Petyr Baelish

Petyr's great-grandfather had been a Braavosi sellsword in service to the Corbrays; once his own son earned his knighthood, he took the Titan of Braavos's stone head as his sigil. Petyr's father inherited only a rocky scrap of the Fingers, the poorest patch of the poorest corner of the Vale. A friendship with Hoster Tully, struck up during the War of the Ninepenny Kings, was enough to get Petyr taken in as a ward at Riverrun.

There he grew up alongside Catelyn, Lysa and Edmure Tully. It was Edmure who gave him the name Littlefinger, for how small his family's lands were and how thin he'd been as a boy. Petyr fell for Catelyn, but she only ever saw a brother in him, and when she turned twelve she was betrothed to Brandon Stark, heir to Winterfell.

Petyr challenged Brandon for Catelyn's hand and lost the duel badly; only her pleading saved his life. Catelyn stopped speaking to him, and the Fingers took him back empty-handed. When Brandon died some time later, Petyr sent her a letter, and she burned it unread.

Unlike her sister, Lysa Tully did fall for Petyr. She came to him one night when he was drunk and wrecked over Catelyn's rejection, and slept with him; in his stupor he called her by her sister's name. The affair continued through the fortnight it took him to recover, and Lysa ended up pregnant.

When Lord Hoster found out, he made his daughter drink the moon tea and sent Petyr home — the Baelishes were too small a house to marry into the Tullys. Not even Lysa's marriage to Jon Arryn ended things between them; she talked her husband into putting Petyr in charge of the customs house at Gulltown.

The money Petyr made there opened enough doors that Jon Arryn brought him onto the small council, where he ended up as King Robert's Master of Coin. He multiplied the Crown's income tenfold, won allies inside the City Watch, and sank part of his fortune into brothels across the capital.

At the tourney for Prince Joffrey's name day, he bet on Ser Jaime Lannister; when Ser Loras Tyrell unhorsed him, Petyr lost the Valyrian steel dagger he prized so much to King Robert.

In 298 AC, Lord Jon Arryn learned the truth about the king's children and prepared to tell Robert. Petyr talked Lysa into poisoning her own husband, framing it as the only way to stop him sending their son Robert Arryn to be fostered with Stannis Baratheon.

After Jon Arryn's death, it was Petyr who pushed Lysa to write to her sister Catelyn laying the blame on Queen Cersei Lannister.

When Catelyn Tully slipped into King's Landing to warn Eddard Stark that someone had tried to kill their son Bran, Petyr was the one who hid her in one of his brothels. He told her the dagger used against the boy had once been his, lost in a bet against Tyrion Lannister.

After a council session, Petyr brought Eddard to his waiting wife and talked him out of moving against the Lannisters without proof, against Ned's first instinct. Catelyn felt she'd found her childhood friend again. Ned stayed wary, though he trusted Petyr a little more once he suggested picking up Jon Arryn's investigation again — even as Littlefinger warned him to trust no one, himself included.

At the Hand's Tourney, Petyr lost a hundred gold dragons betting against Lord Renly when Sandor Clegane unhorsed Ser Jaime. Amid the festivities he met Sansa Stark, Eddard's eldest daughter, and brushed her cheek while playing with her hair.

When King Robert wanted the exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen dead on learning she was pregnant, Petyr sided with him. Soon after, Eddard resigned as Hand in protest, but before he could leave for Winterfell, Petyr offered to help with the Jon Arryn investigation and led him to a brothel where one of Robert's bastards was being raised. Jaime's red cloaks caught them there; Petyr ran to raise the gold cloaks but got there too late to save Eddard's guards, and Eddard himself was wounded.

Robert died of a hunting wound, and as regent Eddard turned down Petyr's advice to secure the throne for Joffrey and grow his own power, refusing to crown a bastard. He asked Petyr to help win over the City Watch — Petyr agreed, then sold that same loyalty to Cersei instead. Eddard was arrested. Retrieving his dagger, Petyr only reminded him that he'd already warned him not to trust him.

