Missandei

A young scribe and translator of the peaceable island of Naath, fluent in the tongues of the world, freed from slavery in Astapor.

The fuller tale

Missandei was born on Naath, the Isle of Butterflies off the coast of Sothoryos, whose people are gentle to a degree the rest of the world finds almost mythological — the Peaceful People, who harm nothing, eat no flesh, and worship a god of harmony. The world repaid them as it usually repays gentleness: slavers’ ships. Taken as a small child with her brothers, Missandei was sold into Astapor, where her gift revealed itself — languages poured into her and stayed, until she spoke the common tongue, High Valyrian and its bastard variants, Dothraki, and more besides. The Good Masters set her to interpreting, which is how she came to be standing beside Kraznys mo Nakloz on the day he sold eight thousand Unsullied to a silver-haired girl he assumed could not understand his obscenities.

Her introduction is one of the tale’s neatest pieces of quiet comedy and quiet horror at once: Missandei translating Kraznys’s filth into diplomatic courtesies, smoothing slavery’s manners in real time, because her survival has always depended on being the pleasant surface of an obscene system. Daenerys, who understood every word all along, asks for Missandei as part of the bargain — and then, in her first act as her new mistress, tells her she is free, and asks whether she will serve anyway. Missandei’s answer, and the wariness inside it, is the beginning of the tale’s most durable working friendship: valar morghulis, she offers — all men must die — and Daenerys corrects her: yes, but we are not men.

What she becomes in the queen’s service is easy to underestimate because it looks like standing quietly beside a throne. Missandei is Daenerys’s interpreter, scribe, herald, and chief of protocol — the voice that proclaims her titles to hostile cities — but she is also the closest thing the queen has to a peer: the one member of the court who is neither suitor, soldier, nor schemer, and therefore the only one whose company asks nothing. Their scenes together — hair-braiding, language lessons, the small talk of two young women running an empire — are the storyline’s connective tissue, and the place where Daenerys practices being a person rather than an institution.

The show gives her a second story the books do not: her slow, careful romance with Grey Worm, two people whom slavery had defined as instruments discovering that the definitions were wrong. It is played with a restraint unusual for the series — a courtship of language lessons and long looks between a translator and a soldier taught from childhood that he was no longer a man — and it becomes, by the later seasons, the emotional proof of Daenerys’s whole project: these two freed people, gentle with each other, are what breaking the wheel is supposed to be for. Missandei crosses the world for it — Meereen to Dragonstone to the frozen North, an islander from the butterfly seas counseling a queen through Westerosi snow.

She is also, pointedly, the tale’s most visible former slave standing in its halls of power, and the story gives her the arguments that matter: it is Missandei who explains to skeptical Westerosi what it means that the queen’s followers chose her, and Missandei whom the tale trusts to say the word freedom without irony. That the realm she helped win never quite becomes a place for her is one of the ending’s deliberate bruises.

The page and the screen

Book Missandei is a child — about ten when Daenerys frees her, a solemn, uncannily clever little scribe whom the queen half mothers, and whose brothers, taken with her, were made Unsullied; one of them, Mossador, the show borrowed by name for a Meereen subplot. She has no romance with Grey Worm on the page — the show aged her up and invented the relationship whole — and she remains alive in the published books, serving in Meereen through the queen’s absence. The show’s Missandei, in Nathalie Emmanuel’s performance, became one of the adaptation’s most significant expansions: a background functionary grown into a principal, whose death was written specifically to detonate the final act — a purpose the books, with their living, eleven-year-old Missandei, cannot and likely will not mirror.

In the show, season by season

Season Eight. In The Last of the Starks — Born free, died chained, last word a command.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Missandei of Naath dies in chains on the walls of King's Landing, with one word: Dracarys. (S8·E4)

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

The show: Executed at King's Landing (S8·E4)

Captured at sea and paraded in chains on the walls of King's Landing, the freedwoman of Naath was beheaded by the Mountain at Cersei's nod, in full view of her queen and Grey Worm. Her last word was Dracarys.

The show’s Missandei dies in the eighth season, in the war’s cruelest staging. Captured at sea in Euron Greyjoy’s ambush off Dragonstone, she is held in King’s Landing and brought out in chains onto the city walls — before Daenerys, Grey Worm, and the assembled parley — as Cersei’s answer to the demand for surrender. Offered last words, the freedwoman of Naath chooses the queen’s own word of fire: Dracarys. The Mountain beheads her where she stands, in her chains, in front of the man who loves her and the queen who freed her — the chains a deliberate, calculated obscenity for a woman whose whole story was the removal of them.

The death functions exactly as Cersei intended and rather more than she intended: it is the moment the campaign for King’s Landing stops being a war of thrones and becomes, for Daenerys and for Grey Worm, a matter of grief — the last counterweight to fire gone. In the published books Missandei is alive in Meereen, a child at a queen’s side, her story still unwritten; the show’s walls-of-King’s-Landing ending belongs to the adaptation alone.