Pate

Pate is a Citadel novice whose desire to possess Rosey and flee with her across the Narrow Sea leads him to steal an archmaester’s key and surrender it to a mysterious stranger. His decisive significance lies in the tragic speed of that transformation: an impoverished young man imagines that romance can carry him beyond accusation and confinement, but the attempt to buy that future becomes the cause of his death.

Identity and Circumstances

Pate belongs to the lowly end of life at the Citadel. He is associated with the nicknames Spotted Pate and Pig Boy, identities that emphasize his subordinate, mocked position among the learned men and acolytes around him. The evidence presents him not as a scholar wielding institutional power, but as a novice who must calculate the value of coins, sexual favors, stolen objects, and promises of escape.

His immediate world is the Quill and Tankard, where Emma serves as a serving wench and Rosey, her fifteen-year-old daughter, works within the same household. Emma has set the price of Rosey’s maidenhead at a golden dragon. Pate has saved nine silver stags, together with copper stars and pennies, but the sum remains hopelessly short of the demanded payment. The disparity makes his predicament concrete: his longing is intense, while the economic means of satisfying it are almost impossibly beyond his reach.

Desire and the Turn to Theft

Pate’s thoughts are organized around Rosey. While sitting with Alleras and the others, he imagines sleeping with Rosey’s arms around him and considers the possibility that by the following day she might be his. He plans to take her far from Oldtown, across the Narrow Sea to one of the Free Cities, where, in his fantasy, there would be no maesters and no one to accuse him. Escape is therefore both romantic and defensive: he wants Rosey, but he also wants a place beyond the judgment of the institution that surrounds him.

The distance between his savings and Emma’s price pushes that fantasy toward criminal action. Pate steals from beneath Archmaester Walgrave’s bed, dragging out a stout iron-bound strongbox. The lock is broken, but the evidence complicates the apparent crime: Maester Gormon suspected that Pate had broken it, whereas Walgrave himself had broken the lock after losing its key. Inside the box are silver stags, a lock of yellow hair tied with a ribbon, a painted miniature of a woman resembling Walgrave even in her mustache, and a lobstered steel knight’s gauntlet that Walgrave claimed had once belonged to a prince whose identity he could no longer remember.

The crucial object is discovered almost accidentally. When Pate shakes the gauntlet, an old, heavy black-iron key falls onto the floor. It supposedly opens every door in the Citadel, and only the archmaesters possess such keys. Pate recognizes the moral threshold immediately: taking it will make him a thief. Yet once he has picked it up, he reasons that stealing more or less no longer changes what he is. He turns back from the doorway to take the silver as well, while a white raven calls his name repeatedly. The moment joins desire to self-condemnation: Pate does not become unaware of wrongdoing; he understands the act and proceeds because the imagined future with Rosey outweighs the immediate danger.

The Stranger and the Fatal Bargain

Pate’s theft is directed toward a stranger whose identity remains deliberately withheld. When asked who he is, the man answers only that he is a stranger and no one. Pate has no power to verify the claim and no secure understanding of what the key will purchase. His bargain rests entirely on trust in an anonymous figure who offers access to the future Pate wants.

Pate nevertheless draws out the key and places it in the stranger’s hand. He feels light-headed and almost giddy, reminding himself of Rosey as he concludes that their business is finished. The gesture is both surrender and imagined arrival. The key has passed from the Citadel’s hidden store to the stranger, and Pate believes that the transaction has converted theft into escape.

The stranger’s final reply destroys that belief. When Pate says that he does not understand what is happening, a voice answers sadly that he never will. The words turn the earlier bargain into an execution disguised as fulfillment. The narrative does not reveal the stranger’s larger purpose through Pate; instead, it preserves the asymmetry between the two men. Pate acts from a narrow, urgent hope, while the stranger possesses enough knowledge to make that hope useful against him.

Death and Narrative Function

Pate’s death follows almost immediately after the exchange. He is halfway down an alley when the cobblestones seem to move beneath his feet. He first misinterprets the sensation as wet, slippery stones, but his heart is hammering, his legs turn to water, and his voice begins to fail. The cobblestones rise toward him as he collapses, leaving him unable to call for help. His last thought is of Rosey.

The ending gives his longing a final, bleak recurrence. Rosey is present at the beginning as the imagined destination of Pate’s life and at the end as the last surviving image in his mind, but she cannot save him or confirm that his plan was ever real. The repetition changes the emotional value of the desire: what first appears to promise love, mobility, and freedom becomes the private fixation accompanying his disappearance.

Pate’s arc is consequently a compact tragedy of misrecognized opportunity. His hamartia is not simple greed, since the stolen silver is secondary to the key and his actions are driven by the hope of obtaining Rosey and escaping accusation. The reversal occurs when the promised exchange proves fatal, while the narration withholds from Pate—and from the reader in the scene—the knowledge needed to understand the stranger’s design. His death also establishes a pattern of concealment and substitution: a seemingly insignificant novice can become the instrument through which access to the Citadel is acquired, while the identity attached to his body may no longer guarantee that the person who follows is truly Pate.

Thematic Significance

Pate’s story exposes the vulnerability created by unequal access to money, knowledge, and institutional authority. A golden dragon is beyond the reach of his careful savings, and the key that could open every door is in his possession only briefly. He occupies a world in which objects carry social power—the coins, the locked box, the princely gauntlet, and especially the black-iron key—but he lacks the standing to understand the networks in which those objects operate.

His imagined journey across the Narrow Sea also contrasts sharply with his actual movement. Pate dreams of leaving Oldtown for a Free City, yet his real passage ends in an alley, with the ground rising beneath him and his speech disappearing. The fantasy promises a life without maesters or accusers; the outcome is a death produced by a stranger’s concealed purpose. In that contrast, Pate functions as more than a victim of personal poor judgment. He is the human cost of a world where private hopes can be priced, stolen, and redirected by actors who know far more than the people they use.