The Waif
A pale, ageless acolyte of the House of Black and White, who trains new servants of the Many-Faced God in the arts of the faceless — patiently, mercilessly.
A soul born at Braavos, sworn to The Faceless Men.
The fuller tale
Season Five
An acolyte of the House of Black and White already, and cold toward the new girl in exactly the way the House requires. She turns up in Arya's training wearing other people's lives — a beggar, a highborn lady, whoever the exercise calls for — to see whether Arya can spot the same person underneath, and rarely lets her pass the test without a bruise for the trouble. When Arya starts keeping a face of her own and a list the House never approved, the Waif is the one person in the building who seems to notice, and to disapprove, well before Jaqen ever says a word about it.
Season Six
Sent to finish what blindness started, and drills Arya through the streets of Braavos with a wooden staff, knocking her down again and again until the excuse stops working. When Arya's mercy toward a Braavosi actress costs her Jaqen's patience for good — given one job, she gave the woman a warning instead — the Waif is handed the contract on Arya herself, and this time it isn't a training exercise. She stabs her in the street, hunts her wounded through the city, and kills the actress who sheltered her along the way, cornering Arya at last with nothing between them but a dark room and a candle. She has never once underestimated Arya's blade; what she doesn't account for is a girl who has spent a season learning to fight without her eyes.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Her face joined the hall (S6·E8)
The faceless novice who hated the Stark girl hunted her one last time through Braavos — into a black cellar, where a blind girl's training and a single candle-cut ended the game. Her face joined the hall.
The show’s Waif dies in the sixth season, at the end of the hunt she asked to lead. Having stabbed Arya on the bridge and butchered the actress Lady Crane for sheltering her, she chases her quarry through Braavos — a pursuit staged as relentless, machine-like, unbeatable — into a bare cellar where Needle waits and a single sword-stroke puts out the candle. The show declines to stage the kill: the next thing seen is the Waif’s face, newly mounted in the hall of the House of Black and White, where Jaqen finds it and draws the intended conclusion. Arya beat her where the blind months had made Arya the native: in the dark. In the books the waif lives on in the temple, no man’s enemy — the duel belongs to the show alone.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The book Waif is no enemy: she is a small, sad, gentle presence who teaches Arya the tongue of Braavos and the craft of poisons, gives her the story of her own ruined childhood as a lesson in lies, and shows the novice nothing worse than the temple’s ordinary rigor. The lethal rivalry, the sanctioned hunt, and the duel in the dark are inventions of the show, which needed Braavos to end in something more cinematic than a curriculum. She is alive in the published books, still serving in the House of Black and White — which means the show killed a character the novels may still be using, one of the adaptation’s quieter unilateral choices.
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.