Ilyn Payne
The King's Justice, the royal headsman — a gaunt, silent man whose tongue was torn out by order of the Mad King, so he can never speak of what he does.
The fuller tale
Ser Ilyn Payne does the realm's most public work in total silence. Once captain of the Hand's guard for Tywin Lannister, he made the mistake of repeating, where the wrong ears could hear, the court's common knowledge — that the Hand ruled the Seven Kingdoms while King Aerys ruled nothing — and the Mad King had his tongue torn out with hot pincers for it. The mutilation ended one career and qualified him perfectly for another: as the King's Justice, the crown's headsman, Payne is the sentence made flesh — a gaunt, pock-scarred, wordless figure whose appearance at any proceeding means the arguing is over. Children at court frighten each other with him; Sansa Stark, meeting his eyes once at a tourney, reads death in them before she has any reason to.
His place in the saga is fixed by a single stroke. On the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, when Joffrey overturns the arranged mercy and demands Ned Stark's head, it is Ser Ilyn who ascends the platform, and — in the detail both tellings sharpen the scene with — takes the condemned man's own greatsword, the Valyrian blade Ice, to do it. He is thereafter a permanent entry on Arya Stark's nightly list, recited between the Hound and the queen, though the man himself neither knows nor would care: Payne is the saga's purest study of the functionary, the instrument that cannot even claim it was just following orders, because it cannot claim anything at all. During the Blackwater he is assigned a quieter commission — stationed with the queen's ladies in Maegor's Holdfast, where Cersei explains to Sansa precisely what service the silent knight is there to perform if the city falls.
The page and the screen
The books give the executioner a strange late-career grace note the show never filmed: Jaime Lannister, learning to fight left-handed and needing a sparring partner who can never gossip about how bad the Kingslayer has become, chooses the one man in the realm with no tongue. Their nightly sessions in the Riverlands — Jaime talking, confessing almost, at a man who answers only with dry clacking laughter and steel — are among the novels' oddest and best pairings, and they reveal an Ilyn with a bleak sense of humor buried in the silence. The show intended more for him: the actor's illness led the series to quietly retire the character after the second season, and his sparring role passed to Bronn. He is alive in both tellings — the show simply lets him vanish, while the books keep him swinging a sword at the Kingslayer's elbow, still without a word to say about any of it.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- By night Jaime crosses swords with Ser Ilyn Payne, the only partner who cannot mock him aloud; by day he watches Cersei rule and bites his tongue bloody. (AFFC 17)
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.