Davos Seaworth

The Onion Knight: a former smuggler raised to knighthood for feeding a starving Storm's End, now the most honest man in Stannis Baratheon's service — and the least comfortable at court. He shortened his own fingers to pay for his crimes.

The fuller tale

Davos was born in Flea Bottom, under the shadow of the Red Keep and about as far beneath its notice as a boy can be born. He went to sea young and rose to be one of the most skillful smugglers in the narrow sea — a careful, unflashy professional whose whole trade was knowing which risks pay. The risk that made him famous paid better than any cargo: during Robert's Rebellion he slipped a hull full of onions and salt fish through the Redwyne blockade into starving Storm's End, and kept its garrison — and its castellan, Stannis Baratheon — alive to the end of the siege.

What Stannis did next explains both men better than any speech. He knighted the smuggler, granted him land and a name — Seaworth, with an onion on the black sail of his arms — and then took the first joint of every finger on his left hand, because the good deed did not erase the years of crimes. Davos agreed with the sentence on one condition: that Stannis wield the blade himself. He carries the finger bones in a pouch at his neck for luck, and the tale's finest measure of him is that he counts the bargain fair — the fingers bought his sons a future, and Davos has always known what things cost.

He is the story's conscience with a smuggler's manners. In the viper pit of Dragonstone — queen's men and king's men, a red priestess burning the old gods on the beach — Davos alone tells Stannis the truth at full price, and Stannis, who despises flattery the way other men despise treason, raises him for it: to lord, to admiral, and eventually to Hand of the King, the highest office in a kingdom of one island. His faith is plain and human: he distrusts Melisandre with every bone in the pouch, and the struggle between the two of them for Stannis's soul is the story's cleanest duel between the numinous and the decent.

The Blackwater takes four of his seven sons and nearly Davos too — blown from his deck by the wildfire, washed onto a bare rock in the bay with his luck-pouch gone. He comes back changed in one particular: ready to put a knife in the red woman, a plan he abandons for a better one. When the Night's Watch's plea for help reaches Dragonstone, it is Davos — newly, laboriously literate, taught his letters by a princess — who reads it, keeps it, and at the risk of his head persuades Stannis that the realm's true war is north. The king who sails to save the Wall is the Onion Knight's finest cargo.

The show carries him past his king into the story's endgame: mourner and truth-teller at Castle Black, the man who begs Melisandre to attempt Jon Snow's resurrection and then banishes her when Shireen's fate comes to light; counselor to Starks; the negotiator who talks his way through King's Landing on the strength of fermented crab and nerve. The books send him on a stranger errand — ambassador to White Harbor, imprisoned, his head reported spiked, and then dispatched in secret to find a lost Stark boy on a cannibal isle, because the books' Davos is the only man in Westeros everyone agrees can be trusted with a king.

He ends the show as master of ships on the small council of a realm he helped stitch back together, correcting the grammar of lords — a Flea Bottom boy with a quill's worth of letters, outlasting the great houses that never learned his lesson: loyalty, honestly priced, is the rarest commodity in the Seven Kingdoms, and Davos always dealt in rare cargo.

The page and the screen

Book Davos is a point-of-view character and the books' quiet moral instrument — his chapters carry Dragonstone's politics, the burning of the godly, and the case against Melisandre from inside. His family is bigger (seven sons; the show keeps one), his letters come from Maester Pylos rather than Shireen (the show's swap is one of its best inventions), and his later road diverges entirely: White Harbor's fake execution — his 'head' on a spike belongs to a criminal — and the secret mission to Skagos for Rickon Stark are still in motion in the books, while the show quietly handed the Rickon thread to other characters and kept Davos at the Wall. His survival past Stannis's fall is show-only so far; in the books his king still lives and Davos still serves him, at a distance of half a kingdom.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In Garden of Bones — Rows a shadow ashore and loses a piece of his soul doing it. In Blackwater — The bay took his ship and his boy in one green breath.

Season Three. In Valar Dohaeris — Survives the bay to find his king in a red woman's shadow.

Season Four. In The Laws of Gods and Men — Four missing fingertips make his best argument.

Season Six. In The Red Woman — Holds a dead man's room against living traitors.

In the books

A Clash of Kings. In The Battle of the Blackwater — Blown into the bay with his sons' ships burning around him.

A Dance with Dragons. In Kings at the Wall — The dead man in the Wolf's Den is offered a lord's strangest quest: find Rickon.

Where they stand, season by season

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.