Braavos

The Secret City

Greatest of the Free Cities, hidden in a fog-bound lagoon behind its Titan, ruled by the Sealord and famed for its water dancers.

The fuller tale

Braavos is the city slaves built to hide in. When Valyria’s ships swept the seas for rowers and miners, one fleet of captives rose, killed their masters, and sailed not for home — every home was watched — but for the end of the map: a fog-bound lagoon at the top of the narrow sea where the dragonlords would never think to look. There they raised a city of a hundred islets stitched together by bridges and canals, and kept its very existence secret for a century, trading through intermediaries while the mightiest empire in the world never learned it had misplaced several thousand of its possessions. Every other Free City is a daughter of Valyria; Braavos calls itself the bastard child, and wears the name with a bravo’s grin.

The secret is long out, and the city now announces itself with the least subtle landmark on earth: the Titan, a fortress in the shape of a striding warrior, so vast that ships pass between its legs and its roar marks the hours. Beyond it lie the Purple Harbor for Braavosi keels and the Ragman’s Harbor for everyone else, the Sealord’s palace with its menagerie, the temples of every god the founders carried into exile — the Moonsingers foremost, for it was their prophecy that led the fleet to the lagoon — and the damp alleys where bravos in flamboyant slashed finery duel over the honor of courtesans whose barges outshine the Sealord’s. Because the founders had all worn chains, the city’s first law endures: no slave may set foot in Braavos. It is the one Free City where the adjective is not a joke.

Two Braavosi institutions bend the whole story from a distance. The Iron Bank, grown from a hoard the founders locked in an iron mine, is the power that wars run on — thrones borrow, thrones repay, and when a throne will not, the Iron Bank funds its replacement, a policy the Lannisters discover the way debtors usually discover things. And in a windowless temple on an island in the lagoon stands the House of Black and White, home of the Faceless Men, an order older than the city itself — begun, the tale goes, among the slaves of Valyria’s mines, where the first of them learned that the gift of death was the only mercy on offer and decided to distribute it more fairly. Their services cost more than gold; what they sell is the most reliable commodity in the world.

The city reaches into the tale before anyone sails there. Syrio Forel, First Sword of Braavos, teaches Arya Stark the water dance in a King’s Landing ballroom, and his catechism — what do we say to the god of death? — outlives him by the length of the entire story. It is to Braavos that Arya flees with an iron coin and two words of Valyrian, and the House of Black and White gives her the tale’s strangest apprenticeship: washing corpses, learning the lying game, going blind and getting her eyes back, serving an order that asks for all of herself when all of herself is precisely the thing she came to lose. The books linger longer in the streets — she is Cat of the Canals selling cockles from a barrow, and a singer who deserted the Night’s Watch learns that Braavos is a bad city for oathbreakers — but both tellings arrive at the same heresy: the Faceless Men teach Arya Stark everything except how to be no one.

Braavos matters to the tale as its great counterexample. Every other city in the story was built by conquest and runs on someone’s servitude; the secret city was built by the conquered and runs on contracts, and it has quietly outlasted the empire that hunted its founders. Even Daenerys’s oldest memory belongs to it — in the books, the house with the red door and the lemon tree outside her window, the only place she was ever a child, stands in Braavos. The city of escaped slaves gave the last Targaryen her image of home; the story does not underline the irony, which is how you know it is intended.

The page and the screen

The show sails Stannis and Davos to Braavos to petition the Iron Bank in person — a scene invented to put faces on the ledger. In the books the bank comes to them: the envoy Tycho Nestoris appears at the Wall, having crossed half a war to collect on the Iron Throne’s debts, and ends up bankrolling Stannis’s northern campaign in a snowstorm. Arya’s apprenticeship is also rearranged — the show builds her exit around Lady Crane’s theater troupe and a long knife-duel with the Waif, while the books spread the training across more identities, more small errands, and considerably more corpse-washing, with her final test still unwritten.

The chronicle here

Arya begins lessons with Syrio Forel, First Sword of Braavos: not knitting. (S1·E3)
Brienne and the Hound fight over Arya; Arya leaves him begging for mercy she won't give — and sails for Braavos. (S4·E10)
Arya reaches Braavos and a door of ebony and weirwood that won't open — until it does, on a familiar face. (S5·E2)
Arya sees Meryn Trant in Braavos and abandons the thin man for an older prayer. (S5·E9)
The Waif hunts Arya through Braavos — into a dark cellar where a blind girl trained. Valar morghulis; a girl goes home. (S6·E8)
Ned finds Needle — and instead of taking it away, hires Syrio Forel, the First Sword of Braavos, to teach his daughter water dancing. (AGOT 23)
The Titan of Braavos straddles the harbor; a copper coin and a word open the House of Black and White, where all men must serve: valar dohaeris. (AFFC 7)
In Braavos Sam brawls with Dareon over duty and silk; he comes back bloody to find Aemon awake, asking after dragons — and a girl named Daenerys. (AFFC 27)
A banker of Braavos arrives frost-bitten at the Wall; Jon signs the Iron Bank's paper for grain against winter — and lends Tycho Nestoris to find Stannis in the snows. (ADWD 40)
A blind girl begs on Braavos's canals and learns to see with skin and ears; each night the kindly man asks who she is, and each night the lie tastes safer: no one. (ADWD 46)