House Stark

Arya Stark

Arya Underfoot

Life: no fixed AC year given; nine years old at the story's opening by internal reckoning
House: Stark

Alive, last known training among the faceless assassins of Braavos.

Arya Stark was the Stark daughter who wanted a sword instead of a needle, and Winterfell's septas despaired of her long before the realm gave her real cause to hold one. A dancing-master's lessons in the water-dance style of Braavos, meant as a lady's exercise, became instead the single most useful gift anyone gave her, arriving just before the world took her family apart around her. What the wars made of a highborn girl too young and too stubborn to simply die when the songs said she should is a story the chronicle treats with particular care, for Arya's road ran further from Winterfell, and stranger, than any of her siblings'. A maester notes that the girl who once could not sit still for a septa's lesson proved, in the end, remarkably good at holding still for a much stricter kind of teacher.

The arc of Arya Stark

This carries the character’s road through the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.

Fleeing King's Landing after her father's fall, Arya survives as a fugitive, a cupbearer, and a killer long before she reaches Braavos and the House of Black and White, where the Faceless Men offer to unmake her into a weapon with no name of her own. She trains among assassins who deal in identity itself as currency, and the published books leave her partway through that training, caught between the girl she was and the no one they want her to become.

Where the books leave Arya Stark: alive as of A Dance with Dragons, blinded and then restored within the House of Black and White, sent out into Braavos's canals on her first assignments as a novice of the Many-Faced God

These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.

In the timeline

SourcesAGOT · AryaASOS · AryaAFFC · AryaTWOIAF · House Stark

Is Arya Stark alive?

Yes, alive as of A Dance with Dragons, training in Braavos — the specifics of that training the chronicle keeps veiled.

Who is Arya Stark?

The younger daughter of Eddard and Catelyn Stark, a fierce, unladylike girl whose survival instincts and stolen sword-training carried her through the wars that killed most of her family.