Mycah, the butcher's boy
A butcher's boy travelling with the king's party, who befriends a Stark girl and plays at swords with her by the river.
A soul born at King's Landing.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Ridden down on the kingsroad (S1┬ÀE2)
Arya's friend played at swords with a princess by the Trident and paid a prince's grudge for it. The Hound rode him down on the kingsroad; his father was given the body.
On the page. Killed on the kingsroad (AGOT, ch. 17)
He played at swords with Arya by the Trident and a prince's lie made it treason. The Hound rode him down and brought the pieces back across his saddle. 'He ran,' Sandor said. 'But not very fast.'
He is ridden down on the kingsroad, and no version of the story pretends it was anything but murder. After the incident at the Trident, with Joffrey humiliated and the court requiring blood from somewhere, Sandor Clegane is sent after the fled boy ÔÇö on whose order the tellings leave technically unspoken, though Cersei's appetite and Joffrey's lie are the only candidates ÔÇö and the Hound does what the Hound is for: he runs Mycah down on horseback and cuts him nearly in half. The books deliver the detail through Ned Stark's horrified viewing of the body, returned to the butcher his father like spoiled goods; the show gives it a single image, the small form slung across the Hound's saddle, and the line that damns and defines Sandor for seasons ÔÇö he ran, but not very fast. It is the first death of the saga's long wars, inflicted for a prince's wounded vanity on the one person present who had done nothing at all; Arya adds the Hound to her list for it that night, and the story spends two entire character arcs ÔÇö hers and Sandor's ÔÇö paying off the debt incurred beside the Trident.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Page and screen tell his short story almost identically ÔÇö the Trident, the broomstick, the flight, the Hound ÔÇö and differ only in what they do with the echo. The books make him a permanent stone in two consciences: his name is a fixture of Arya's nightly death-prayer from the first, and his memory becomes the unlikely hinge of Sandor Clegane's book arc ÔÇö flung at the Hound as an accusation at his trial by the Brotherhood Without Banners, and carried by him, the story implies, a good deal further than he admits. The show keeps the list but stages the reckoning differently, giving Arya and the Hound seasons of road together in which the butcher's boy is the unspoken third traveler. In both tellings his function is identical and terrible: he is the measure by which we are meant to judge everyone who was on the kingsroad that day ÔÇö and by that measure, nearly all of them are found wanting.
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.