Prendahl na Ghezn
A hard Ghiscari captain of the Second Sons sellsword company, hired to fight against the dragon queen at Yunkai.
The fuller tale
Prendahl na Ghezn is a Ghiscari sellsword captain in Yunkai’s pay when the dragon queen’s army arrives — in the books a commander of the Stormcrows, in the show a captain of the Second Sons — and the tale gives him one scene to be exactly what the slavers’ silver buys: a hard professional who has taken the Yellow City’s coin, means to earn it, and sees in the girl across the tent nothing but a contract complication with dragons. Summoned to parley, he hears Daenerys’s offer to buy his company out from under its employers and answers with a soldier’s contempt; blood runs truer than gold, he tells her, in what proves to be an inaccurate market forecast.
His function is to be the vote that loses. The sellsword companies decide their allegiance in council, and Prendahl’s company holds a third captain with different arithmetic: Daario Naharis, who settles the debate that night with a blade and carries the results to the queen’s tent in a sack. Prendahl exists so the tale can show, in one economical stroke, how power actually changes hands in the sellsword east — not on the battlefield, but in the tent, between partners, at the exact moment a better offer outweighs an old comrade.
The page and the screen
The books and the show agree on Prendahl’s death and disagree on his letterhead. On the page he co-captains the Stormcrows — a separate company from Mero’s Second Sons — with Daario and Sallor the Bald, and it is both his and Sallor’s heads that Daario delivers when he swings the Stormcrows to the queen; the Second Sons defect separately, later, after Yunkai’s field is already lost. The show merged the two companies into one, made Prendahl Mero’s lieutenant alongside Daario, and had both captains die the same night — the same consolidation that later lets the Second Sons stand for all the queen’s sellswords. The scene the books give Prendahl — dismissing Daenerys in Ghiscari pride as a mongrel queen — became on screen the cruder tent scene the show preferred; the head in the sack is identical in both.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: His head answered Daario's ambition (S3·E8)
The books: His head delivered by Daario (ASOS, ch. 42)
The Ghiscari captain of the Second Sons ordered Daario to kill Daenerys. Daario answered by bringing Prendahl's head to her tent instead, an offering from the company's new commander.
Prendahl na Ghezn died the night the sellswords changed sides, killed not by his enemy but by his colleague. Assigned with Daario Naharis — by lot on the page, by Mero’s order on screen — to settle the matter of the dragon queen, Prendahl instead became the settlement: Daario killed him (and, in the books, his fellow captain Sallor; in the show, Mero as well) and carried the heads to Daenerys’s tent as proof that the company’s swords now answered to a captain of better judgment. Both tellings play the delivery the same way — the sack opened at the queen’s feet, the offer of service made over the trophies — and both let the arithmetic speak for itself: the man who said blood ran truer than gold was disproved by a colleague who understood that in the free companies, blood is simply gold’s way of voting.