Hizdahr zo Loraq
A smooth-tongued noble of old Meereenese blood, spokesman for the great families under the dragon queen's new order, forever counseling accommodation.
A soul born at Meereen, sworn to The Masters of Slaver's Bay.
The fuller tale
Season Five
Dany feeds a Master to her dragons on suspicion ÔÇö then reopens the fighting pits and offers marriage to Hizdahr.
Where they stand. Meereen.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Killed at the fighting pits (imprisoned in the books) (S5┬ÀE9)
The nobleman who preached patience and married a queen to buy peace was knifed in the fighting pits by the very Sons of the Harpy he was thought to lead. The peace died in the same hour.
In the show Hizdahr zo Loraq dies at the reopening of the fighting pits of Meereen ÔÇö the very institution he had spent his whole arc lobbying to restore. When the Sons of the Harpy rise from the crowd in their golden masks and turn DaznakÔÇÖs Pit into an abattoir, the king-consort is caught in the first rush and stabbed repeatedly, dying on the marble he had argued was the price of peace, killed by the insurgents whose cause he had seemed, to half the court, to represent. The show plays the irony absolutely straight: whatever Hizdahr was ÔÇö collaborator, conspirator, or the one honest broker in Meereen ÔÇö the HarpyÔÇÖs knives did not pause to ask.
In the published books he is alive: surviving the pit, ruling briefly as king while the queen is lost in the Dothraki sea, then arrested by Ser Barristan on suspicion of the locust poisoning and held prisoner as the siege of Meereen begins. His guilt or innocence is one of the Meereenese knotÔÇÖs genuinely open questions ÔÇö Martin has left the poisoner unnamed ÔÇö and his fate, like the cityÔÇÖs, waits on The Winds of Winter.
Their chapters, book by book
A Dance with Dragons 4 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The endings part company completely. In the books Hizdahr survives DaznakÔÇÖs Pit ÔÇö it is he who urges Daenerys to try the honeyed locusts that fell her champion, a detail that makes him the poisoningÔÇÖs chief suspect ÔÇö and after Drogon carries the queen away he rules Meereen in her name until Ser Barristan, convinced of his treachery, deposes and imprisons him in a quiet coup. The published novels leave him alive in custody, his guilt genuinely unresolved: the books offer at least one other credible poisoner, and HizdahrÔÇÖs terrified protestations read as plausibly innocent. The show wanted no such ambiguity ÔÇö its Hizdahr is stabbed to death by the Sons of the Harpy in the pit massacre, dying at the hands of the insurgency he was widely suspected of fronting, a tidy irony the novels deliberately withhold. Book readers also note the pale, elegant detail the show dropped: the peace he delivered was real, whoever paid for it.
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.