With most of Eddard's household dead after the arrest, Petyr took Vayon Poole's daughter Jeyne into his custody, and mocked Ser Barristan Selmy when he was publicly cast out of the Kingsguard. He was there in the Great Sept of Baelor when Joffrey, unexpectedly, ordered Eddard Stark's execution.

With Cersei running things, Petyr imposed a toll on everyone entering the capital to help fund its defence. On the council, after Stannis proclaimed Cersei's children born of incest, he proposed answering with a rumor of their own: that little Shireen Baratheon was really the daughter of Patchface, Stannis's fool.

In front of Tyrion he boasted of having taken both Tully sisters' virginity. The Hand then sent him to the Vale to win Lysa Arryn over to Joffrey's cause, in exchange for Harrenhal and the title of Lord Paramount of the Trident. After Renly's murder, when Tyrion sought an alliance with the Tyrells, Petyr traveled to Bitterbridge to negotiate a marriage between Joffrey and Renly's widow, Margaery.

He returned to the capital with Mace Tyrell's army at the worst possible moment of the Battle of the Blackwater. It later came out that dressing Garlan Tyrell in the dead Renly's armor, to terrify Stannis's men, had been his idea. For his service he was granted Harrenhal and the title Lord Paramount of the Trident.

All the while he stayed in touch with Sansa Stark through Ser Dontos Hollard, and kept the Kettleblack brothers as informants inside the court.

Petyr told Tywin Lannister that the Tyrells meant to marry Sansa Stark to Willas, the heir to Highgarden — giving Tywin time to marry her to Tyrion instead. His new standing also made him a candidate to wed the widowed Lysa Tully and win the Vale of Arryn for the Lannister cause; Petyr agreed and set out for the Eyrie.

He was in no hurry: he stayed near the capital until the king's wedding, meaning to get Sansa out in whatever chaos followed Joffrey's death. When Ser Lothor Brune's crossbowmen killed Dontos Hollard, he told Sansa his silence was the only guarantee that no one would connect them to what happened — and revealed that he and Olenna Redwyne had planned Joffrey's poisoning at his own wedding feast, using the amethyst hairnet Dontos had insisted she wear.

He had Sansa dye her hair and travel with him to the Fingers disguised as Alayne Stone, his bastard daughter. There he married Lysa, who had loved him since their childhood at Riverrun. Lysa named Petyr Lord Protector of the Vale and even proposed marrying "Alayne" to her own son, Robert Arryn, not knowing who stood before her.

Petyr's feelings for Sansa, which seemed an echo of what he'd felt for Catelyn, grew too obvious to miss: Lysa caught them kissing. Wild with jealousy, she tried to throw Sansa through the Moon Door. Petyr stepped between them, and in the argument that followed Lysa confessed it had been Petyr who told her to poison Jon Arryn. It was Petyr, then, who pushed her through the Moon Door instead, telling her his only love had always been Catelyn — and blamed the murder on the singer Marillion.

With Lysa dead, Petyr stayed in charge of the Eyrie and the Vale as young Robert Arryn's guardian. He won Lord Nestor Royce's support by granting him the Gates of the Moon, claiming it had been Lysa's own wish.

Six of the Vale's most powerful lords met at Runestone to plot how to remove him. In King's Landing, Cersei decided to let them settle who would govern the Vale during Robert Arryn's minority — on condition that no harm came to Petyr.

The rebel lords' forces surrounded the Gates of the Moon and climbed up to parley. Petyr turned down their demand that he leave for Harrenhal and the war-ravaged riverlands; Ser Lyn Corbray even drew his Valyrian steel sword during the meeting. Once the lords left, having granted him a year to set the Vale in order, Petyr admitted to Sansa that Lyn had actually been playing for his side all along.

He arranged a marriage between Lyn's older brother and a merchant's daughter and traveled to Gulltown for the wedding. On his return he brought three hedge knights he'd hired — Byron, Morgarth and Shadrick — without the court knowing that Shadrick had been quietly hunting for Sansa on Varys's reward.

Alone with her, Petyr confided that Cersei's rule was ruining the Seven Kingdoms faster than he'd expected, and laid out his plan: marry her to Ser Harrold Hardyng, heir to Robert Arryn, then reveal her true identity and retake Winterfell with the Vale's knights behind her.