House Baelish of the Fingers is among the meanest and youngest of the noble houses of the Vale of Arryn, holding no more than a few stony acres and an old, unnamed flint tower upon the smallest of the Fingers, where a dozen families of smallfolk dwell in huts of piled stone beside a peat bog. Its founder was a sellsword born in the Free City of Braavos, who came across the narrow sea to take service with House Corbray; when his son was knighted he claimed for his sigil the grey stone head of the Titan of Braavos, fiery-eyed upon a light green field, in token of the family's distant origins beyond the water. That hedge knight's son rose no higher than "the smallest of small lords," yet he proved fortune's instrument all the same, for during the War of the Ninepenny Kings he won the friendship of Lord Hoster Tully and later cashed in that friendship to have his own son, Petyr, fostered at Riverrun—where the boy, slight of stature and small of holding, earned the mocking name Littlefinger.
That same Petyr would carry the house further in a single lifetime than three generations before him had managed in their entirety. Sent home in disgrace after he dared challenge Brandon Stark for the hand of Catelyn Tully and lost, he was raised up again by his onetime sweetheart Lysa, who prevailed upon her lord husband Jon Arryn to grant him first the customs of Gulltown and then a sinecure at court; there his cunning with coin so distinguished him that within three years he sat the small council of Robert Baratheon as master of coin. Upon his father's death he succeeded as lord, and—forsaking the Titan of his forebears—took for his own a field of silver mockingbirds upon green, that the singing bird might whisper where the stone head had only stared. From so slender a perch this littlest of lords climbed at last to Lord of Harrenhal and Lord Paramount of the Trident, proof that in the game of thrones a clever tongue may outreach the oldest blood.