Doreah

A Lysene bed-slave in Daenerys's service, schooled in the arts of the pleasure houses, who teaches her frightened young mistress a kind of power.

The fuller tale

Doreah was Lysene, sold to a pleasure house in Lys as a child — nine years old, the books say, with the flat economy the tale reserves for such facts — and trained in the free city whose courtesans are its principal export. Illyrio Mopatis bought her years later for a different market: she was one of the three handmaids given to Daenerys at her wedding, the Lysene one, purchased specifically to teach a frightened girl the arts that might make a Dothraki marriage survivable. The other two handmaids taught riding and the Dothraki tongue; Doreah’s curriculum was power of the only kind she had ever been permitted to hold.

Her lessons land differently than anyone intended. What Doreah actually teaches Daenerys — in the tent scenes the show stages with surprising tenderness — is that a marriage of owner and owned can be renegotiated; that the girl sold to the khal can look him in the eyes and make the bed a place of parley. It is the first stone of everything Daenerys builds, and it comes from the least powerful person in her retinue. The books also hand Doreah the story’s first piece of dragonlore that matters — the tale that dragons came from the moon, a second sun that cracked in the heat and poured out fire — for which Daenerys, pointedly, silences the mockery of the others.

She is a gentler presence than the tale’s other survivors, and the two tellings dispose of her in ways so different that they amount to different characters by the end — the books giving her a victim’s death and the show a traitor’s. In both, she marks something the saga rarely pauses over: the ordinary, unnamed cost of the great story. The khaleesi’s rise is attended at every step by people who were bought to attend it, and Doreah — bought at nine, spent before twenty — is their representative in the tale’s memory.

The page and the screen

The divergence here is total. Book Doreah sickens on the death-march through the red waste after Drogo’s khalasar dissolves, and dies of a wasting fever in that burned country with Daenerys holding her at the end — a loyal servant mourned, and buried, with genuine grief. The show instead kept her alive into Qarth and turned her: its Doreah seduces her way into Xaro Xhoan Daxos’s coup, helps engineer the theft of the dragons and the slaughter of the khalasar’s remnant in the palace, and is found in the traitor’s bed when Daenerys returns from the House of the Undying. Same name, opposite endings — the show manufacturing a betrayal the books never imagined, largely to give its Qarth arc teeth.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The khalasar staggers across the red waste, dying by inches; Doreah dies of the wasting, and three riders return from the east with word of Qarth. (ACOK 13)

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

The show: Lost in Qarth (S2·E10)

The books: Died in the red waste (ACOK, ch. 13)

The Lysene handmaid sold her mistress to Xaro Xhoan Daxos for a place in his bed. Daenerys found them together after the House of the Undying burned, and sealed them both alive in his empty vault.

In the books Doreah dies in the red waste, one of the first losses of Daenerys’s queenship: the fever wasted her as the remnant khalasar starved through the desert, and the khaleesi held her as she went — a death the narrative treats as the plain price of the pyre’s miracle, paid by someone who never chose it. In the show she dies in Qarth as a traitor: discovered in Xaro’s chambers after the coup’s collapse, she is sealed alive in his famous empty vault beside him, pleading as the door swings to — the khaleesi’s mercy, that day, extending exactly as far as the vault’s threshold. Two tellings, two Doreahs: the books’ dies pitied, the show’s dies punished, and the distance between them is a fair measure of how differently the two versions of Daenerys were being written even then.