Jaqen H'ghar
A mysterious, red-and-white-haired prisoner with courtly manners and unsettling eyes, who speaks of himself as 'a man' and pays his debts in the coin of death.
A soul born at Lorath, sworn to The Faceless Men.
The fuller tale
Season Two
A prisoner in Yoren's cage bound for the Wall, chained between the killers Rorge and Biter, until the Lannister ambush at the crossroads burns the wagons and Arya pulls the pin on the cage door before she thinks better of it. He owes the Red God three lives for the three he should have lost that day and offers to spend them on whomever she names; she wastes the first on a guard she points at out of pure frustration, spends the second deliberately on the Tickler, and burns the third — out of patience with his rules rather than any plan — on Jaqen H'ghar himself. He poisons the garrison's wine at Harrenhal to make good on the debt, sees her and Gendry and Hot Pie out through the chaos, and leaves her an iron coin, a password, and an open door in Braavos if she ever wants to stop being Arya Stark.
Season Five
The same face, or a face wearing his name, running the House of Black and White in Braavos when Arya finally crosses the sea to collect on his old offer. He has her wash corpses and lie about who she is until she can do it without flinching, tests her with poisoned water and borrowed identities, and sets the Waif to needle her at every turn. Permitted at last to kill a corrupt merchant who has been selling doomed cargo insurance, she does the job cleanly — and then, without permission, uses a stolen face to hunt down a man from her own list for reasons that have nothing to do with the Many-Faced God. The House does not forgive for free, and by the end of the season Arya is paying for it in the dark, robbed of her sight on its own front steps.
How it ends for them
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.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 4 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The show’s Jaqen is really two book characters wearing one face. The Harrenhal arc tracks the novels closely — cage, debt, three deaths, the coin — though the names Arya spends differ (the books’ victims are Harrenhal functionaries Chiswyck and Weese, and the third name buys the castle’s fall rather than a jailbreak). But the serene master who trains Arya in Braavos is, on the page, a different figure entirely: the Kindly Man, an elderly priest of the House of Black and White whom the show simply replaced with Jaqen’s familiar face — a sensible economy that nonetheless erases one of the books’ eeriest characters and flattens the temple’s hierarchy. Book Jaqen, meanwhile, vanishes after Harrenhal into one of the novels’ favorite puzzles: a man with his description surfaces in the Citadel at Oldtown — the alchemist who buys a novice’s key with a gold dragon in the prologue of A Feast for Crows — apparently hunting something in the maesters’ vaults, purpose unknown. He is alive in both tellings, insofar as the verb applies to a man who may not exist.
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.