Mysaria

The White Worm: a dancer of Lys turned mistress of whisperers, once Daemon's paramour, always her own creature. Everything in King's Landing is for sale, and Mysaria holds the ledger.

The fuller tale

Mysaria arrives in Westeros as a dancer of Lys and leaves that identity behind almost entirely, remaking herself, through sheer accumulated usefulness and information, into the White Worm — mistress of a network of whisperers, informants and Flea Bottom contacts that eventually rivals the crown's own intelligence apparatus.

Her relationship with Daemon Targaryen begins as his paramour during his years of restless exile from proper court favor, and while the affair does not survive his eventual settling into more dynastically useful marriages, the working relationship it establishes — Daemon's occasional patron, Mysaria's occasional source of protection and funding — persists in various forms long after the romance itself has cooled.

What sets Mysaria apart from every other player at court is the thoroughness of her independence — she serves no house, swears no binding oath, and treats King's Landing's entire underworld economy as a ledger she alone keeps accurate accounts of. Everything in the city is for sale in Mysaria's assessment of it, and she has simply made herself the person best positioned to broker the transaction.

Her intelligence network becomes genuinely consequential once the war begins in earnest, feeding information to whichever side currently has her favor and giving her, by extension, a degree of influence over the conflict's course that her lack of formal title would never otherwise suggest she possessed.

The page and the screen

The show gives Mysaria a fuller arc and considerably more direct dialogue and screen presence than Fire & Blood's sparser mentions of a whisperer network operating in the capital's shadows — much of her characterization, including the specific texture of her relationship with Daemon, is series invention built on top of the book's much thinner factual skeleton.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In Rhaenyra the Cruel — The White Worm, traded to Dragonstone — where her worth is finally seen. In Smallfolk — The White Worm turns the city's hunger into the black queen's love.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Hunger bites King's Landing; Rhaenyra and Mysaria feed the city from black ships, and the smallfolk begin to love the queen who feeds them. (S2·E6)

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

The books: Died in the city's fall (F&B, ch. 6)

The White Worm rose to mistress of whisperers and fell with the city: given to the mob's justice in the riots — whipped through the streets, dead before the gates. Gyldayn notes that half her secrets died with her, and the other half went looking for new owners.

The series has not yet reached the fall of King's Landing where Mysaria's story ends in the book; her fate remains ahead of the current seasons.

Fire & Blood has her rise to genuine influence as a mistress of whisperers and fall with the city itself — caught up in the mob's justice during the riots that accompany King's Landing's collapse, whipped through the streets and dead before she can reach the gates. The book notes, with a certain rueful respect, that half her secrets died with her and the other half went looking almost immediately for new owners willing to pay for them.