Daario Naharis

A flamboyant sellsword captain of the Second Sons, all swagger and blue-dyed beard, who offers his blade — and rather more — to the dragon queen.

The fuller tale

Daario Naharis arrives in the tale the way he would want to: as a problem of trust with excellent hair. A lieutenant of the sellsword companies hired by Yunkai to stop Daenerys’s freedmen-army, he is sent to treat with her — or kill her, depending on whose orders one credits — and instead returns to his captains with a new allegiance and, shortly, returns to Daenerys with their heads in a sack. The Second Sons follow the heads. It is the character’s whole method in miniature: Daario’s loyalty is absolute, instant, and self-authorized, which makes it either the most romantic thing in her service or the most dangerous, and the tale enjoys refusing to decide.

He is Tyroshi, out of the free city where mercenaries dye their beards and vulgarity is a fine art, and he practices war as self-expression: gilded blades with naked women for hilts, a swagger that reads as insolence to every throne room he enters, and genuine, unshowy competence underneath — the tale never once shows Daario losing a fight. What he offers Daenerys is not counsel but appetite: where Jorah urges caution and Barristan urges honor, Daario urges her to be exactly as large as she wants to be. Kill the masters, take the cities, enjoy the fire. Every ruler collects a voice like this; the interesting thing about Daenerys is how long she keeps his in the room.

The romance, when it comes, is on her terms — a queen taking a lover as kings always have, to the scandal of precisely no one whose scandal matters. The show plays it warmer and longer than the books, and gives Daario his best material as the relationship’s clear-eyed junior partner: he knows what he is to her, knows it will end when politics require, and loves her anyway with a professional’s lack of illusion. His marriage proposal of sorts — that she marry her Meereenese noble for peace and keep her sellsword for herself — is refused in a way that tells them both the truth. Daario is for the war; he was never going to be for the after.

As a commander he earns his keep several times over — the taking of Yunkai’s gates, the pacification campaigns, the duel before Meereen’s walls where he dispatches the city’s champion with a thrown knife and a bored expression while the queen watches — and the storyline uses him as its index of her Essos phase: bold, effective, morally noisy. When Daenerys is carried off by Drogon, it is Daario and Jorah, rivals to the last, who ride together into the Dothraki sea to find her — a buddy tragedy the show mines for the frankest conversation anyone ever has about loving her.

His ending is the tale being honest about what he is. Sailing for Westeros, Daenerys leaves Daario and the Second Sons behind to hold Meereen and keep the peace of Slaver’s Bay — a command delivered as strategy and understood by everyone, including him, as the end of the affair by other means. The most confident man in Essos takes it standing up, with the one plea — let him at least love her — already refused. The wars of Westeros are then fought and finished entirely without him: the sellsword who backed her before her armies existed never sees the country she spent everything to win.

The page and the screen

The screen and the page disagree about Daario from the skin inward. Book Daario is a deliberate grotesque — beard dyed blue and forked in three, a gold tooth, a mustachio waxed to points, arms ringed in gaudy metal — and readers meet him as Daenerys does, half repelled and wholly fascinated; the show, after one season of a fairly flamboyant version, recast him into a conventionally handsome soldier and never looked back, a change so total that the two Daarios function as different men telling the same role. Structurally the books split what the show merges: Daario there captains the Stormcrows, a separate company from Mero’s Second Sons, and his defection decides Yunkai’s field rather than following it.

The books also trust him far less. Their Daario is plausibly a liar about his own past, is loathed on principle by Barristan Selmy, and ends A Dance with Dragons as a hostage — handed to the Yunkish as surety for the peace, his fate hanging on a war about to resume. Whether he is merely a sellsword or something more corrosive to the queen’s judgment is a live question on the page; the show settled it kindly, and left him — as the books leave him, by different roads — alive, in Essos, out of the story’s ending.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Beneath Yunkai's walls Daenerys treats with sellswords; Daario Naharis brings her two captains' heads and his sword, and the Wise Masters' host breaks in the night. (ASOS 43)
• Hizdahr zo Loraq courts the queen with flowers and a suspiciously perfect peace; Daario Naharis returns from the field to tempt her with everything Hizdahr is not. (ADWD 24)

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.