Lyanna Stark

She was born at Winterfell in 267 AC, daughter of Lyarra and Rickard Stark. In one of the visions Bran Stark reaches through the weirwood in the godswood, a girl who looks much like Arya is seen playing with a smaller boy, both wielding sticks as swords; she wins the duel and knocks him into the pool, then helps him out while warning him to keep quiet before Old Nan tells their father. Nothing confirms the girl was Lyanna, but the resemblance to Arya and the later claim that she could handle a sword point that way.

Her father promised her to Robert Baratheon, lord of Storm's End, and that same night Lyanna told Eddard what she thought of her husband-to-be: that he was not a man built for one woman. She had heard Robert already had a bastard daughter in the Vale, and though Eddard tried to wave the matter aside, she was not convinced. "Love is a wondrous thing, my dear Ned," she told him, "but it changes a man's nature not at all."

Those who knew her remembered her as willful and stubborn, carrying the wolf blood her brother Eddard spoke of, and riding with a skill Barbrey Dustin likened to a centaur's when she rode alongside Brandon. Roose Bolton once said she was half a horse herself, though he added that his own son Domeric could keep pace with her. Kevan Lannister remembered a wild beauty in her, though to his eye it fell short of Cersei Lannister's; others compared her to Margaery Tyrell, a comparison Eddard never accepted.

In 281 AC Lyanna traveled to Harrenhal for the great tourney with her brothers. There she found three squires harassing Howland Reed, a small young northman from the Neck, and drove them off with a tourney sword. She brought him to her tent, cleaned his wounds, bandaged them, and introduced him to Brandon, Eddard, and Benjen.

That night she talked Reed into attending the feast, arguing her birth gave her as much right to be there as anyone; Benjen found him proper clothes. During the meal Prince Rhaegar played a song so sad it brought her to tears, and when Benjen mocked her for it, she poured her wine over his head. She also spotted among the crowd the three squires who had harassed Reed, each serving a knight of a different house — Haigh, Blount, and Frey — and pointed them out to her brothers.

On the second day of jousting, an unknown knight in mismatched armor bearing a shield painted with a heart tree challenged and unhorsed all three of those knights. The crowd cheered him as the Knight of the Laughing Tree; by morning he was gone, leaving only the shield behind. Rhaegar won the tourney after unhorsing Brandon Stark, Yohn Royce, Arthur Dayne, and Barristan Selmy, then rode past his own wife to crown Lyanna queen of love and beauty. Eddard would later remember it as the moment every smile in the hall died.

A year after the tourney, Lyanna vanished; it was said Prince Rhaegar had taken her with the help of Ser Arthur Dayne and Ser Oswell Whent. Brandon rode to King's Landing and, standing before the Red Keep, shouted for Rhaegar to come out and die. King Aerys II had him arrested along with his companions, then summoned Rickard Stark to answer for his son. Both were killed in horrific fashion.

The deaths of Rickard and Brandon lit the fuse of Robert's Rebellion. Robert himself, together with Eddard and Jon Arryn, led the rebels. At the Trident they broke the royal army, and there Rhaegar died whispering Lyanna's name with his last breath. House Lannister seized the moment to change sides, took King's Landing, and Aerys II died in the sack.

Eddard arrived with six men at the Tower of Joy, in Dorne, and found there the last three members of Aerys II's Kingsguard: Ser Arthur Dayne, Ser Oswell Whent, and Ser Gerold Hightower. Only he and Howland Reed walked away from the fight. In his dreams, Eddard remembers Lyanna screaming while the men fought, and then a storm of blue rose petals falling under a sky the color of blood.

Inside the tower he found his sister in a room that smelled of blood and roses, wasted by fever, her voice down to a whisper. Before she died she wrung a promise out of him; the moment Eddard gave his word, the fear left her face and she smiled. Howland Reed arrived afterward to find Eddard still holding his sister's clasped hands. Neither the content of that promise nor the cause of her death has ever been known for certain. She was sixteen.

Lyanna was buried in the crypts of Winterfell, beside her father's tomb, beneath a statue Robert always felt failed to capture her beauty. Years later, as king, he named one of his warships Lady Lyanna in her honor; Davos Seaworth would come to think it a handsome ship.

Eddard still dreams of the crypts and of the statue's voice asking him to promise, weeping blood and wearing a wreath of blue roses; he always wakes with his heart racing. Theon Greyjoy, for his part, dreams once of a feast of the dead at Winterfell where Lyanna appears thin and sorrowful, crowned with pale roses, her dress speckled with blood, Brandon at her side and Rickard just behind them.