Ulf the White
A White Worm of a different kind: a tavern soldier who claims Targaryen blood whenever the drink is listening. Once, embarrassingly, the story turns out true enough for a dragon.
A soul born at King's Landing, sworn to The Dragonseeds.
The fuller tale
Season Two
In The Red Sowing — A tavern boaster whose one true story got him a dragon. Hugh Hammer, a blacksmith's bastard, masters Vermithor, the Bronze Fury — second only to Vhagar; Ulf the White stumbles drunk onto Silverwing.
Where they stand. King's Landing and Dragonstone.
Their story
A tavern soldier of King's Landing with a habit of claiming Targaryen blood whenever the drink in front of him is listening sympathetically, Ulf becomes, to his own considerable and public surprise, one of the very few people in the realm whose barroom boasting turns out to be true enough for a dragon's purposes.
The Sowing gives him Silverwing, gentlest of the available dragons, and elevates Ulf from a man nobody at court would previously have crossed the street to avoid into one of the black cause's genuine military assets — a transformation that goes to his head roughly as fast as anyone who knew him beforehand would have predicted.
How it ends for them
On the page. Poisoned in his sleep for treasons past counting (F&B, ch. 7)
The other Betrayer drank to his new lordship of Highgarden once too often and was poisoned in his sleep — treason's wages paid by treasonous friends. Silverwing, gentlest of dragons, went wild rather than take another rider.
The series has not yet reached this stage of the war; Ulf the White's fate remains ahead of the current seasons.
Fire & Blood has him turn traitor alongside Hugh Hammer, drinking too openly and too often to his own imagined future as Lord of Highgarden — a boast that gets him poisoned in his sleep by allies as treasonous as himself. Silverwing, gentlest of dragons even in the war's most brutal stretch, refuses ever to accept another rider after him.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
As with Hugh Hammer, Ulf's arc belongs to the dragonseed campaigns the show's current seasons have not yet reached; Fire & Blood's fuller account of the Sowing and the subsequent betrayals at Tumbleton gives him considerably more narrative space than the series has had occasion to provide.
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.