Janos Slynt

A butcher's son risen to command of the City Watch of King's Landing, greedy and self-serving, who knows exactly which way to bend.

The fuller tale

Janos Slynt is the tale’s field study in the small man promoted. A butcher’s son who climbed the City Watch of King’s Landing to its command, he learned the capital’s true civics early: gold cloaks answer to gold, and virtue is a rumor spread by people who can afford it. Under Robert he sells the Watch’s honesty piecemeal — commands bought, brothels shaken down — and survives every audit because the men who might sack him find him too usefully for sale.

His hour arrives with Ned Stark’s. Promised the gold cloaks’ support, the Hand of the King moves against Joffrey’s succession — and Slynt, purchased in advance by Littlefinger, turns the City Watch on Stark’s men in the throne room. The reward tells the whole story of the new regime: the butcher’s boy is made Lord of Harrenhal, granted a seat on the small council, and founds his noble line on the neat, bloody work of betraying the most honorable man in the kingdom. It is Slynt’s men, the story takes care to note, who carry out the massacre of Robert’s bastard children — infants included — without recorded objection.

Tyrion Lannister, arriving as Hand, does the arithmetic in one dinner: a man who sold the last Hand will sell the next one. He ships Slynt to the Wall — dressed as an honor, executed as a purge — and the capital’s judgment becomes the Watch’s problem. At Castle Black, Slynt does what he has always done: seeks the strong (Ser Alliser), bullies the weak, and campaigns for the Lord Commandership as though the Wall were one more city command to be bought. The Watch, inconveniently for him, holds elections it cannot rig, and the bastard boy he sneered at wins it.

Slynt’s function in the story is to test what institutions do with rot. King’s Landing promoted him twice; the Wall is the first place that ever told him no. His refusal to accept that answer — banking on friends at court, certain the old rules of purchase still apply somewhere — collides with the one commander in Westeros who watched his father die of exactly those rules. The collision is brief, public, and much cited afterward.

The page and the screen

The tellings differ mainly in choreography and company. In the books Slynt arrives at the Wall with his cronies in tow and comes within a few votes of winning the Lord Commandership — a genuinely near thing, averted by Sam’s midnight politicking — which makes his subsequent insubordination a sore loser’s gamble rather than mere spite. The order he refuses differs too: on the page it is command of the ruined castle of Greyguard; on screen, oversight of the same sort of restoration work. Both versions agree that he refuses three times, publicly, banking on Lannister protection that no longer exists, and that the sentence that follows is carried out by the Lord Commander’s own hand — the show adding a last-second collapse into begging, the books adding Stannis Baratheon’s silent, approving nod from the King’s Tower.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Tyrion removes Janos Slynt from the gold cloaks and gives them to Bronn. (S2·E2)
• Jon Snow, elected Lord Commander, gives Janos Slynt one order — and then the sword. (S5·E3)
• Joffrey's first court: Barristan Selmy is stripped of his cloak, Janos Slynt is raised, and Sansa is promised mercy for her father — if he confesses. (AGOT 58)
• Tyrion's first strokes as Hand: Janos Slynt, butcher of babes and seller of Ned Stark, is shipped to the Wall before he finishes his wine. (ACOK 9)
• Back from the wildlings, Jon is called turncloak by Janos Slynt and Alliser Thorne; his reward for holding the Wall is an arrest, and worse planned. (ASOS 65)
• The election for Lord Commander stalls while Janos Slynt gathers votes; Sam the Slayer discovers that courage comes in more shapes than swords. (ASOS 76)
• Janos Slynt refuses a lawful command three times before breakfast; Jon Snow does not send him to the ice cells. “Edd, fetch me a block.” (ADWD 8)

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

The show: Beheaded at the Wall (S5·E3)

The books: Beheaded for refusing an order (ADWD, ch. 8)

The former commander of the gold cloaks, who sold Ned Stark and butchered Robert's bastards, refused a direct order from the new Lord Commander. Jon Snow took his head in the yard himself. 'I was afraid. I've always been afraid.'

Ordered to take charge of a derelict castle down the Wall, Slynt refuses — once with scorn, twice with cronies at his back, a third time with open contempt for the boy commander. Jon Snow does not hang him. He orders the block brought out into the yard of Castle Black and takes Janos Slynt’s head himself with Longclaw, in the old northern way his father taught: the man who passes the sentence swings the sword. In the show Slynt’s bluster shatters at the last into terror — “I’ve always been afraid” — and the stroke falls anyway; in the books his end is steadier but no less final, and Stannis, watching, nods once. Either way the debt sworn on the steps of Baelor’s sept years before is paid in full, by the son of the man he sold.