Kevan Lannister

Tywin's steadfast younger brother and right hand, a competent, unambitious soldier who has spent his life in his brother's shadow and never resented it.

The fuller tale

Every great man needs one person who is neither rival nor sycophant, and Tywin Lannister's was his brother. Kevan grew up in the same collapsing household — watching their father Tytos laughed into irrelevance — and drew the opposite conclusion from it: not that he must dominate, but that the family needed exactly one dominant will, and his job was to serve it well. He spent a lifetime as Tywin's marshal, quartermaster and second signature, competent at everything and covetous of nothing, and the arrangement suited them both so perfectly that the court barely noticed him. That was the point. Men who underestimate the quiet brother of a terrifying man tend to discover, late, that the quiet one heard everything.

The war years show his quality in glimpses. He commands in Tywin's host, sits the councils, and does the unglamorous work of an army's actual functioning; in the books he is one of the few who argue with Tywin and survive the experience, because his arguments are never about himself. His son Lancel's slow ruin — Robert's wine-pourer, Cersei's discarded plaything, the Blackwater's casualty — grieves him in a way Tywin would never permit himself, and after Tywin's death it is Kevan who refuses Cersei to her face: he will not serve as her figurehead Hand, tells her precisely what she is, and withdraws to the Rock rather than decorate her disaster. It is the most anyone in the family ever says no to Cersei and walks away.

He returns when the wreckage demands it. With Cersei walked and broken and the realm ungoverned, Kevan takes up the regency and — in the books' telling especially — turns out to be exactly the ruler the moment needs: he conciliates the Faith, steadies the Tyrell alliance, feeds the capital, and begins quietly repairing everything his brother's children shattered. The tragedy of Kevan Lannister is arithmetic again: the family's least ambitious man is its best governor, and by the time anyone hands him the realm, being good at ruling it has become the most dangerous job in Westeros.

The page and the screen

The show keeps Kevan peripheral — a stern face at councils, a walkout from Cersei's regency, a return as Tommen's Hand — while the books make him the hinge of an entire volume's ending. His refusal scene with Cersei is on the page far longer and colder, and his regency is the fifth book's demonstration that the realm's sickness was never inevitable: given one honest administrator, Westeros starts healing within months. Readers who know him only from television are often surprised to learn his book sendoff is among the most celebrated chapters Martin has written; the show, folding the Faith crisis to its own timeline, gives him a communal exit instead of his own.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Ser Kevan Lannister mends what Cersei broke, piece by patient piece — so Varys puts a crossbow bolt in his chest, apologizing kindly, to keep the realm bleeding for Aegon. (ADWD 73)

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

The show: Died when the sept burned (S6·E10)

The books: A crossbow in the night (ADWD, ch. 73)

Tywin's steady brother, Hand to a boy king in a burning city, was in the Great Sept when the caches beneath it caught. All of Cersei's rivals in one building — her uncle counted among the acceptable losses.

The two tellings kill him for opposite reasons, which says everything about him. In the show he dies in the Great Sept of Baelor with the High Sparrow, the Tyrells and half the court, incinerated by the wildfire Cersei ignites to escape her trial — an acceptable loss in his niece's arithmetic, one more rival removed. In the books he is murdered precisely because he was succeeding: lured to Pycelle's chambers by a forged note, he takes a crossbow bolt between the ribs, and Varys himself steps from the shadows to finish it — apologizing as he works. The eunuch explains, courteously, that Kevan was knitting the realm back together, reconciling Faith and throne and Tyrell and Lannister, and a mended Westeros has no need of the Targaryen restoration Varys has spent decades preparing; the little birds close in with their little knives. The fifth book ends on his dying view of the ceiling — the epilogue of Tywin's whole order, killed not for its crimes but for its competence.