountain's skull handed over. Arianne flirts with Balon, but he doesn't fall for it as easily as the knight who served alongside him once did.

She talks Myrcella into telling Ser Balon that it was Gerold Dayne who killed her old protector, and on that word Myrcella herself begs the knight to hunt Dayne down and bring him to justice. When her father assigns each of the elder Sand Snakes their part in his plans, Arianne stays behind with him after they leave — and that's when Doran tells her that, by word out of Lys, a fleet may already have landed on the shores of Westeros. He believes it's Daenerys Targaryen's.