High Sparrow

No one knows this man's true name. By his own account he was once a wandering septon, the kind who visits villages too small for a sept of their own, naming newborns, marrying couples and hearing confessions for whatever people could spare.

His bare feet, black and gnarled like old roots, are the only evidence backing that story — years on the road without boots leave that mark, and no one has found reason to doubt him.

When Brienne of Tarth meets him on the road, she finds him leading a band of sparrows carrying the bones of septons and septas killed during the War of the Five Kings. He's just one of the many pilgrims the war left homeless and unmoored in faith — except this one drags hundreds behind him.

The previous High Septon is murdered, and the Most Devout gather to choose a successor. According to Qyburn, the sparrows don't wait for a verdict: they storm in with axes in hand, their leader hoisted on their shoulders, and the terrified conclave names him High Septon on the spot.

Barely in office, he sells every gold crown in the Great Sept, including his own, along with the rich robes, and uses the proceeds to buy bread for the sparrows and the poor of King's Landing. He wears rough wool himself and forces the rest of the septons to follow by example.

Cersei Lannister sees a tool in that austerity: in exchange for the Faith's blessing on her son and the cancellation of the crown's debt to the Sept, she lets him restore the Faith Militant, disbanded since the days of Jaehaerys I. The sparrows become Poor Fellows, a hundred-odd knights swear themselves as Warrior's Sons, and the new High Septon starts being called, without seeming to mind, the High Sparrow.

Emboldened by its new power, the Faith arrests Margaery Tyrell and her cousins after Osney Kettleblack falsely confesses to sleeping with them. The High Septon doesn't buy the confession — he's never heard a man speak with such pleasure of his own guilt — and has him whipped until he tells the truth: Cersei forced him to lie, and had earlier sent him to kill his predecessor.

The next time the queen sets foot in the Great Sept, the High Septon has her arrested on the same charges as her daughter-in-law — except in her case, they're true.

With the evidence against Margaery and her cousins too thin to sustain a trial, the High Septon releases them into the custody of Lord Randyll Tarly, who swears a sacred oath that they'll return when the time comes. Cersei, meanwhile, he lets confess to him day after day: she admits to sleeping with her cousin Lancel and the Kettleblacks, sins that won't send her to the block, while staying silent on the ones that would, like ordering the previous High Septon's death or her part in King Robert's.

He grants her one visitor a day and agrees to release her on one condition: a walk of penance through the streets of King's Landing. Cersei accepts, grudgingly, and chooses trial by combat, with Ser Robert Strong as her champion; Margaery instead puts herself in the Faith's hands.

On the small council, Kevan Lannister, Randyll Tarly and Mace Tyrell swallow every demand the High Septon makes, however much it galls them: with half the realm in revolt, no one wants to push the faithful into another claimant's arms. For the High Septon the matter is simple — Stannis Baratheon has turned from the Seven to worship a red demon, and that false faith has no place in the Seven Kingdoms.

He's a tall, thin man, grey-haired and deeply lined, with a short beard somewhere between grey and brown and his hair pulled back into a knot. His eyes, sunken and mud-brown, look almost accusing; he's thin enough to seem half-starved.

Unlike his predecessors, he wears no crowns or cloth-of-gold: just a plain white woolen robe down to his ankles, and he walks barefoot on those hard, calloused feet. Cersei Lannister, who has felt his will up close, sums him up in one line: 'This one is relentless.'