Brynden Tully
The Blackfish: Hoster's brother, the finest soldier House Tully ever produced, who quarreled with his lord over an unwanted marriage and never took a wife at all.
A soul of House Tully, born at Riverrun.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
In the show, the siege of Riverrun ends when Jaime threatens EdmureÔÇÖs infant son and sends Edmure into the castle to order its surrender as its lawful lord. The garrison obeys; the Blackfish will not. He hurries Brienne and Podrick to a boat, refuses her plea to come north to Sansa ÔÇö he has a castle to die in, he says, more or less ÔÇö and is cut down fighting, offscreen, sword in hand in the halls where he was born. The show grants him the death he would have picked from a catalogue.
The books stage the same siege with a different last move: when Edmure yields the castle, the Blackfish is simply not among the prisoners. He escapes by the river that named his house and disappears. As of the published books he is alive, whereabouts unknown ÔÇö the rare character whose show death has no book counterpart at all, only an empty cell and a furious Frey garrison.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The two tellings split at the Twins. Show-Brynden attends the Red Wedding and survives it by stepping out to find a tree ÔÇö a black joke the episode plays completely straight ÔÇö while book-Brynden was never there, having stayed to hold Riverrun as RobbÔÇÖs warden. The endings diverge just as sharply: the show closes his story at the fall of Riverrun, while the book siege ends with the Blackfish slipping the net entirely, swimming out beneath the Water Gate and vanishing into the riverlands. In the published books he is still at large ÔÇö an unaccounted-for Tully with a sword, which several characters have cause to find worrying.
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.