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.
A soul born at Beyond the Wall.
The fuller tale
Season One
A wildling caught on the wrong side of the Wall with a band of raiders, marched into Winterfell as a captive and kept alive by putting her to work in the kitchens rather than a cell. She tells anyone who will listen what she saw before she was caught — the dead walking, and worse than dead — and gets mostly disbelief for her trouble, filed away as a wildling's tall tale by people who have never had a reason to need it to be true.
Season Two
When Theon takes Winterfell, Osha is the one who keeps her head — she hides Bran and Rickon and the direwolves in the crypts, and when hiding stops being enough she trades a night with one of Theon's men for the chance to get the boys out unnoticed. She has no loyalty to the Starks so much as a working contempt for anyone who lets children get killed over politics, and that turns out to be loyalty enough to get Bran and Rickon out of a burning castle alive.
Season Three
North with Bran's party, Osha has no patience for Jojen Reed's green dreams and even less for the idea of taking two highborn boys beyond the Wall to chase them. She has kept Bran and Rickon alive on practical terms since Winterfell fell, and practical terms say the youngest Stark left does not follow his brother into wherever this vision is leading. She takes Rickon and Shaggydog and turns off the road toward Last Hearth instead, choosing the boy she can still protect over the one who has stopped needing her kind of protecting.
Season Six
Years of hiding end with Osha and Rickon handed over to Ramsay Bolton by the Umbers as proof of loyalty, Shaggydog's head included as a bonus nobody asked for. She tries the trick that got Bran and Rickon out of Winterfell once before, working a blade loose to use on a man who trusts her enough to get close — but Ramsay knows exactly what kind of trick it is, names it before she can finish it, and kills her with her own knife while she is pinned in place. She dies having spent her entire war trying to keep one boy alive, with no way left to stop him from being handed to the person who kills him next.
How it ends for them
On the screen. 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.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
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.
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.