Xaro Xhoan Daxos
One of the Thirteen, the merchant princes of Qarth: a fabulously wealthy trader who welcomes the dragon queen with open arms and a closed fist.
A soul born at Qarth.
The fuller tale
Season Two
A Qartheen merchant prince and one of the Thirteen who rule the city, and the first person there to treat Daenerys like an asset worth acquiring rather than a curiosity to gawk at. He houses her exhausted khalasar, proposes marriage, and promises ships and an army if she'll grant him a claim on her dragons, all delivered with the practiced warmth of a man who has made this offer before. What he's actually doing, alongside the warlock Pyat Pree, is arranging a massacre of his fellow Thirteen and the theft of her dragons so he can crown himself king of Qarth unopposed. She takes the dragons back from the House of the Undying, walks into his mansion, and finds the great vault he's always boasting about is as empty as his promises — so she seals him inside it with Doreah and sails on with his ships instead.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Sealed in his own vault (alive in the books) (S2·E10)
The self-made merchant prince of Qarth bet everything on a coup and a stolen queen. His famous vault proved empty as his promises, and Daenerys locked him inside it with her traitor handmaid for company.
The show’s Xaro dies in the second season’s closing minutes, in the most poetic cell the series ever furnished. His coup — the theft of the dragons, the slaughter of the Thirteen, his self-proclamation as King of Qarth — collapses when Daenerys walks out of the House of the Undying with her dragons answering to her voice, and she finds Xaro in his bed beside Doreah, her own traitor handmaid. The vault whose legendary contents underwrote his power is opened at last and found empty — the richest man in Qarth, revealed as a rumor with a door — and Daenerys seals traitor and treasury together: Xaro and Doreah are locked inside the impregnable dark, and her people strip the palace of enough gold to buy a ship as they go.
In the published books Xaro Xhoan Daxos is alive and hostile: his thirteen ships refused, his patience ended, his perfumed glove of war delivered to Meereen — one more creditor of the old world sailing against the queen who would not be collected. The vault, the coup, and the entombment belong entirely to the show.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 2 chapters that name them
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The two Xaros diverge almost completely. Book Xaro is a weeping, ring-fingered grandee of ambiguous appetites who never betrays Daenerys outright: he courts her, fails to win the dragons, and departs — resurfacing in A Dance with Dragons at Meereen with thirteen ships and an ultimatum wrapped in silk: take the fleet and sail for Westeros, or be Qarth’s enemy. Refused, he has a glove of scented cloth delivered — the formal declaration of war — and the published books leave him alive, with Qarthine galleys joining the blockade of her city. The show’s Xaro is a different creature: a Summer Islander arriviste who conspires with Pyat Pree to steal the dragons and seize Qarth, murders the Thirteen at a stroke, and ends sealed in his own vault. The famous empty vault is likewise the show’s invention — a fine, cruel image for a man whose whole power was the rumor of what he held.
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.