Gendry

A bull-strong blacksmith's apprentice from Flea Bottom with a stubborn streak, who has no notion of who his father was — though his black hair and blue eyes tell a story.

The fuller tale

Gendry grows up in Flea Bottom knowing exactly one thing about his father: nothing. His mother, a tavern worker, died when he was small; someone — he never learns who, and never thinks to ask why — paid the fee that apprenticed him to Tobho Mott, the finest armorer in King's Landing, where the boy turned out to have a gift. The bull's-head helm he forges and refuses to sell is the whole character in one object: stubborn, proud of his work, and blind to the joke the story is telling over his head, which is that the black hair and blue eyes bent over the anvil are King Robert's, cast in a sturdier mold than any of the king's trueborn children got.

The secret makes him a target before it makes him anything else. Both the dying Hand and the king's spymasters come sniffing around the forge, and when the purge of Robert's bastards begins, Gendry is already gone — shipped north for the Wall in Yoren's recruit column, where he falls in with a scrawny, sharp-tongued boy called Arry, whose secret is bigger than his. Their friendship — the bastard who doesn't know he's a king's son and the highborn girl pretending to be nobody — is one of the tale's warmest things, forged in the war's worst country: the burning Riverlands, the horrors of Harrenhal, capture and escape and the Brotherhood Without Banners.

There the tellings fork. The show has the Brotherhood sell him to Melisandre, who wants the king's blood in his veins; leeched and earmarked for the fire, he is freed in the night by Davos and rows for years into a running joke, resurfacing sea-hardened in time to forge dragonglass in Winterfell's forges and swing a warhammer — his father's weapon, the story notes without comment — through the Long Night. The books knight him instead: Ser Gendry of the hollow hill, smithing for the Brotherhood at the crossroads inn, minding orphans, and taking his vows seriously in a band that has otherwise lost its way.

The show gives him the ending the books have only implied: legitimized by a queen's stroke of a pen as Gendry Baratheon, Lord of Storm's End — the anvil to the high seat in one lifetime. His proposal to Arya, and her gentle refusal, closes the story's longest-running what-if with both of them being exactly who they always were. He ends where Robert began, in the castle of the stags, the last of the black-haired line — a smith who knows what things cost to make.

The page and the screen

The forks matter. Book Gendry is never sold, never leeched, never rowed anywhere: Melisandre's king's-blood candidate in the books is Edric Storm, Robert's acknowledged bastard, and the show folded the two boys into one — giving Gendry Edric's peril and, eventually, something like Edric's status. Book Gendry stays in the Riverlands, knighted by Beric Dondarrion, working the forge at the inn at the crossroads when Brienne's road passes through — a meeting the show never stages. And the books surround him with a darker Brotherhood than the one that sold his show-self: what he serves by the fourth book is no longer the outfit that knighted him, which is its own quiet tragedy in progress.

In the show, season by season

Season Seven. In Eastwatch — Still rowing — and swinging a warhammer like his father.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Yoren dies defending his recruits; Arya, Gendry and Hot Pie are dragged to Harrenhal as prisoners. (S2·E3)
• Melisandre leeches king's blood from Gendry over three names: Robb Stark. Balon Greyjoy. Joffrey Baratheon. (S3·E8)
• Jorah returns cured; Gendry returns rowed; Jon plans madness: capture a wight to convince two queens. (S7·E5)
• Ned follows the late Hand's footsteps to Tobho Mott's forge and meets Gendry — a black-haired apprentice with King Robert's jaw. (AGOT 28)
• Yoren's ragged column creaks out of King's Landing: Arya is “Arry” now, an orphan boy among orphan boys, with Gendry, Hot Pie, and three chained men in a wagon. (ACOK 2)
• Gold cloaks ride out from the city with a warrant — for Gendry; Yoren's dirk and thirty ragged brothers send them back empty-handed. (ACOK 6)
• Loose in the riverlands, Arya, Gendry and Hot Pie ride for Riverrun — until singers with swords find them at an inn: Tom o' Sevens and the brotherhood without banners. (ASOS 4)
• At Acorn Hall Lady Smallwood puts Arya in a dress with acorns on it; Tom's songs and Gendry's forge make the war feel briefly far away. (ASOS 23)
• At the crossroads inn the orphans shelter with a broken man; Rorge comes hunting in the Hound's helm, and Biter's teeth meet Gendry's spear too late to save her face. (AFFC 32)

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.