Podrick Payne
A shy, tongue-tied young squire of distant Lannister blood, quietly braver and more capable than anyone gives him credit for.
A soul born at The Westerlands.
The fuller tale
Season Eight
One last night: songs by the fire, wine, Podrick singing ÔÇö and Jaime knights Brienne of Tarth.
Where they stand. Winterfell and King's Landing.
How it ends for them
The chronicle records no death for this soul ÔÇö they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.
Their chapters, book by book
A Feast for Crows 2 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Book Pod is younger, smaller and still mid-journey. The novels keep his Blackwater heroics and his refusal to abandon condemned masters ÔÇö he follows Brienne uninvited across the Riverlands because Ser Jaime's lady is his best road back to the lord he lost ÔÇö but his arc through the published pages ends in genuine peril: taken with Brienne by the Brotherhood Without Banners in its merciless late incarnation, he is under a noose in her final chapters, and his survival hangs on the word Brienne shouts as the rope draws ÔÇö a cliffhanger the books have never resolved on the page, though the story's grammar and Brienne's later movements imply the boy was cut down in time. The show, having no patience for ambiguity about its most likable squire, carries him clear of the Riverlands entirely ÔÇö no Brotherhood, no noose ÔÇö and invents his whole later flowering: the training montages, the song, the white cloak. The famous brothel mystery is the show's too; book Pod's talents remain, as far as the record runs, strictly military.
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.