Garlan Tyrell

Garlan the Gallant, Mace's second son: a better sword than his famous brother, by his own family's telling, and far too modest to say so (book only).

The fuller tale

Garlan is the second of Mace Tyrell's sons and the one the songs skip, by his own arrangement. His brother named him Garlan the Gallant as a boy — a kindness, the books note, to a plump child who would otherwise have been named something crueler — and he grew into it sideways: a swordsman who trains against three and four men at once, on the theory that battle never sends opponents singly, and whom his own family quietly rates the better blade than his famous brother Loras. He does not joust, does not glitter, and does not care; married and content, he is the rarest thing in the saga's aristocracy — a great house's son with nothing to prove.

His two book scenes are load-bearing. At the Blackwater it is Garlan who wears Renly's green armor into the dawn attack, the ghost that breaks the Baratheon rearguard's nerve — the story's neatest piece of psychological warfare, conducted by its least theatrical man. And at Joffrey's wedding feast, amid a court entertained by the mockery of Tyrion Lannister, Garlan and his wife are the only guests who offer the dwarf plain courtesy — a small decency the books place carefully, the night before Tyrion needs character witnesses and has none. Raised afterward to Lord of Brightwater Keep, he remains alive in the books, the Reach's quality held in reserve.

The page and the screen

The show cut Garlan along with Willas and redistributed the parts: the Blackwater ghost-of-Renly gambit vanished (the show's battle needs no second armored specter beside its wildfire), and the Tyrell martial reputation was consolidated into Loras. What the cut costs is the books' argument-by-roster that Highgarden could lose its famous knight and still field a better one — and the small, structural kindness at the purple wedding, which the books use to remind the reader that courtesy, in the Reach, is not always a tactic.

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.