Dacey Mormont

Maege's eldest daughter, a tall, graceful warrior more at home with a mace than a spindle, who rides with the Young Wolf's host.

The fuller tale

Dacey is the eldest of Maege Mormont's five daughters and the heir to Bear Island, and the books introduce her with the detail that says everything: her mother put a morningstar in her hand at an age when other girls got dolls. Tall, lean and — the books note with mild surprise — graceful in a way that confounds mainland expectations of Mormont women, she can wear mail or a gown with equal unconcern, which the tale will eventually make the cruelest fact about her. She rides south with her mother when the banners are called, one of the war's few highborn women under arms, and earns her place the only way Bear Island respects: by being good at it.

Robb Stark names her to his personal guard — the books put her at his shoulder through the war's whole middle passage, the Whispering Wood among the battles on her shield — and she serves with an easy, unservile loyalty the young king plainly leans on: teasing at the fires, steady in the field, one of the handful of people around Robb who treat him as both king and boy without diminishing either. Where her house's other famous members carry heavy arcs — an exiled brother-cousin, a Lord Commander uncle — Dacey's role is simpler and warmer: she is what the North's best looked like in the field, competence and cheer in the same saddle, following the direwolf because that is what Mormonts do.

The page and the screen

Dacey belongs to the books; the show never casts her, and her place among Robb's guard is absorbed into the anonymous northern retinue that shares her fate. Readers lose more than a name in the trade: her presence — a woman in the king's own guard, unremarked because the North simply produces such women — is part of the books' texture for Mormont culture that the show later rebuilt around her little sister Lyanna instead. The books also use her to sharpen the war's costs at Bear Island specifically: with Dacey gone south and Jeor at the Wall, the island's succession thins toward the child the show made famous.

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Slain at the Red Wedding (S3·E9)

The books: Killed at the Red Wedding (ASOS, ch. 52)

The she-bear of Bear Island danced at the Red Wedding in a gown instead of mail. When the music turned to murder she broke a flagon across Ser Ryman's face and made for the doors — an axe caught her belly before she reached them.

Dacey Mormont died at the Red Wedding, and the books make her death the massacre's bitterest image. Out of courtesy to her hosts she came to the feast dressed as a lady — a gown instead of the mail she had worn through every battle of the war — and when the music turned to murder she was unarmored and unarmed among the tables. She fought anyway: the books have her break a flagon of wine across the face of the first killer to reach her and dash for the doors, and an axe takes her in the belly before she gets there. The woman who survived the Whispering Wood in mail died in silk at a wedding — the Freys' treachery measured exactly by what it made of courtesy. The show, having never introduced her, folds her into the slaughtered northern company at the Twins; the books make sure she has a name in it.