Jon Connington

The exiled former Hand of the Mad King, who loved Prince Rhaegar and lost everything in the rebellion, now returned with the Golden Company and a boy to put on the throne (book only).

The fuller tale

Jon Connington was Lord of Griffin’s Roost, a storm-lord of red-and-white griffin banners, and the truest friend Prince Rhaegar Targaryen ever had — a word the books load with everything it can carry, for Connington’s own memories make plain that what he felt for the silver prince went past friendship into a love he never spoke and never spent. He was young, proud, and ferociously capable, and when the realm rose against House Targaryen, the Mad King — having burned one Hand and exiled another — reached past older men to make Connington Hand of the King, gambling the dynasty on the young lord’s hunger to save his prince.

The gamble died at the Battle of the Bells. Hunting the rebel Robert Baratheon through the town of Stoney Sept, Connington held back from burning the town to smoke him out — a mercy, or a failure of ruthlessness, depending on which voice in his memory is speaking — and when the bells rang and Robert burst from hiding, the rebels shattered the royal army in the streets. Aerys stripped Connington of office, lands and honor and exiled him; the books’ bitter footnote is his conviction, decades on, that Tywin Lannister would have burned Stoney Sept without blinking, and that the realm’s history is written by men who blink at nothing. In exile he sank — the Golden Company, then dismissal, then the story put about that he had drunk himself to death in Lys, a disgrace so complete that no one thought to check it.

The disgrace was a costume. Connington had been recruited by Varys and Illyrio for the strangest duty in the saga: to vanish, and to raise a boy. For a dozen years he lived as Griff, a hired-sword riverman on the poleboat Shy Maid on the Rhoyne, foster-father, tutor and drill-sergeant to a blue-haired lad called Young Griff — who is, Connington believes with all that is left of his heart, Rhaegar’s son Aegon, saved from the Sack as an infant and hidden against the day of restoration. The love he could never give the father he pours, sublimated into duty, into the son: the boy is his penance, his second chance at the Bells, and the last thing his life is for.

The fifth book detonates his quiet twice. Ferrying the disguised Tyrion Lannister down the Rhoyne, the Shy Maid passes through the drowned sorrows of Chroyane, where the stone men attack — and Connington, hauling the dwarf from the river, takes the touch of greyscale. He tells no one, watching the grey creep up his arm on a private clock. And when the planned union with Daenerys’s fleet dissolves in delays, it is Connington who makes the great throw: turning the Golden Company west to invade Westeros without her. The landings in the stormlands, the fall of his own Griffin’s Roost, and the storming of Storm’s End follow in swift order — the exiled griffin, dying by inches, conquering a beachhead for his dead prince’s son with the calm of a man who has subtracted his own survival from every equation.

He is one of the books’ finest late creations: a study in devotion as tragedy, the counselor whose love makes him the worst possible judge of the one question that matters — whether the boy is real. The books plant the doubt (a mummer’s dragon, the prophecy says) and give it to everyone except the one man who cannot afford to ask it.

The page and the screen

The show cut Jon Connington entirely — no Griff, no Shy Maid, no second Aegon, no stormlands invasion — and quietly recycled his most distinctive affliction: the greyscale contracted saving Tyrion from the stone men was transplanted onto Jorah Mormont, along with the doomed-devotion flavor that goes with it, in the show’s Valyria sequence. The Golden Company does reach the screen, but sails for Cersei under Harry Strickland and dies in a single morning, a fate that inverts the books’ arc, where Connington’s company lands early, fights well, and holds a growing piece of Westeros as the published story ends. He is alive in the novels — victorious at Storm’s End, hiding his gloved hand, waiting on a trial by battle with the greyscale that no man survives — one of the largest characters, and largest storylines, the adaptation ever simply erased.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Griff drops his mask: Jon Connington, exiled Hand of the Mad King — and the blue-haired boy is presented to the Golden Company as Aegon Targaryen, Rhaegar's living son. (ADWD 25)
• The Golden Company takes Griffin's Roost, Jon Connington's stolen home, in Aegon's name; the greyscale on the exile's hand climbs while his prince's war begins ahead of schedule. (ADWD 62)

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.