Rakharo

A young Dothraki warrior of Drogo's khas, loyal to Daenerys, who stays at her side when greater men abandon her.

The fuller tale

Rakharo was one of the young riders of Khal Drogo’s khas — the guard of warriors assigned to the khaleesi — and from the first he is the friendliest face the Dothraki show her: young enough not to have ossified into the khalasar’s contempt for the foreign, proud of his skills, willing to teach and to be teased. The books give him the long whip and the drawling arguments with Jorah about the merits of steel against horsehair; the show gives him the arakh lessons on the road and the patient explanations of custom. Either way he is part of the small circle — handmaids, knight, khas — inside which the frightened Pentoshi bride becomes the khaleesi.

His loyalty is proven where Dothraki loyalty is hardest: after the fall. When Drogo dies and the khalasar dissolves — the riders streaming away after new khals, the weak abandoned by the strong, as the custom is — Rakharo is among the handful of warriors who stay with the widow and her hatchling dragons, following a woman with no horde, no wealth and no precedent into the red waste on nothing but her word. It is one of the saga’s quiet inversions: the horselords’ code says power is the only claim, and a few young riders break it for something the code has no name for yet.

The tellings then part ways with him — the show spending his life early to teach a lesson about the waste’s dangers, the books keeping him at his khaleesi’s side across the sea — but his meaning is the same in both: Rakharo is the first Dothraki who chose her, the seed of the claim she makes years later on the whole people.

The page and the screen

Book Rakharo is alive throughout the published novels: he survives the red waste (it is he who scouts the way to Qarth), crosses to Slaver’s Bay, and stands among the queen’s kos in Meereen — one of the three young riders, with Aggo and Jhogo, whom Daenerys names as good as bloodriders despite custom’s objection to serving a woman. The show killed him in its second-season opener — a choice reportedly tangled with recasting practicalities — and gave his role in the later seasons to the invented rider Kovarro and, eventually, to the anonymous mass of the Dothraki. The books’ bloodrider triad, each carrying a piece of her khalasar’s honor, has no real screen counterpart; Rakharo’s early death is where the show began flattening the Dothraki inner circle it never rebuilt.

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 returned in a saddlebag (alive in the books) (S2·E2)

Sent to scout the red waste for the starving khalasar, he met a rival khal's riders. His horse came back with his head in a saddlebag and his braid cut — a Dothraki's deepest shame.

The show’s Rakharo dies off-screen in the red waste, and the death is delivered as pure Dothraki horror: sent out to scout the empty country for the starving remnant of the khalasar, he does not come back — his horse does, with his severed head in a saddlebag and his braid cut off, the mutilation that shames a rider in death. The kill is credited to a rival khalasar, one of the hordes of the old order announcing what it does to those who follow a woman; Irri’s grief over the braid — he cannot enter the night lands whole — is the scene’s true point, a culture’s whole theology of death compressed into a saddlebag. In the published books Rakharo is alive and riding at his queen’s side in Meereen; the head, the braid and the saddlebag belong to the show alone.