Meryn Trant
A knight of the Kingsguard, a joyless brute happy to do the ugly work a cruel king requires and call it duty.
The fuller tale
Ser Meryn Trant is the answer to a question the Kingsguard's founders never thought to ask: what happens to an order of the realm's finest knights when a king prefers obedient ones? A charmless, unremarkable swordsman elevated to the white cloak, Trant distinguishes himself in nothing except availability — he is the brother the throne calls when the order is one no knight should take. It is Trant who leads the guardsmen sent to seize a nine-year-old girl during the coup, Trant who cuts down her fencing master for standing in the way, and Trant who, when King Joffrey wants Sansa Stark punished for her brother's victories, strikes and strips a defenseless girl in open court while his white cloak hangs off his shoulders — pausing only when the Imp arrives to ask whether beating children is a knight's work.
The character's whole function is to embody the gap between the institution and its members. Set against Barristan Selmy's fury at what the order has become, or even Sandor Clegane's honest refusal to wear its hypocrisies gently, Trant is the Kingsguard as career: he takes the cloak's privileges, performs its brutalities, and experiences no friction whatsoever between his vows and his orders. The show gives Sandor the definitive scouting report — any boy whore with a sword could beat three Meryn Trants — and stages their mutual loathing across two seasons of sneers; the books let Jaime, reorganizing the order as Lord Commander, privately rank him among the men who shame the cloak. Power never minds; men like Trant are precisely what certain kinds of power are for.
His final posting sends him across the narrow sea. Accompanying Mace Tyrell's embassy to the Iron Bank of Braavos as escort, Trant treats the city as men of his appetites treat foreign ports — and the show, in its bleakest character revelation, follows him into a brothel where his tastes run to the youngest girls the house can produce, each rejected as too old. It is a last-act confirmation that the man who beat Sansa on command and killed Syrio Forel for convenience was never merely following orders; the orders and the man were always a match. Braavos, the city of his old victim's teacher, is watching him closely.
The page and the screen
Book Trant is the same instrument with less screen time and no Braavos. The novels use him exactly as the show does — Syrio's presumed killer, Sansa's beater, the reliable hand for shameful work — but he never leaves Westeros, and the pedophilia the show assigns him is a television invention constructed to sharpen his ending. In the published books he is alive: still a Kingsguard under Tommen, still unremarkable, last seen holding the door of the order's decline. His Braavosi excursion belongs to the show's compression of Arya's training arc, which needed a name from her list to walk within a blade's reach of a novice Faceless Man; readers of the books are still waiting to learn which telling of his story the novels will rhyme with.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Arya sees Meryn Trant in Braavos and abandons the thin man for an older prayer. (S5·E9)
- Arya takes Meryn Trant's eyes and life; the Faceless Men take her sight for it. (S5·E10)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Killed in Braavos (S5·E10)
The Kingsguard brute who killed Syrio Forel and beat Sansa on command took his appetites to a Braavosi brothel. A girl with a borrowed face put out both his eyes before she cut his throat — the first name crossed off Arya's list by her own hand.
In the show, the first name Arya Stark crosses off her list by her own hand is his. Recognizing Trant on the canals during his Iron Bank escort duty — the man who killed Syrio Forel — she abandons her assigned Faceless errand and stalks him to the brothel where his tastes have emptied the room of willing girls. The child brought to him last is a girl with a borrowed face. What follows is deliberate, prolonged and shot without mercy: she puts out both his eyes with her knife, names herself and her grievance so he dies knowing exactly whose blade it is, and opens his throat. The kill costs her — the House of Black and White exacts payment for a life taken from the wrong ledger, and Arya's blindness follows — but the show frames the debt as one she never disputes owing. In the published books Meryn Trant is alive in King's Landing, his appointment with the god of death not yet on any page.