Pate, the Citadel novice
A slow, unhappy novice of the Citadel in Oldtown, in over his head with a Braavosi stranger and a stolen key (book only).
The fuller tale
The Citadel of Oldtown mints the realm’s knowledge, and Pate is its least promising coin: a slow, kindly, unhappy novice pushing thirty years against examinations he keeps failing, whose actual employment is tending the senile Archmaester Walgrave — feeding him, cleaning him, minding his beloved white ravens, and holding, not incidentally, the old man’s keys. Even his name is a joke at his expense: every fool tale in Westeros stars a pig boy called Pate, and the novices never let him forget it. What he has instead of prospects is a girl — Rosey, a tavern maid at the Quill and Tankard, whose maidenhood her mistress has priced at a golden dragon, a sum a failed novice will not honestly see in a lifetime.
Into that arithmetic steps a stranger the story calls only the alchemist: a hooded, soft-spoken man who claims his art can change gold — and offers Pate exactly one golden dragon for exactly one thing, a certain iron key from the collection Pate minds. The bargain is the oldest in literature, dressed in Citadel gray: a small theft, a large want, and a buyer who knows precisely what a desperate man’s conscience weighs. Pate makes his choice at the riverside inn, coin against key, telling himself the story every such man tells — that no great harm can come of so small a thing.
His purpose in the saga is to open its fourth volume and its newest front: the prologue that announces the war after the war will be fought over knowledge — the Citadel’s locked doors, its glass candles burning where glass candles should not burn, and the interest that the world’s most dangerous people have begun to take in what the maesters keep. Pate is the small, ordinary door through which all of that walks in.
The page and the screen
Pate is book-only, and so is his entire mystery — the show’s visit to Oldtown, with Sam’s bedpans and chained library, borrows the setting but none of the conspiracy. On the page, the tale’s eeriest thread runs straight through him: the alchemist’s glimpsed features match the face Jaqen H’ghar wore when he left Arya at Harrenhal, and at the fourth book’s end a novice called Pate — walking, smiling, unmistakably not the boy who died — makes friendly introduction to Samwell Tarly at the Citadel’s door. The Faceless Men have enrolled, the books quietly tell us, and only the reader knows.
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
Before the tale: (book only)
The books: Died in Oldtown (AFFC, ch. 1)
The pig boy of the Citadel sold a maester's key to a stranger with a face that wasn't his, for a gold dragon and a girl's freedom. The coin was still in his fist when he died — and someone left Oldtown wearing his name.
He dies in the prologue of A Feast for Crows, minutes after the worst bargain of his life. The alchemist pays him his golden dragon for Archmaester Walgrave’s iron key; Pate, giddy with the enormity of it, bites the coin as men do — and is dead before he has gone far, folding into the Oldtown street with the gold still in his fist, the taste of something wrong the last thing his slow, honest mind records. Whether the poison rode the coin or the parting is left for readers to argue; what is not left in doubt is the sequel, for by the volume’s end someone is walking the Citadel wearing Pate’s face and Pate’s name, keys and secrets within easy reach. He never appears in the show.