Who is more likely to eventually encounter Jeyle Poole first (should Jeyne live long enough to be encountered) - Sansa or Arya?
Oh, Arya, no question in my mind. Per âTheon Iâ TWOW, this was the last we heard about Jeyne Poole:
âOh, and take the Stark girl with you. Deliver her to Lord Commander Snow on your way to Eastwatch.â Stannis tapped the parchment that lay before him. âA true king pays his debts.â
But, of course, what neither Stannis nor Justin Massey knew in that moment (since chronologically it hadnât happened yet) is that Jon Snow was assassinated by Bowen Marsh and his fellow co-conspirators, and while he seems all but certain to come back to life in TWOW, for the moment there is no Lord Commander Snow to whom Ser Justin can deliver Jeyne. Justin might have been prepared by Stannis to hear rumors (maybe even true) that his king had fallen in battle against the Boltons, but certainly he would not expect to hear that the Lord Commander of the Nightâs Watch was dead as well. Unless he is completely stupid, I think Justin Massey is going to hear about Jon being killed, decide that Castle Black is no place for the woman he believes to be Arya Stark, and take her (and Alysane Mormont!) to Eastwatch directly, and thence to Braavos.
And that, I think, is where Arya will come in. Much of her FeastDance arc has been questioning whether she can truly become âno oneâ, and emphasizing that Arya cannot let go of her own identity, not entirely. Even into TWOW, Arya is still caught between her training as a Faceless Man and her personal feelings and goals as Arya Stark - and as her killing of Raff showed, Arya is still not willing to completely subsume her motivations into the philosophy of the House of Black and White. The farther she goes in her training, the more difficult those two paths are going to be to reconcile (not to mention the possible punishment-training the Faceless Men will impose on her for killing again out of the line of duty, so to speak).
The arrival of Jeyne Poole with Justin Massey will be, then, the most explicit, obvious challenge to Aryaâs Faceless Men journey of de-identification. Here will be someone not merely that she vaguely recognizes (like Dareon and Sam, whom she knew for Nightâs Watchmen), nor someone that she knows personally but is otherwise unremarkable as an individual (like Raff), but someone that she knows personally who is believed to be Arya Stark herself. If she does nothing to intervene with Justinâs party, Arya will have made a firm decision that she wishes to let go of her former life, to give up being Arya Stark ⊠but of course she canât. She knows Jeyne too well, is indeed among the few people who could positively identify âLady Aryaâ as the steward of Winterfellâs daughter (and, just as importantly, Jeyne is also uniquely capable of identifying Arya as the real Arya Stark). Confronted with the possibility of losing more of herself (physically and psychologically) to the Faceless Men, given the opportunity to once and for all assert herself as Arya Stark and return home, I think Arya will do just that, finally letting poor Jeyne be Jeyne Poole again and publicly reclaiming her Stark identity.Â
Thatâs not to say Sansa will never see her old friend again, of course. Iâm very much convinced that part of Sansaâs turn against Littlefinger will be finding out both that Baelish was behind her fatherâs fall (and death) and that he sold her closest childhood companion into sexual slavery and eventually had her pretend to be her own sister to marry a monster. I wouldnât be surprised if she, Jeyne, and Arya all ended up in ADOS in Winterfell, home after long and often brutal journeys away for all three.