Sansa Stark

Sansa was born in Winterfell, with Maester Luwin attending her mother through the birth. By eleven she had already learned from Septa Mordane the lessons expected of a lady, while Luwin took charge of teaching the rest of her siblings.

She shared a bedchamber with Arya until she got one of her own, though the two sisters never got along well: Jon Snow once frightened them in the crypts, his face dusted white with flour to look like a ghost, and while Sansa and Bran were properly startled, Arya answered with her fists.

In Winterfell she also met Theon Greyjoy, her father's ward, who once thought of asking for her hand, and felt a brief, girlish infatuation with Ser Waymar Royce when he stopped there on his way to Castle Black.

When her father was named Hand of the King, Sansa saw the courtly life she had long imagined finally within reach, and her betrothal to Prince Joffrey Baratheon felt like the start of one of her songs. On the road south she got a bad fright running into Ser Ilyn Payne at the inn at the crossroads.

Near the Ruby Ford, walking with Joffrey, she ran into Arya, who was play-fighting with a boy named Mycah; the prince drew his sword, Lion's Tooth, and threatened the boy, and came away wounded when Arya's wolf Nymeria attacked him. Before King Robert, Joffrey lied about what happened, and Sansa, unwilling to contradict her betrothed, claimed she remembered nothing. Cersei seized the moment to demand the direwolf's death; since Arya had already sent Nymeria off to safety, it was Sansa's own wolf, Lady, who paid for it, killed by her father's hand.

Back in King's Landing, Sansa blamed Arya for Lady's death and stayed devoted to Joffrey, growing closer to Queen Cersei as well. At the Hand's tourney she found plenty to feed her ideas of chivalry, though Sandor Clegane tried to open her eyes by telling her how his own brother Gregor had burned his face. She was also taken with Ser Loras Tyrell, who gave her a rose.

When Eddard learned the truth about Joffrey's parentage and told his daughters he was sending them home, Sansa ran to warn Cersei rather than lose her betrothal, not realizing she was handing the queen a weapon against her own father. After Eddard's arrest she was made to call him a traitor and beg for mercy; Joffrey, now king, promised clemency and then, on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, ordered his execution in front of her. Not long after, he showed her his father's head on a spike.

Turned into a hostage inside what should have been her own future household, Sansa learned to stay courteous and submissive with everyone around her, including Sandor Clegane, Joffrey's sworn shield, who could be as harsh as he was unexpectedly protective. Joffrey often had his Kingsguard beat her for every setback his brother Robb dealt him in the war, and humiliated her more than once, from having her stripped in open court to showing her father's head again, this time mounted on the walls.

At a small tourney for Joffrey's name day, a knight called Dontos Hollard turned up too drunk to fight, and the king decided to have him killed; Sansa protested without thinking, and with Sandor backing up a lie she improvised, managed to get Joffrey to settle for stripping Dontos of his knighthood and making him a fool instead. From then on she put her trust, with little else to hold onto, in Dontos's drunken promise to get her out of the capital.

During the riot that followed Myrcella Baratheon's farewell before her journey to Dorne, Sansa was left alone in the crowd when Ser Mandon Moore chose to guard Joffrey instead; the Hound found her hurt and carried her back to the Red Keep. Not long after, on the eve of Stannis Baratheon's attack, she had her first flowering. During the Battle of the Blackwater she sheltered with the other court ladies in the sept, trying to hold their nerve while a drunk Cersei grew bitterer by the minute; once the battle was over, a drunk Sandor offered to take her away from the city, and when she refused, made her sing for him instead.

With the Crown's new alliance with House Tyrell, her betrothal to Joffrey was called off in favor of Margaery Tyrell, though the king made clear he still meant to take her to bed whenever he pleased. Sansa remained a captive in all but name, with Dontos insisting his plan to smuggle her home still stood after the wedding, and giving her a hairnet set with amethysts.

House Tyrell, wanting to know what kind of man Joffrey really was before marrying him to Margaery, approached Sansa through Lady Olenna, who at one point proposed marrying her to Willas Tyrell, the crippled heir to Highgarden. When Sansa told Dontos about it — and he, without her knowing, passed it to Littlefinger, who passed it on to the Lannisters — the match with Willas came to nothing; instead she was married off to Tyrion Lannister, to secure her claim as heir to Winterfell.

Tyrion didn't force her to consummate the marriage, something she was grateful for, especially once she learned of the Red Wedding and the deaths of her brother and mother. At Joffrey's wedding feast to Margaery she wore the amethyst hairnet Dontos had given her, and slipped away the moment the king began choking. Dontos led her to a boat where Petyr Baelish was waiting, who killed Dontos himself in front of her so a drunk tongue couldn't give her away.

Baelish hid her at the Fingers, one of the few properties he held outright, and built her a false identity — Alayne Stone, his bastard daughter — since Sansa was wanted as an accomplice in Joffrey's death. There her aunt Lysa Tully joined them, married Petyr, and agreed to keep the secret of who Sansa really was. It was Lysa who gave her the dye to hide her red hair and who proposed marrying her to her own son, Robert Arryn — an idea that horrified Sansa, though she kept it to herself.

At the Eyrie, Petyr kissed her one night while she was building a snow castle and thinking of Winterfell; Lysa saw it and, consumed with jealousy, tried to throw Sansa through the Moon Door. Petyr arrived in time to pull her back — and then pushed Lysa through it himself, letting the singer Marillion take the blame while Sansa was drawn into covering it up.

Under the name Alayne Stone, Sansa effectively took charge of the Eyrie and of her cousin Robert Arryn, whom she called Sweetrobin: a sickly boy who, since his mother's death, wandered at night looking for a bed to crawl into, and who ended up locked in his own room each night by her order, tired of his shaking and his groping.

Petyr, now Lord Protector of the Vale, schooled her in the finer points of court intrigue — among other things, that a lie told kindly does no harm — and made sure she understood that if his hand in Lysa's death ever came out, she would share the blame. When Lord Nestor Royce asked about it, Sansa repeated the story blaming Marillion, and worked out that Petyr had granted the Gates of the Moon to Nestor to buy his loyalty. She also noticed that Ser Lyn Corbray, who drew his sword during the talks with the Lords Declarant, was acting on Littlefinger's orders.

Dressed in Lysa's old jewels and silks — careful never to wear Arryn colors, so a bastard wouldn't seem to reach above her station, or Tully colors, so no one would notice her likeness to her mother — Alayne worried about what she'd do once the dye running through her hair ran out. When the court moved from the Eyrie to the Gates of the Moon ahead of winter, she let Robert kiss her and, without meaning to, thought of another kiss, Sandor Clegane's.

Once at the Gates of the Moon, Petyr told her his plan: to marry her, in time, to Harrold Hardyng, heir to the Vale, and then reveal who she truly was before the lords of the Vale, to claim Winterfell in her name.