Sullied on Unsullied: Will Arya have the opportunity to kill Meryn Trant?

Each week, Alison, Adam, and Xavier break down the newest episode of Game of Thrones on WiC Live, our Game of Thrones aftershow. When discussing “Sons of the Harpy,” they responded to a fan who wondered whether Arya Stark, now installed in Braavos as a Faceless-Man-in-training, will have an opportunity to kill jackass Kingsguard Meryn Trant, who’s heading to Braavos as part of a diplomatic escort. Alison, Adam, and Xavier are forbidden from bringing spoilers into their discussion. I don’t have that problem.

So, will Arya have the opportunity to kill Meryn Trant when he comes to Braavos? From my perspective: yes. Unequivocally, absolutely, positively yes. In fact, I’d be shocked if Trant isn’t dead in a few episode’s time.

Now, even if I didn’t have spoilers at my disposal, this would still be a pretty easy question to answer. Trant was one of the first people to be added to Arya’s infamous kill list—Arya has never forgiven him for (probably) killing her beloved dancing master Syrio Forel way back in Season 1. Now, Trant is traveling to Braavos, and Arya is in Braavos training to be an assassin. It would amount to storyteller’s malpractice to maneuver these two characters to the same place and not have something go down.

However, there’s a more complicated explanation as to why Arya is all but guaranteed to kill Trant by the end of the season, an explanation that requires cutting through the increasingly tangled web created by the show whenever it changes something from the books. Because the path of least resistance is no fun, let’s consider this explanation.

By the end of A Dance with Dragons, Meryn Trant remains in King’s Landing, so he’s in no danger of being killed by Arya, at least not yet. There’s another character, however, who’s very much at risk: Raff the Sweetling (Rafford to his mom), a Lannister soldier who’s currently serving as a member of Ser Harys Swyft’s household guard. At the end of Dance, Swyft is dispatched to Braavos to negotiate with the city’s Iron Bank. Raff, who’s been on Arya’s kill list since killing Lommy Greenhands in A Clash of Kings, goes along as protection. Once in Braavos, Arya happens upon Raff and murders him in a disturbing excerpt from the upcoming The Winds of Winter.

It’s pretty clear that “Sons of the Harpy” is setting up this Arya chapter from Winds. Instead of sending Swyft to Braavos, the show is sending Mace Tyrell to negotiate with the Bank. Instead of sending Raff, who doesn’t appear on the show, it’s sending Meryn Trant to serve as a bodyguard. Different characters, same voyage ending in death.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that the show has already sort of adapted Raff’s murder. In Winds, Arya kills Raff without anger, eerily repeating the words Raff used when he killed Lommy. On the show, it was Polliver, not Raff, who killed Lommy, in “What Is Dead May Never Die” back in Season 2. When Arya memorably runs into Polliver in Season 4’s “Two Swords,” she kills him much in the same way as she kills Raff in The Winds of Winter: by parroting his own words back to him and calmly stabbing him in the throat.

So although I’m almost positive Arya will kill Trant, I’m not quite sure how she’ll kill him, since I don’t think the show will adapt that scene twice. Perhaps it’ll take a page from one of Arya’s chapters from A Dance with Dragons and have her kill her mark by slipping him a poison coin, or perhaps it’ll somehow incorporate cat warging. The show gets a lot of grief for altering the novels, but this is an example of shuffling characters around in an intelligent way while preserving the intensity present on the page.

• Published on 05/06/2015 at 3:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT