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.
A soul born at Lys.
The fuller tale
Season One
The eunuch spymaster, soft-spoken and never quite trustworthy, whose 'little birds' hear everything said in King's Landing before the speaker has even finished the sentence. He offers Ned Stark warnings dressed up as riddles about who really holds power in the city, and when Ned is arrested he visits the black cells to argue — not entirely dishonestly — that a false confession is the only move left that might save his daughters. Ned takes the advice, confesses, and loses his head anyway, a demonstration of how little even the best information is worth once a boy with a crown stops listening to reason.
Season Two
Tyrion's most useful and least trustworthy ally as acting Hand, forever fencing with Littlefinger in corridors over which of them actually understands the city better. He tells Tyrion, unprompted, the story of the sorcerer who cut him as a boy and burned the pieces in a brazier, a confidence that explains a great deal about a man who trusts no one and needs nothing from anyone. During the Battle of Blackwater he stays inside the walls doing the unglamorous work that wins sieges — organizing, provisioning, making sure the city that survives the night still has someone competent running it.
Season Three
Keeps his allegiance quietly tilted toward Tyrion and away from Joffrey and Cersei, while somewhere across the water a khaleesi with three dragons starts to look like a bet worth placing early. The man who cut him as a boy sends an assassin after him in a box marked as a gift; Varys turns the tables, traps his old tormentor inside a chest instead, and has him shipped off to a slow death at sea — the closest thing to a smile he allows himself all season.
Season Four
After Tyrion is condemned for a murder he didn't commit, Varys helps smuggle him out of the city in a crate bound for the docks, gambling his own position and possibly his life on a man he has never fully vouched for before. He tells Tyrion where to find Illyrio's ship, and where to find Illyrio's other project, before boarding it himself. By the time King's Landing wakes up to Tywin Lannister's murder, both of them are already at sea, headed for a continent Varys has been quietly betting on since before anyone knew a queen was coming from it.
Season Five
Crosses the Narrow Sea with Tyrion, keeping him drunk, alive, and moving through a string of near-disasters that would have killed a less-connected man twice over. He talks his way past pirates and slavers with the same unbothered patience he used to bring to Small Council meetings, and steers Tyrion, deliberately, toward Meereen and the queen he's been quietly championing from a distance for years. By the time they reach her city, the eunuch who once served three kings he never respected finally has a ruler he's willing to work for outright.
Season Six
Established now as Daenerys's Master of Whisperers in practice if not yet in name, and put to the use he's always been best at: recruiting allies she can't reach herself. Sent to Dorne, he helps turn two of the crown's oldest grudges — the Martells and the Tyrells — into an alliance against the Lannisters, all without Daenerys lifting a finger. He returns to Meereen in time to sail west with her fleet, dragons and all, a spymaster who spent years collecting favors finally about to collect on every one of them at once.
Season Seven
Formally Hand-adjacent counsel at Dragonstone now, pushing Daenerys toward patience and alliance-building over spectacle, which puts him at odds with a queen who has spent her whole life being told to wait. When she demands to know where his loyalty truly lies, he gives her the only honest answer he's ever given anyone — not to a house or a crown, but to the people who have to live with whichever one wins — and it's convincing enough, or useful enough, to keep his head on his shoulders for one more season.
Season Eight
Watches Daenerys lose Missandei, Jorah, and finally her own restraint in the same handful of weeks, and does the arithmetic a spymaster can't help doing: a monarch this destabilized is a danger to the realm he claims to actually serve. He tries, carefully and too late, to steer support toward Jon instead, and is caught doing it — reported by the one person in her camp he never suspected would report him. Daenerys has him burned on the beach at Dragonstone, and he goes to it without much fight, a man who spent his whole life surviving kings finally undone by choosing, once, to work against one.
How it ends for them
On the screen. 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.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 3 chapters that name them
Eddard VII
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.
Arya III
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.
Eddard XV
In the black cells Varys comes disguised with water and arithmetic: confess, take the black, and Sansa lives. “The realm bleeds, Lord Eddard.”A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
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.
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.