Game of Thrones: What Littlefinger's Mystery Letter Says

Once you know what it says, you know why it exists.

By Terri Schwartz

Full spoilers for Game of Thrones: Season 7 "Eastwatch" continue below.

The seeds of dissent are suitably sowed between Arya Stark and her sister Sansa, and Littlefinger took one very low blow to make them all the more realized.

In Game of Thrones' latest episode, "Eastwatch," Sansa and Arya find themselves taking opposite life approaches that set themselves at conflict to one another. In a mysterious moment, Arya follows Littlefinger back to his room, where she sees Maester Kressen give Petyr Baelish a letter from Maester Lewin's archives that supposedly only has one copy. Arya finds it, reads it and sees it's signed by Sansa, and what she reads definitely rubs her the wrong way.

But what does it say? We see Littlefinger lurking in the shadows, watching her exit his room, so we know he definitely wanted her to read it. Fortunately, Reddit user Opa1979 helped us all out by decoding the letter, and not only is it very real, but we know exactly what it's from.

The letter reads:

"Robb, I write to you with a heavy heart. Our good king Robert is dead, killed from wounds he took in a boar hunt. Father has been charged with treason. He conspired with Robert’s brothers against my beloved Joffrey and tried to steal his throne. The Lannisters are treating me very well and provide me with every comfort. I beg you: come to King’s Landing, swear fealty to King Joffrey and prevent any strife between the great houses of Lannister and Stark."

Reading the letter's contents is a bit of a gut punch, because we know exactly when it came from. After Ned Stark's execution, when Sansa was being held captive by Cersei Lannister -- and after Arya had been sent on her very different journey with Yoren -- Sansa was forced to write this letter to Robb. Of course, we know the real context for it, but Arya doesn't.

It surely rubs her the very wrong way as someone who not only has had the Lannisters on her List for many years, but also as someone who doesn't know her sister as well as we the audience does. As we heard in Arya's confrontation with Sansa, she definitely judges her sister as the girl she was when she left Winterfell, not as the woman she is today.

But as showrunner Dan Weiss explained in the Inside the Episode segment, Arya also isn't judging Littlefinger the way she should, and he's playing both Stark sisters like a fiddle.

"She hasn't dealt with Littlefinger for a while, so she gets roped into spying on somebody who's actually leading her by the nose to something that he wants her to have," said Weiss. "He's looking for a way to prevent this sister bond from developing further because the tighter that bond is the more definitively he is caught on the outside of it."

While Littlefinger is setting up a Lady Stark vs. Lady Stark showdown, we can only hope that both sisters have learned plenty enough over the course of the last seven seasons to not be played so easily. The real question is what will happen when both of them learn that Baelish is trying to turn them against one another. Hopefully, as Sansa said as one of the trailers for this season, "the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives."

Terri Schwartz is Editorial Producer at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.

Let's block ads! (Why?)