Margaery Tyrell
Mace's daughter, clever and gracious and quietly ambitious, who understands the winning of a crowd ÔÇö and a king ÔÇö better than anyone at court.
A soul of House Tyrell, born at Highgarden.
The fuller tale
Season Two
Tywin is named Hand and savior; Margaery Tyrell replaces Sansa as the king's betrothed.
Where they stand. Storm's End, Highgarden and King's Landing.
Season Three
In Valar Dohaeris ÔÇö Wins the capital one orphanage at a time. Margaery Tyrell feeds orphans in Flea Bottom and the city notices the difference. In Dark Wings, Dark Words ÔÇö Handles a monster the way his mother never learned. In And Now His Watch Is Ended ÔÇö Teaches Joffrey to wave at the crowd she bought for him.
Season Four
In The Lion and the Rose ÔÇö Queen for the length of a feast. Tommen is crowned; Margaery starts on husband number three; Cersei plays nice with everyone she hates.
Season Five
Tommen weds Margaery; the new queen sweetly suggests his mother might prefer Casterly Rock. In Sons of the Harpy ÔÇö Her brother in a cell; her husband too gentle to open it.
Season Six
In Blood of My Blood ÔÇö Barefoot penitence as performance; the Sparrow can't tell. Margaery converts the crown to the Faith; Tommen fuses crown and church; Jaime is shipped to Riverrun.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died when the sept burned (S6┬ÀE10)
The thrice-wed queen read the room the way she always did ÔÇö she knew Cersei's absence meant death, and tried to empty the sept. The High Sparrow's certainty barred the doors, and the wildfire spared no one, not even the cleverest.
In the show she dies of being the only person in the building who understood it. At Loras's trial in the Great Sept, Margaery reads the room the way she reads every room: Cersei is absent, Cersei who never misses a triumph, and therefore the triumph is the building. Her warning is immediate and correct ÔÇö she tries to force an evacuation, breaking her penitent's mask for the first and last time ÔÇö and the High Sparrow's serene refusal bars the doors until the wildfire beneath the sept ends the argument. The explosion kills her, her brother, her father, and the Faith entire; the cleverest player in King's Landing loses to the one player willing to burn the game. In the published books Margaery is alive, released to await a trial that has not yet come, her endgame unwritten.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
A Feast for Crows 4 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The show ages her up and moves her to center stage; the books keep her at a teenager's remove, seen only through others' eyes ÔÇö mostly Cersei's, a narrator whose paranoia the reader must constantly discount, which is the books' sly trick: Margaery's true interior is one of the saga's deliberately withheld cards. Book divergences run through her whole file: her marriage to Renly is unconsummated by her own testimony, the Joffrey match ends at the purple wedding before any wedding night, and her arrest is engineered through a suborned knight confessing to her adultery ÔÇö with her trial by the Faith still pending as the published books close, her cousins imprisoned beside her and a Kingsguard champion in the offing. The show's crossbow diplomacy, Sparrow alliance, and sept endgame are all its own construction.
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.