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.

The fuller tale

Xaro Xhoan Daxos is one of the Thirteen, the merchant princes who share the rule of Qarth — the greatest city that ever was or will be, as its every inhabitant will explain unprompted — and he is the tale’s purest specimen of wealth as worldview. His palace could house a market town; his hospitality is legendary and itemized; and when a beggar queen with three newborn dragons appears out of the red waste, it is Xaro who sponsors her entry into the city, vouching for her before the Thirteen with lavish public warmth. The warmth is real, in its way. So is the ledger behind it: half the treasures of the earth flow through Qarth, and Xaro has never once seen a miracle he could not price.

His campaign for Daenerys — and for what she carries — is conducted as a siege of generosity. Gifts, feasts, counsel, and a standing offer of marriage, renewed with each refusal; in the books, the proposal comes with Qartheen law attached, under which a spouse may claim one possession of the other’s on the wedding day, and no one in Qarth has any doubt which possession Xaro means. Daenerys takes his hospitality, his intelligence on the city’s factions, and his ships’ terms under advisement, and keeps her dragons. The relationship curdles on the fixed point neither will move from: she needs a fleet to cross the world, and Xaro needs a dragon to complete his collection of everything.

He is also the tale’s introduction to Qarth itself — the veiled Pureborn, the scheming Thirteen, the warlocks with their blue lips and their diminished, hungry magic — and the show makes him the arc’s engine: a self-made man (by his own showy account, arrived penniless from the Summer Isles) whose partnership with the warlock Pyat Pree turns Qarth’s courtesies into a coup. Between the two tellings, Xaro stands for the same proposition: that to the powers of the old world, Daenerys is not a queen but an asset — to be wed, held, traded or stolen — and that the education of the Mother of Dragons is largely a course in what her hosts are actually offering.

The page and the screen

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.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Xaro Xhoan Daxos comes with thirteen ships and one price — that she sail away and be a queen somewhere else; Daenerys chains her dragons after Hazzea, and refuses him war instead. (ADWD 12)

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

The show: 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.