Anguy

A common-born marcher archer of unmatched skill, who won a king's tourney and threw in with the Brotherhood Without Banners.

The fuller tale

Anguy comes out of the Dornish Marches, that stony border country whose smallfolk are raised on the longbow the way other children are raised on prayers, and at the Hand’s tourney in King’s Landing he does the thing the songs promise and the odds forbid: a nameless commoner outshoots every knight and fancy archer in the field and walks off with a purse of ten thousand gold dragons. The books append the perfect footnote — he ran through the entire fortune in a matter of months, on drink and boots and companionship, and was back to owning a bow and a good eye when the war found him and swept him into Beric Dondarrion’s luckless company.

With the Brotherhood Without Banners he is the indispensable specialist: the bowman who feeds the band, screens its marches and settles arguments from farther away than the other side can answer. The show gives him its fondest scenes — trading shots and pointers with Arya, teaching her in a sentence the whole marcher creed of instinct over aim — and its most uncomfortable one, when he stands by as the Brotherhood sells Gendry to the red priestess, the moment the band’s roguish charm first shows its price tag. He vanishes from the screen thereafter, unremarked; the books keep him riding with the outlaws through the riverlands’ long ruin. Alive in both tellings, so far as either says — a small, cheerful argument that the realm’s best archer was never a knight at all.

The page and the screen

The show’s Anguy is a warm supporting turn who simply stops appearing after the third season — no death, no farewell, just the adaptation misplacing him. The books keep him in the band through its darkening turn, one more good-humored man attached to a cause that has stopped being good-humored, and readers tracking the Brotherhood’s later grim work are left to wonder how the tourney champion sits with the rope-work. The purse-squandering backstory is book-only, and worth keeping: it is the entire character in one anecdote.

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.