Jon Arryn

Jon was born in 225 AC, the eldest son of Lord Jasper Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie. He had a brother, Ronnel, and a sister, Alys. His father gave him the title Warden of the Gates of the Moon; when Jasper died, Jon inherited the lordship and passed that post first to Ronnel and later to his cousin Denys.

As a young man he fought for King Jaehaerys II in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, alongside Steffon Baratheon, Lord of Storm's End, Rickard Stark, Warden of the North, and Hoster Tully, Lord of Riverrun. That friendship with Steffon and Rickard would matter years later.

When Steffon and Rickard had sons of their own, both entrusted them to Jon: Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark grew up as his wards in the Vale. Under his roof the two boys became inseparable friends and came to think of him almost as a second father.

Jon married three times without ever getting a living heir. He was widowed by his first wife, Jeyne Royce, and remarried a cousin, Rowena Arryn; neither marriage gave him a child. He named his nephew Elbert Arryn his heir, but King Aerys II had the boy executed. The next in line, his cousin Denys, died fighting at the Battle of the Bells, already in the middle of Robert's Rebellion.

It was during that war that Jon took Lysa Tully as his third wife, a match that won him the Riverlands' support but no affection: Lysa thought him far too old and hated his breath. After several lost pregnancies she bore him a single child, Robert Arryn, sickly from the cradle.

When Aerys II demanded Jon hand over his wards Robert and Eddard for execution, Jon refused and called his bannermen to arms. He fought at the Battle of the Bells and at the Trident, and when Robert took the Iron Throne, he named Jon his Hand.

As Hand, the first fire Jon had to put out was Dorne's fury over the deaths of Lewyn and Elia Martell during the war. Oberyn Martell wanted to raise the realm behind Viserys Targaryen, Aerys's surviving son; Jon defused it by returning Lewyn's bones and striking a deal with Prince Doran.

To secure Robert on the throne he arranged his marriage to Cersei Lannister and advised keeping her brother Jaime in the Kingsguard. When Robert raised the idea of killing the last Targaryens, Viserys and Daenerys, it was Jon who talked him out of it.

What he could not do was rein in the king's spending on tournaments and excess, and the realm sank deeper into debt while Jon ran it in Robert's name. It was his wife Lysa who talked him into bringing an old friend of hers, Petyr Baelish, to court, where Jon made him Master of Coin.

Stannis Baratheon had begun to suspect that Cersei's children were not Robert's at all, but his brother Jaime's, which would make them bastards and Stannis the true heir. Afraid the charge would look like naked ambition coming from him, he took it to Jon instead of the king.

Jon and Stannis looked into it quietly, hunting down the bastards Robert really had fathered. They visited Tobho Mott's forge, where a boy named Gendry worked with the king's own face, and Chataya's brothel, where they found another of Robert's daughters bearing the same look.

Jon was after one more proof, in a volume Grand Maester Pycelle had lent him, Maester Malleon's genealogy of the great houses: it showed that whenever Baratheons married Lannisters, the children always came out looking like Baratheons, which had not happened with Cersei's. Too many people at court — Pycelle, Varys, the queen herself, Littlefinger — came to know Jon was digging into something.

For all his reputation as a hale man for his age, Jon fell ill the night after Grand Maester Pycelle lent him Malleon's book. His own maester, Colemon, tried to treat what looked like a stomach ailment that would not let go.

His last understandable words were "the seed is strong." Lysa took it as a reference to their son Robert; it more likely referred to what he had just learned about the Baratheon bloodline. After that his speech gave out, and he died the next morning.

Lysa and young Robert Arryn fled King's Landing for the Eyrie soon after.

Years later, Sansa Stark learned at the Eyrie what no one at court had known: that Lysa and Petyr Baelish had been lovers since they were young, and that it was she who talked Jon into bringing Petyr to King's Landing so they could be close.

Littlefinger had convinced Lysa that poisoning her husband's wine with the tears of Lys would solve two problems at once — it would remove Jon and stop him sending their son Robert to foster with Stannis at Dragonstone. Lysa did it.

It was also Petyr who pushed the new widow to write her sister Catelyn blaming the Lannisters for Jon's death, a letter that would help light the fuse of the War of the Five Kings.