Hizdahr zo Loraq

Long before any crown, Hizdahr was known in Meereen as a merchant, and one of the most successful in the city: his travels had taken him as far as Volantis, Lys, and Qarth, and his connections reached well beyond the city walls. His family counted among its ancestors respected figures of the Ghiscari past, such as Mazdhan the Magnificent or Hazrak the Handsome, a lineage he never let anyone forget.

He fathered two children out of wedlock, a boy and a girl, and built a reputation as a shrewd, well-connected man, equally at ease among the masters of Meereen.

When Daenerys took Meereen and ordered the fighting pits closed, Hizdahr bought up nearly all of them at a bargain price, and from then on kept pressing the queen to reopen them. He came before her with the same request as many as seven times.

On the last occasion he brought along the pits' old champions — Khrazz, Barsena Blackhair, Camarron of the Count, Goghor the Giant, Spotted Cat, Ithoke the Fearless, and Belaquo Bonebreaker — to add their voices to his.

With the Sons of the Harpy spreading death through the streets, the Green Grace advised Daenerys to take a husband of Ghiscari blood to calm the city, and put forward Hizdahr's name. The queen, far from convinced, set him a condition: ninety days without a single Harpy killing before she would even consider the wedding.

Hizdahr met the deadline, and the city knew a peace Daenerys had long wanted, though Skahaz mo Kandaq warned her that such calm only made sense if Hizdahr himself had been behind orders for the Sons of the Harpy's own killings to stop. Desperate for the truce all the same, Daenerys married him, and the fighting pits reopened to celebrate the wedding.

For the celebration, Hizdahr insisted that every fighter in the pits be a volunteer, drawn by the promise of glory rather than a slave forced to fight. Before the games he offered Daenerys spiced locusts; she refused them, and it was the giant Belwas who ate them instead, and nearly died of the poison in them.

In the middle of a bout between a boar and a gladiator, the roar of the crowd and the smell of blood drew Drogon down into the arena. When someone tried to strike the dragon, Daenerys ran to him, climbed onto his back, and vanished into the sky, leaving Hizdahr in charge of a Meereen without its queen.

With Daenerys gone, Hizdahr tried to take control of Meereen, but Grey Worm and his Unsullied refused to obey him, and Ser Barristan Selmy came to see him as a vain man with no real strength. Hizdahr removed Skahaz mo Kandaq from command of the Brazen Beasts and replaced him with his own cousin, Marghaz zo Loraq.

When the lords of Yunkai arrived with Groleo's head and demanded the dragons' deaths in exchange for the hostages of Meereen, Hizdahr only asked for time to think it over — an answer Selmy, who had served three kings, thought none of them would have been foolish enough to give. Selmy went on to speak with Skahaz and then with Grey Worm, and between them they captured Hizdahr, though the old knight refused to kill him without being certain of his guilt. The Sons of the Harpy returned to their shadow war, and the Yunkish siege of Meereen went on.

The television series ends Hizdahr's story in the year 302 after the Conquest: in that telling, the king of Meereen does not survive.

The novels, as far as the published story has gone, give him no such ending: there he remains alive, a prisoner still waiting to learn his fate.