Meryn Trant
A knight of the Kingsguard, a joyless brute happy to do the ugly work a cruel king requires and call it duty.
A soul born at The Crownlands, sworn to The Kingsguard.
The fuller tale
Season Five
Arya sees Meryn Trant in Braavos and abandons the thin man for an older prayer. Arya takes Meryn Trant's eyes and life; the Faceless Men take her sight for it.
Where they stand. Braavos.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Killed in Braavos (S5┬ÀE10)
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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö the man who killed Syrio Forel ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö the House of Black and White exacts payment for a life taken from the wrong ledger, and Arya's blindness follows ÔÇö 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.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Book Trant is the same instrument with less screen time and no Braavos. The novels use him exactly as the show does ÔÇö Syrio's presumed killer, Sansa's beater, the reliable hand for shameful work ÔÇö 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.
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.