Rast

A brutal former rapist sent to the Wall, one of the meaner recruits Jon and Sam train beside at Castle Black.

The fuller tale

Rast is the recruit the Wall was invented for: a rapist offered the black instead of the knife, who arrives at Castle Black having learned nothing from the reprieve. In Thorne’s training yard he finds the natural occupation of the strong and stupid — tormenting Samwell Tarly — until Jon Snow ends the sport by other means: Rast wakes one night to a direwolf’s weight on his chest and a quiet promise, and Sam’s troubles in the yard stop that day. He never forgives either of them, and files the grievance where men like Rast file everything, with interest.

The Great Ranging carries him beyond the Wall with the rest, and hunger and fear finish what resentment started. At Craster’s Keep he is in the thick of the mutiny — among the first knives out when the starving remnant turns on its host and its commander — and afterward he stays on with the mutineers to enjoy the spoils of the smallest, ugliest kingdom in the world: a longhall, a larder, and Craster’s captive wives.

The page and the screen

Book-Rast is a training-yard bully who fades from the page after the recruits are assigned — the Ghost-on-the-chest warning is his one memorable book scene, and he takes no recorded part in the mutiny, whose named knives are Dirk, Ollo Lophand, Clubfoot Karl and their like. He has no death in the published books; he simply drops out of the story, one more black brother somewhere in the ranks. The show promoted him into the mutiny’s second face — it is Rast who actually stabs the Old Bear on screen — and gave him a season of squalid tyranny at the keep, largely so that the audience would have a familiar name to hate when the Watch came calling.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Killed at Craster's Keep (S4·E5)

The whining mutineer who stabbed the Old Bear ran when the Watch retook Craster's Keep. He got as far as the treeline, where Ghost had been waiting a long time to see him again.

The show settles his account with tidy cruelty. When Jon Snow leads the loyalists back to Craster’s Keep, Rast — who put his knife in Jeor Mormont’s back and spent the months since starving a caged direwolf for amusement — runs from the fight and makes the treeline. Ghost is waiting there. The wolf he tormented takes his throat, and the man who began the story raping and ended it stabbing commanders dies alone in the dark, mourned by no one, his death scene shorter than his crimes deserve. In the published books he is alive, or at least unaccounted for — the page never bothered to finish him.