Grand Maester Pycelle
The ancient Grand Maester of the Red Keep, who has advised king after king with much bowing and throat-clearing and rather more cunning than he lets show.
A soul born at The Westerlands.
The fuller tale
Season One
The oldest voice on the small council, and by Littlefinger's telling nowhere near as feeble as he plays at being — a long white beard doing a great deal of work to make every Hand who passes through underestimate him. He assures Ned Stark that Jon Arryn's death was natural and that there is nothing worth digging into in the matter of the king's bastards, reassurances that turn out, at best, to be incomplete. Whatever loyalty keeps him at that table has clearly never belonged to whichever Hand currently sits in the chair, and by the time Ned works that out, it has already cost him.
Season Two
Caught by the oldest trick in Tyrion's admittedly short career as Hand: told a secret meant for him alone, in confidence, and watches it reach Cersei within the day. Tyrion has him dragged to the black cells and his famous beard shaved off him in front of witnesses, less for the treason itself than to strip away the costume of harmless old age he's been hiding behind for years. Without the beard he looks exactly as old, and exactly as sharp, as Littlefinger always said he was.
Season Three
Restored to the small council the moment Tywin Lannister takes the Handship after Blackwater, beard regrown and grudges intact, though he is noticeably more careful now about which secrets he repeats and to whom. He resumes his old function — agreeing with whoever currently holds power, and reminiscing at length about King Aerys whenever anyone will let him — while giving no sign that months in a cell taught him anything except patience.
Season Four
Summoned to Joffrey's side as the king chokes at his own wedding feast and pronounced dead by the only maester in the room, which puts Pycelle at the center of the investigation that follows without ever making him especially useful to it. He sits through Tyrion's trial offering the court his professional opinion that the boy king was poisoned, technically true and entirely unhelpful to a man he has disliked for years and is in no hurry to save.
Season Five
Watches Cersei's regency for her son with the wary displeasure of a man who has outlasted several kings and does not rate her chances of outlasting this one. He grumbles about the High Sparrow's growing hold over the city and about Cersei's decision to arm the Faith as a private army, correctly predicting trouble while being far too easy to ignore for anyone to act on it. His warnings go into the small council record and nowhere else.
Season Six
Finds himself edged off the council's real business by Qyburn, whose usefulness to Cersei has none of the moralizing Pycelle can't quite stop doing even now. Summoned to a council session that turns out to be a pretext, he is drawn away down a candlelit passage by a pack of Qyburn's little birds and killed there, quietly and efficiently, on Cersei's standing order to leave no one behind who remembers the old regime too fondly — one more loose end cut on the same night the Sept of Baelor goes up in wildfire and takes half his enemies with it.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died in the Red Keep (S6·E10)
The old maester who served five kings and betrayed most of them was lured to Qyburn's cellar and stabbed to death by little birds with little knives — the price of standing between Cersei and her new order.
On the page. Killed by the little birds (ADWD, ch. 73)
The old maester who served five kings died at his own table, his skull broken by Varys's little birds before Kevan Lannister arrived to share the room's fate — the epilogue of the fifth book, and of Tywin's whole order.
Both tellings kill him with children's knives, in service of opposite conspiracies. In the show, on the morning of Cersei's trial, one of Qyburn's little birds leads the Grand Maester down into a cellar beneath the Red Keep, where Qyburn waits with something like regret — his former colleague, he explains, is an obstacle to the new order — and the swarm of children closes in with blades while the sept across the city awaits its green fire. In the books the little birds still answer their original master: in the fifth novel's epilogue, Varys's children ambush Pycelle at his own table and stave in his skull, the first course of the double murder that claims Kevan Lannister in the same chambers — the Spider erasing the two men mending the realm his hidden prince needs broken. Either way the end is the same shape: the great survivor of five reigns, who outlasted every purge by seeming harmless, dies at the hands of the only players in King's Landing more invisible than himself.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings agree on the man and differ on the exposure. The books formalize what the show implies: the Citadel's maesters are meant to serve the realm, and Pycelle's confession to Tyrion — that he has always served House Lannister first, since Tytos's day — lands as institutional scandal, not just personal corruption. His book arc after Tywin's death is fuller: trembling before Cersei's regency, quietly conspiring with Kevan to repair her damage, part of the sober old guard whose competence becomes, fatally, its own provocation. The show also awards him a small parting gift the books withhold — a wordless scene of the shuffling dodderer straightening, mid-corridor, into a hale man once unobserved, the series' confirmation that the senility was always a costume.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.