Criston Cole
A steward's son of the Dornish Marches who won a tourney and a white cloak with it ÔÇö the finest sword of his generation, sworn shield to the princess, and the man the realm will call Kingmaker. His vows fit him worse than his armor.
A soul born at Blackhaven, in the Dornish Marches, sworn to The Greens ÔÇö the King's Party, The Kingsguard.
The fuller tale
Season One
In Second of His Name ÔÇö The Dornish marches' finest sword, sworn to the princess's side. Rhaenyra rides out angry, kills a boar in the dark with Ser Criston, and watches a white hart ÔÇö the king's omen ÔÇö walk away unkinged. In King of the Narrow Sea ÔÇö A white cloak left on the floor of a locked room. What starts in the pleasure house Daemon cannot finish; what Rhaenyra starts that night with Ser Criston, she does.
In We Light the Way ÔÇö Confesses to the queen and finds a protector where he sought a headsman. At the betrothal feast Ser Criston, refused as a paramour and half mad with broken vows, beats Laenor's lover Ser Joffrey Lonmouth to death on the floor. Ser Harwin breaks his fist on Ser Criston's face defending his... the princess's sons, and is dismissed from the Watch to Harrenhal. In The Green Council ÔÇö Kingmaker now, by his own hand and an old man's blood.
Old Lord Beesbury alone objects that this is treason; Ser Criston opens his throat on the council table.
Where they stand. King's Landing.
Season Two
In Rhaenyra the Cruel ÔÇö Hand of the King now ÔÇö and author of the war's stupidest gambit. Aegon rages past his grandsire's counsel; Otto is stripped of the Hand's badge for the second time in his life, and Criston Cole takes it. In The Burning Mill ÔÇö The Hand marches ÔÇö a kingmaker learning what kings cost. Criston Cole marches out with the green host, bending black-sworn Rosby and Stokeworth into line ÔÇö and Baela hunts him from dragonback.
In The Red Dragon and the Gold ÔÇö His trap works ÔÇö at the cost of a king he'll now have to explain. Criston Cole takes Duskendale ÔÇö Lord Darklyn keeps his loyalty and loses his head ÔÇö then marches on Rook's Rest by night.
Where they stand. Rosby, Rook's Rest and King's Landing.
How it ends for them
On the page. Three arrows at the Butcher's Ball (F&B, ch. 5)
The Kingmaker marched from Harrenhal into the riverlords' trap at the Butcher's Ball. Scorned, surrounded, and done running, he put on his white cloak, walked out alone, and took three arrows rather than kneel. The histories spend more ink on his sins than his end.
The series has not yet marched Criston to his final battle; his fate remains ahead of the current seasons.
Fire & Blood sends him from Harrenhal into a riverlord trap the histories remember as the Butcher's Ball ÔÇö surrounded, outnumbered, and out of any path that does not end in surrender or death. Criston Cole chooses neither in the way his enemies expect: he puts on his white cloak, walks out from his own lines alone rather than send men to die covering his retreat, and takes three arrows standing rather than kneel to the riverlords who have waited years for exactly this reckoning. The book allows him, in his very last act, something closer to the honor he spent the whole war failing to embody.
Their chapters, book by book
Fire & Blood ÔÇö The Dance of the Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The show, in its aired seasons, gives Criston's romance with Rhaenyra and his subsequent turn toward the greens considerably more screen time and emotional interiority than Fire & Blood affords him ÔÇö the book relays his motivations mostly through the consequences of his actions, filtered through chroniclers who had little patience for a lowborn knight's wounded pride. Both versions agree on the essential arc: a man of genuine skill whose broken oath curdles into a career-long grievance he never stops re-litigating.
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.