Osha

A wildling spearwife taken captive in the wolfswood, shrewd and watchful, who knows more about what stirs beyond the Wall than the southron lords will hear.

The fuller tale

Osha arrives in the tale running — one of a ragged band of wildlings who slipped the Wall not to raid but to flee, because she had seen what was waking in the far north and drew the sensible conclusion the Seven Kingdoms refused to. The band makes the mistake of ambushing Bran Stark in the wolfswood; the men die for it, and the spearwife who survives is marched back to Winterfell in chains to fetch water and scrub pots. It is the tale's usual joke played straight: the one person in the castle who understands the coming war is the one carrying the buckets.

She earns her way from captive to keeper by being right early and useful always. To Bran she is the voice of the old gods' side of the world — it is Osha who tells him the sigh in the godswood's leaves is the gods answering, Osha who hears what his wolf-dreams mean before the maesters will. When Theon takes Winterfell with twenty men, she plays the seduction card to get a blade and the gate, and walks the Stark boys out of their occupied home over the corpses of the men she killed doing it. In the sack's aftermath she makes the coldest good call in the boys' story: split the pack — she takes Rickon and Shaggydog toward safety while Bran turns north, doubling the odds that House Stark survives somewhere.

For years she is simply gone from the tale, which is the measure of her success — a wildling woman keeping a Stark heir alive precisely by keeping him out of the story. She is one of the saga's great supporting inventions: shrewd, unsentimental, funny in a way that costs nobody anything, and loyal not to houses or banners — wildlings kneel to no one — but to two small boys who needed somebody dangerous on their side.

The page and the screen

The book and show Oshas diverge in age, texture and destination. On the page she is an older, harder-bitten figure, and her flight with Rickon ends somewhere the show never dared: Skagos, the cannibal isle, where the pair remain alive and hidden in the published books — with Davos Seaworth dispatched to find them. The show, having sent her to the friendlier-sounding Umbers, wrote her back into the plot only to hand her to the Boltons. Natalia Tena's swaggering, younger Osha is essentially a co-creation of actress and adaptation — book readers would call the confidence hers but the charm the show's.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Bran and Rickon vanish from Winterfell with Osha and Hodor. (S2·E6)
• Umbers deliver a gift to Ramsay: Osha, Rickon Stark, and the head of his direwolf. (S6·E3)
• Bran rides Dancer into the wolfswood at last — into wildlings and deserters with knives; Robb and Theon save him, and Osha is taken captive. (AGOT 38)
• Out of the ashes of Winterfell: Maester Luwin dying beneath the heart tree gives his last counsel, Osha gives him mercy, and the wolves go separate ways. (ACOK 70)

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

The show: Slain at Winterfell (S6·E4)

The spearwife who carried Rickon to safety across half the North was handed to the Boltons by the Umbers. She tried the knife-in-the-throat trick that had served her before; Ramsay had heard the story, and his blade was faster.

The show's Osha dies as she lived — trying the one move that had always worked. Handed to Ramsay Bolton by the Umbers along with Rickon, she plays the old Winterfell game: sidle close, feign interest, reach for the knife. But Theon had told Ramsay everything long before, including exactly how Osha freed the Stark boys, and Ramsay lets her get precisely close enough before opening her throat with the paring knife on the table. He goes back to his apple. It is over in seconds, unmourned on screen, and deliberately so — Ramsay's scenes ran on making competence feel useless. In the books she is alive on Skagos with Rickon, her long game still working, and readers rather expect her to finish it.