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.
A soul born at King's Landing, sworn to The Night's Watch.
The fuller tale
Season One
Commander of the City Watch of King's Landing, which makes him a man with two thousand gold cloaks and no loyalty attached to any of them beyond whoever is currently signing his pay. Ned Stark believes those cloaks are his to command when he moves against the Lannisters; Slynt has already sold them to Petyr Baelish and Cersei before Ned finishes explaining the plan, and turns his men on Ned's household guard the moment it matters. He is rewarded with a lordship and Harrenhal for it, a castle everyone else in Westeros knows better than to want, and accepts both with the satisfaction of a man who thinks he has finally been recognized for his talents.
Season Two
Tyrion Lannister arrives as acting Hand with a long memory for who did what during the coup, and Slynt is the first name he crosses off the list of men worth keeping around. Stripped of his new lordship in the same breath it takes to pronounce it, protesting the whole way down the stairs about his years of loyal service, he is bundled onto a ship north before he can finish the sentence. He arrives at Castle Black a disgraced lord in a black cloak among boys half his age, still telling anyone who will listen that this is a mistake that will be corrected as soon as the right people hear about it.
Season Five
Years at the Wall have not made him any less certain that rank is owed to men like him rather than earned, and he treats Jon Snow's election as Lord Commander as an outrage to be waited out rather than an order to be followed. When Jon commands him to lead a company back to Craster's Keep to deal with the mutineers holed up there, Slynt refuses to his face in front of the assembled Watch, gambling that a green nineteen-year-old will not enforce it. He is wrong, and finds out how wrong at the block a few minutes later, marched there by men who have stopped finding his excuses interesting — the last and smallest use anyone gets out of Janos Slynt's lifelong belief that someone else would always clean up after him.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Beheaded at the Wall (S5·E3)
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.'
On the page. Beheaded for refusing an order (ADWD, ch. 8)
The butcher's son who sold Ned Stark refused the Lord Commander's order three times, sure his friends in King's Landing made him safe. Jon Snow did not hang him. He took Slynt's head himself, in the yard, with Longclaw — and Stannis nodded.
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.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
A Storm of Swords 2 chapters that name them
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
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.
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.