Loras Tyrell

The Knight of Flowers: Mace's son, the most dazzling young jouster in the Seven Kingdoms, devoted to Renly Baratheon.

The fuller tale

Loras Tyrell is what the songs promise and the story audits. The Knight of Flowers arrives at the Hand's tourney as chivalry's cover illustration — sixteen, beautiful, draped in sapphires and roses, handing his winnings' flower to the crowd's prettiest girl — and unhorses the realm's best, including, by way of a mare in heat and a plan, the Mountain himself. The trick is the character in miniature: dazzling, genuinely gifted, and never quite above improving the odds. Sansa Stark sighs; Renly Baratheon smiles; the realm files Loras under decoration and misses, as it usually does, the steel.

Renly is the center of him. The show states plainly what the books fold into subtext — that Loras is Renly's lover, his kingmaker, and the reason the Reach crowns a fourth-born claimant with a hundred thousand swords — and both tellings agree that everything reckless in Loras dates from the shadow in the tent. The books give his grief its ugliest hour: finding his king dead and his fellow guards standing over the body, he cuts down two of his own sworn brothers before reason returns. Thereafter he serves causes the way grieving men do — completely, and a little carelessly, as though survival had stopped being one of his requirements.

The middle war spends him well: he fights the Blackwater in the vanguard, helps deliver the Tyrell alliance that saves the city, and in the books takes the white cloak of the Kingsguard — trading Highgarden's inheritance for a vow, which for a third son with his heart buried at Storm's End costs less than it looks. The show, which had made him heir, sends him instead into the Faith's cells, where the boy built of tourney silks is systematically unmade — and where the story asks its coldest question about him: what is left of the Knight of Flowers when the flowers, the knighthood, and the name are all stripped away.

The page and the screen

The tellings diverge on his rank and his ruin. Book Loras is the third of four Tyrell children — Willas and Garlan stand between him and Highgarden, both cut from the show, which promoted Loras to heir and thereby invented the Faith's interest in his inheritance. His book endgame is entirely different: as a Kingsguard knight he demands command of the assault on Dragonstone's garrison, takes the castle in a reckless storming, and is carried back scalded by boiling oil and gravely wounded — alive in the published books, but reported dying by increments, with readers left to wonder how much of the report is true and whose interests it serves. The show's imprisonment, confession and mutilation by the Faith have no book counterpart; the books' Loras never faces the Sparrows at all.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Loras Tyrell whispers a crown into Renly's ear. (S1·E5)
• The Faith Militant is reborn; Loras Tyrell is seized for his sins; Tommen bounces off the steps of the sept. (S5·E4)

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 Knight of Flowers confessed, was mutilated with the Faith's seven-pointed star, and renounced Highgarden itself — minutes before the sept that broke him burned with him inside it. House Tyrell's future died the same morning.

The show ends him in the Great Sept, broken first and burned after. Imprisoned by the Faith for his sexuality, Loras is worn down past the point his family bargained for: at trial he confesses everything, renounces his name, his claim and Highgarden itself, and kneels to take the Faith's seven-pointed star carved into his forehead — his sister's fury notwithstanding, the bargain his freedom required. He is given minutes to hold his new station. Cersei's wildfire beneath the sept detonates before the congregation can disperse, and the Knight of Flowers dies with his sister, his father, and the institution that unmade him, in the green fire of the woman who fed him to it. In the published books Loras is alive — burned and bedridden after Dragonstone, but breathing, his renunciations unmade and his sword, for what it is worth, still his.