Brienne of Tarth
The Maid of Tarth: a huge, plain, earnest young noblewoman who wants only to be a knight, mocked by men she could best with either hand, and truer than any of them.
A soul born at Evenfall Hall, sworn to House Tarth.
The fuller tale
Season Two
Wins Renly Baratheon's melee tournament outright and asks, as her prize, for a place in his Kingsguard rather than any softer reward — an unheard-of request he grants anyway, charmed by the nerve of it. She is at his side, devoted past reason, when a shadow with Stannis's face kills him in his own tent, and flees the scene covered in his blood with no one likely to believe how he actually died. Catelyn Stark, who saw enough to know Brienne didn't do it, takes her into service instead.
Season Three
Sworn to Catelyn's cause, she is given an unwelcome charge — escort Jaime Lannister safely to King's Landing in exchange for the Stark girls, a prisoner swap she has no love for and every intention of honoring anyway. Locke's men take them both captive, and when Brienne is thrown into a pit to fight a bear for entertainment, Jaime — one hand gone, debt still unpaid — climbs down after her rather than watch.
Season Four
Released from Jaime's service with his father's Valyrian steel sword and a new charge: find Sansa and Arya Stark and keep them safe, whatever that costs. Squire Podrick Payne in tow, she tracks Arya as far as the Vale, only to be mistaken for an enemy by the Hound and forced to fight him for her at the Bloody Gate — a brutal, close thing that she wins, and Arya still won't go with her.
Season Five
Waits outside Winterfell through the winter, watching for a candle Sansa was told to light in a high window if she ever needed rescuing, certain it will come and increasingly unwilling to leave without it. When Stannis Baratheon's broken army stumbles past her position after its defeat, she finally gets to settle an old debt from Renly's death, sword in hand.
Season Six
Finds Sansa fleeing Winterfell with Theon before any candle is ever lit, and the search that has occupied her for years simply ends, replaced by a sworn place at Sansa's side. Sent to Riverrun to talk the Blackfish into surrendering the castle to save the Stark forces marching for Winterfell, she instead runs into Jaime commanding the siege from the other side — an old debt now standing on opposite ends of the same battlefield.
Season Seven
Stationed at Winterfell as its castellan in all but name, training Podrick and keeping an uneasy peace between Sansa and a newly returned Arya, whose skills leave Brienne visibly rattled the one time they cross swords in practice. When Jaime arrives with the rest of the great households summoned south, she goes too, standing guard over Sansa at the parley in King's Landing's dragonpit while old enemies try, unconvincingly, to be allies.
Season Eight
Knighted by Jaime before the Battle of Winterfell — the honor she wanted at Renly's tourney years ago, finally given, by the person least expected to give it. She survives the night at his side, and the fragile thing between them survives it too, right up until he chooses to ride south for Cersei anyway. She stays behind to write the true account of his life into the White Book, since no one else will.
How it ends for them
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 3 chapters that name them
A Storm of Swords 3 chapters that name them
A Feast for Crows 8 chapters of their own, and 1 more that name them
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The books' Brienne is a point-of-view character on a road the show never takes: her fourth-book quest through the ruined Riverlands — with Podrick Payne, a conscript guide, and a trail of the war's orphans — is the saga's long meditation on what knighthood owes the smallfolk, and it ends on the story's most argued cliffhanger: captured by the Brotherhood under its terrible new leadership, sentenced for carrying a Lannister sword, and shouting a single unrecorded word as the noose tightens. The show cut the entire arc, spent her instead on found scenes — the duel with the Hound, Stannis's end, Riverrun's siege — and resolved her story with honors the books still hold hostage. Her face, too, diverges: book Brienne carries a mauling that the show never inflicts, part of the books' insistence that her road pays its tolls in flesh.
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.