Qarl Correy

A household knight of Driftmark, Ser Laenor's favorite — quick to laugh, quicker to spend, and last seen fleeing Spicetown with blood on his blade and gold in his purse.

The fuller tale

A household knight of Driftmark and, by every account, Ser Laenor Velaryon's particular favorite among his sworn men, Qarl Correy is quick to laugh, quicker to spend the coin his position affords him, and entirely central to whichever version of Laenor's story a given source has chosen to believe.

The show gives Qarl a staged killing to arrange — helping fake Laenor's death and passage into anonymous exile, a mercy the character's book counterpart is never afforded the chance to perform. Fire & Blood instead has him wielding the real blade: he is last recorded fleeing Spicetown with blood on it and gold in his purse, his motive and his eventual fate left to speculation the book itself declines to resolve.

The page and the screen

This is one of the sharpest divergences in the whole saga's cast: the show's Qarl Correy is Laenor's rescuer, arranging an escape from a marriage and a war that both give the real Laenor no future in Westeros. Fire & Blood's Qarl Correy is Laenor's killer, cutting him down at a fair in Spicetown for reasons — jealousy, a bought blade, a lovers' quarrel — the sources argue over without ever settling. Notably, neither telling records what ultimately becomes of Qarl himself; he vanishes from both versions of the history the moment his role in Laenor's story is finished.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The Old King's council at Harrenhal passes over Rhaenys for Viserys; a generation later Viserys passes over precedent for Rhaenyra. Aemma dies of the birthing bed, Alicent weds the king, and two courts grow inside one castle — the blacks and the greens, named for the gowns worn at a tourney. Daemon wins the Stepstones, weds Laena, loses her, and weds Rhaenyra over Laenor's convenient corpse — though the book's Laenor is truly murdered, cut down at Spicetown by his own favorite, Qarl Correy. Harrenhal burns its lord and his heir; the king rots slowly on his throne and dies whispering to no one the maesters record. (F&B 1)

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

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.