Mirri Maz Duur
A godswife and healer of the Lamb Men, learned in medicine and darker arts, taken as a slave when the Dothraki burned her temple town.
A soul born at Lhazar.
The fuller tale
Season One
The khalasar sacks a Lhazareen village for ships; Daenerys claims the godswife Mirri Maz Duur ÔÇö and Drogo takes a wound. Drogo's wound festers; Daenerys lets Mirri Maz Duur work blood magic as the khalasar recoils.
Where they stand. Village of the Lhazareen.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Bound to a funeral pyre (S1┬ÀE10)
The godswife traded Drogo's life for the life of Daenerys's unborn son and called it justice for her burned temple. Daenerys bound her to the khal's funeral pyre, and she sang her death song until the fire took the tune.
On the page. Given to the flames (AGOT, ch. 73)
The godswife repaid the sack of her temple by trading Rhaego's life for a breathing husk of a khal, and told Daenerys the sun would rise in the west before Drogo returned. She was bound to his pyre ÔÇö and from her death-song came dragons.
Daenerys bound Mirri Maz Duur to Khal DrogoÔÇÖs funeral pyre, and both tellings are exact about the sequence: the maegi was tied to the pyre with the khalÔÇÖs body and treasures, the three petrified dragon eggs were set among the wood, and the khaleesi lit the fire herself. Mirri sang as the flames climbed ÔÇö a death-song, defiant, until the smoke took the tune and the screaming was no longer song. It was not, the tale is careful to establish, mere execution: Daenerys had understood the maegiÔÇÖs own lesson better than her teacher, and spent her death as a component. Only death pays for life ÔÇö and three lives were in the fire.
What the pyre returned at dawn is the storyÔÇÖs founding miracle: Daenerys unburnt in the ashes, three dragons at her body, the first in the world in a century and a half. The booksÔÇÖ epilogue to Mirri is the bleak symmetry that her vengeance made her victim into the very thing she died to prevent ÔÇö she burned one conqueror in the tent, and her burning midwifed a greater one. The dragons that broke Astapor, Yunkai and Meereen ÔÇö and, in the showÔÇÖs telling, KingÔÇÖs Landing ÔÇö hatched in the fire she fed.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The two tellings track closely; the books simply supply more of everything ÔÇö MirriÔÇÖs education under Marwyn the Mage (a thread that quietly links her to the CitadelÔÇÖs forbidden shelves), the fuller horror of the sack, and the precise, chilling interview in which she explains to Daenerys that her sonÔÇÖs death was not a mishap but the point. The show compresses her learning into a few lines and shifts some emphases ÔÇö its Mirri states outright that she intervened to spare the world the stallionÔÇÖs coming conquests, making the murder overtly political ÔÇö but keeps her prophecy about DrogoÔÇÖs return nearly verbatim, which matters, because Daenerys later treats its impossible conditions as a private calendar of grief. Her death is the same in both tellings, and so is what walks out of it.
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.