Tyrosh

An island Free City of bright-dyed beards, pear brandy, and hired swords.

The fuller tale

Tyrosh crowds its rocky island off the Stepstones behind fortifications the Archon keeps in good repair, for the city began as a Valyrian military outpost and never lost the habit of armament — it merely learned to sell it. Tyroshi love loud color the way Braavosi love black: a sea snail of the surrounding waters yields dyes of every impossible shade, and merchants and sellswords alike wear forked beards in green, pink and blue. The city trades in dye, pear brandy, ornate armor and, above all, hired violence; its position athwart the Stepstones makes it broker to every pirate, smuggler and free company in the narrow sea, and Tyroshi captains fill mercenary rolls from the Disputed Lands to Slaver’s Bay. Daario Naharis, the flamboyant captain who fights his way into Daenerys’s service and rather further, is the city’s type specimen — blue hair, gilded swagger, negotiable loyalties expensively sold.

History remembers Tyrosh as the place the Ninepenny Kings made their throne. A generation before the tale, a band of pirates, sellswords and the last Blackfyre pretender seized the city and the Stepstones as a first step toward Westeros, and the Iron Throne sent an army to burn them out — the war where a young Barristan Selmy cut down Maelys the Monstrous and ended the male line of the Blackfyres. It is the recurring fate of Tyrosh to host other people’s ambitions: everything in the city is for sale, including, periodically, the city.

Born here

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.