Varys

The Spider: the realm's Master of Whisperers, a soft, bald, perfumed eunuch whose little birds carry him every secret in the Seven Kingdoms. He serves, he says, the realm.

The fuller tale

Varys enters every room already knowing what was said in it yesterday. A slave-born eunuch from Lys, cut as a boy by a sorcerer who burned his parts in a brazier and heard a voice answer from the flames — a memory he relates, decades later, with the fire's voice still audible under his own — he survived the streets of Myr and Pentos as a thief of an unusual specialty: he stole information. The trade grew into a network, the network into a reputation, and the reputation carried him across the narrow sea to Aerys Targaryen's paranoid court, where a king who trusted no one found the one adviser whose whole art was knowing whom not to trust. Westeros never stops underestimating him for the things it mocks — the bald head, the perfume, the soft hands — which suits him precisely. Contempt is camouflage.

His instrument is children. The little birds — small, quick, often tongueless, threaded through the hollow walls of the Red Keep and half the cities of two continents — bring him everything: treasons whispered in bedchambers, debts, appetites, the exact hour a rival's ship makes port. As Master of Whisperers he serves Aerys, then Robert, then Joffrey, then Tommen, surviving each transition that kills better-armed men, because Varys has grasped the realm's true constitution before anyone: as he frames it in his riddle to Tyrion, power resides where men believe it resides — it is a trick, a shadow on the wall. The Spider has no army, no lands, no name, and for twenty years nothing happens in King's Landing that he has not heard coming.

The question that stalks him through both tellings is what all of it is for. His answer, delivered to anyone who asks and believed by almost no one, is the realm — not its kings but its people, the millions who bleed when the great houses play. The story keeps testing the claim. He argues against the assassination of a pregnant Daenerys even while transmitting the order; he visits Ned Stark in the black cells, the only counselor who does, to broker the confession meant to save him; he warns Tyrion, aids him, and finally smuggles him across the narrow sea in a crate when the alternative is an execution. Every act is deniable, every kindness double-booked as strategy — and yet, across eight seasons and five books, the pattern holds: whenever the powerless are on the board, the Spider quietly plays their side.

In exile he stakes the last of his career on Daenerys Targaryen. It is Varys who steers Tyrion to her, Varys who delivers her the alliances of Dorne and the Reach, Varys who stands on Dragonstone and answers her direct challenge with the saga's cleanest statement of his creed: kings and queens rise and fall, but he serves the realm, and will tell her to her face the day she starts failing it. She accepts the terms with a promise to burn him if he betrays her — and both of them, in that scene, understand they have just scheduled an appointment. The final season keeps it. Watching his queen isolate, grieve and harden, and holding the secret of Jon Snow's birth, Varys does exactly what he told her he would do — begins quietly working the succession, letters and whispers, one last wager of himself on the realm's behalf.

He is the saga's great argument about ends and means, deliberately left unresolved. Set against Littlefinger — his opposite number, the throne room's other permanent fixture — Varys is the schemer whose ambitions are for other people; set against the honest men he outlives, he is the proof that in King's Landing, virtue without deception is just a shorter queue for the block. The books complicate him further, the show streamlines him into something closer to a conscience with a spy network; both agree on the essentials. He was cut as a child by men who wanted to use him, and spent the rest of his life making sure the realm's knives knew where its children were.

The page and the screen

The book Varys is running a much longer and stranger game. In the novels his decades of whispering serve a specific restoration: with his partner Illyrio Mopatis he has raised a hidden claimant — a boy presented as Rhaegar's son Aegon, supposedly saved from the sack as an infant — educated him in secret aboard a poleboat on the Rhoyne, and timed his landing in Westeros with the Golden Company at his back. The show cut the boy, the company plot and the partnership's depth entirely, redirecting Varys's loyalty to Daenerys herself; book Varys, pointedly, never serves her, and his fifth-book reappearance in the capital — emerging from the walls to murder the realm's ablest administrator precisely because a mending realm leaves no room for his prince — reveals a conspirator far more ruthless than the show's weary humanist. Which face is the true one is the books' open question about him.

The tellings also part on texture: the books' Varys is a master of disguise who moves through the city as a gaoler, a begging brother, a gap-toothed turnkey, and the whispered horror of his cutting is delivered to Tyrion in the dark of a tunnel rather than a bright chamber. The show's finest Varys material — the odd-couple sparring with Tyrion in Meereen, the ships-and-sails banter, the last quiet talk on the steps at Dragonstone — is its own invention, and among its best.

In the show, season by season

Season Three. In And Now His Watch Is Ended — Patience measured in decades, revenge measured in crates.

Season Five. In The Wars to Come — "A ruler who is loved... you'll never make one out of Cersei."

In the books

A Dance with Dragons. In The Dragon's Peace Breaks — Returns from nowhere with two small crossbow bolts and a speech. In For the Watch — "I am sorry. You were the man the realm needed. That is why you must die."

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Varys reveals what was in the box the sorcerer sent him — and who is in his crate now. (S3·E4)
• Littlefinger wins the Vale-sized game with Varys and ships Ros to Joffrey's crossbow. (S3·E6)
• Tyrion arrives in Pentos in a crate; Varys offers him a queen worth serving. (S5·E1)
• Varys chooses the realm one last time; the dragon chooses fire. (S8·E5)
• The tourney ends; by night Varys comes to the Hand's chambers with soft words about poison, the king's wine, and men who serve the realm. (AGOT 31)
• Chasing cats through the Red Keep, Arya overhears two men in the cellars plotting delay and war — Varys and Illyrio, though she cannot name them. (AGOT 33)
• In the black cells Varys comes disguised with water and arithmetic: confess, take the black, and Sansa lives. “The realm bleeds, Lord Eddard.” (AGOT 59)
• Ser Kevan Lannister mends what Cersei broke, piece by patient piece — so Varys puts a crossbow bolt in his chest, apologizing kindly, to keep the realm bleeding for Aegon. (ADWD 73)

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

The show: Executed at Dragonstone (S8·E5)

The Spider backed the realm one last time over its queen, whispering Jon Snow's secret to anyone who could use it. Tyrion informed; Daenerys sentenced; Drogon burned him on the Dragonstone shore at dusk.

The show grants him the death he predicted for himself, on his own terms and schedule. At Dragonstone, on the eve of the last war, Varys commits openly to what he has been edging toward: Jon Snow's claim is better, Jon's temperament is safer, and the realm outranks his queen. He writes the letters naming Jon's birth, sounds out Jon directly, and — the detail the show leaves deliberately ambiguous — may already have moved against Daenerys's life through her kitchens. Tyrion, forced to choose between his friend and his queen, informs. Varys is arrested on the beach at dusk; he removes his rings before they come for him, burning his correspondence — tidy to the last. Facing Daenerys, Tyrion confesses it was he who betrayed him, and Varys's farewell is without rancor: he hopes he deserves this, truly he does, and he hopes he is wrong about her. He was not, which is the epitaph the next episode writes for him in fire across a city. Drogon burns him on the shore at his queen's single word — dracarys — the appointment both of them made in that same castle, kept. In the published books Varys is alive, victorious and terrifying: last seen in the Red Keep's walls with a crossbow, clearing the board for his hidden prince.