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
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died in the Red Keep (S6┬ÀE10)
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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö his former colleague, he explains, is an obstacle to the new order ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö that he has always served House Lannister first, since Tytos's day ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö 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.