Merrett Frey
One of Lord Walder's many undistinguished sons, a soft, unlucky man who never won the spurs or the respect he wanted (book only).
A soul of House Frey, born at The Twins.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
(book only) ÔÇö before this story begins.
On the page. Hanged by the brotherhood (ASOS, ch. 82)
The Freys' soft, unlucky envoy rode to Oldstones with the ransom for Petyr Pimple and found the brotherhood waiting. They hanged them together ÔÇö on the word of a hooded woman whose throat wound matched her wedding.
He dies on a hanging tree at Oldstones, in the epilogue of A Storm of Swords. Sent ÔÇö because no one better would go ÔÇö to ransom his young kinsman Petyr Pimple from outlaws, Merrett arrives with the gold and finds the Brotherhood Without Banners has already hanged the boy. They take the ransom anyway, and hang Merrett too, on the testimony of a hooded woman he is brought to face: a gaunt figure in a torn gown, her throat opened in a wound that matches the one the Freys gave Catelyn Stark at his familyÔÇÖs wedding feast. He protests, truthfully, that he killed no one ÔÇö he only got a man drunk. For the thing that was Catelyn, it is enough. The chapter, and the book, end with the rope. He never appears in the show at all.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter of their own
Where the page and the screen part
Merrett exists only on the page ÔÇö the show never names him, folding the Frey rank and file into an anonymous mass for AryaÔÇÖs vengeance to sweep away wholesale. In the books he is the instrument of a different reckoning entirely: his epilogue chapter is the readerÔÇÖs first sight of what the Brotherhood Without Banners has become, and of who now leads it ÔÇö a reveal the show reassigned, in much-diminished form, to no one. The two tellings thus punish the Freys through opposite doors: the show with a daughterÔÇÖs knife, the books with a motherÔÇÖs rope.