Irri

A Dothraki handmaid to Daenerys, patient and loyal, teaching her khaleesi the ways and the tongue of the horse people.

The fuller tale

Irri was Dothraki-born, taken in a raid when one khalasar fell upon another — enslaved by the very culture that had raised her, which is the sort of detail the tale plants quietly and lets the reader step on later. She was given to Daenerys at her wedding as one of three handmaids, hers the task of teaching the khaleesi to ride, and with it, in practice, the whole unwritten constitution of the horselords: what is done and never done, what the bells mean, why the stallion matters, how a khaleesi carries herself among forty thousand people whose language she is still learning. If Daenerys passes as blood of the dragon among the Dothraki, a good share of the credit is Irri’s tutoring.

She is loyalty in its least theatrical form. Through the wedding, the great ride east, the collapse of the khalasar, the red waste and the sea crossings, Irri simply remains — braiding her mistress’s hair, guarding her sleep, mending and translating and disapproving. The books give her the small, sad shading the show omits: a young woman with no world left but her khaleesi’s shadow, whose service occasionally reaches for comforts that Daenerys, half oblivious in the way of the served, accepts and forgets. Her fiercest moments are on points of Dothraki law — it is Irri who insists on the proprieties of mourning, of the braid, of what a khal’s death demands — the enslaved girl carrying the whole culture in her memory.

Between them, Irri and her counterpart Jhiqui — and Doreah, the third — form the tale’s quietest institution: the khaleesi’s tent, the room where Daenerys is neither dragon nor queen but a girl being dressed for the part. The saga’s grand arcs are argued in throne rooms; its actual texture is maintained by figures like Irri, and the story’s habit of killing or forgetting them is, by the late seasons, one of the sharpest things it has to say about its heroes.

The page and the screen

Book Irri is alive: she and Jhiqui remain in Daenerys’s service through the published novels, handmaids in the pyramid of Meereen, their small domestic scenes running right through A Dance with Dragons. The show killed her in Qarth — strangled during the theft of the dragons, a casualty of a coup subplot the books do not contain — and, characteristically, gave the death perhaps a minute of screen grief before the story moved on. The books also acknowledge, as the show does not, a physical intimacy between Irri and her khaleesi, presented with deliberate awkwardness as one of the unexamined privileges of being served by people one owns — a thread of the novels’ slavery critique the adaptation left on the page.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Killed in Qarth (alive in the books) (S2·E5)

Daenerys's gentle handmaid was strangled in Qarth when the dragons were stolen, killed in her khaleesi's chambers by a Dothraki who had sold himself to Xaro's coup.

The show’s Irri dies in Qarth in the second season, inside the walls that were supposed to be sanctuary: when Xaro Xhoan Daxos and the warlocks moved against Daenerys, the dragons were carried off and the khalasar’s remnant slaughtered in the palace, and Irri was strangled in her mistress’s chambers — by one of their own Dothraki, bought for the coup, in the show’s bleak detail. Daenerys finds her among the dead and the storyline barely pauses; the quiet servant got a quiet death, which is arguably the point the show was accidentally making. In the published books Irri is alive in Meereen, still braiding her khaleesi’s hair — the Qarth coup, and everything about it, being an invention of the screen.