Randyll Tarly
Lord of Horn Hill and the finest battlefield commander in the Reach — a cold, iron-hard man ashamed of his bookish eldest son.
A soul born at Horn Hill, sworn to House Tarly.
The fuller tale
Season Six
Lord of Horn Hill, and the reason Samwell Tarly joined the Night's Watch rather than inherit anything. He receives his son's uninvited family — a wildling mother and a baby that is not his blood — at his own dinner table and spends the meal making sure everyone present understands exactly how little he thinks of Sam: no warrior, no hunter, unfit to carry Heartsbane or the family name. He orders Gilly sent to the kitchens and Sam back to the Wall alone; Sam answers by walking out that night with Gilly, the baby, and his family's Valyrian steel sword under his arm.
Season Seven
When Highgarden falls, House Tarly is the reason it falls easily — Randyll reads the field, abandons the Tyrell cause, and bends the knee to Cersei Lannister rather than lose everything backing a dying house. He leads the column that guts the Reach's granaries and rides with the army Daenerys catches in the open at the Loot Train. Taken prisoner afterward and offered the mercy of bending the knee a second time, he refuses outright — pride and contempt for a queen he considers little better than a foreign invader outlast his instinct for survival — and Daenerys burns him for it.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell after the Reach campaign (S7·E5)
Sam's iron father chose Cersei over the queen who beat him at the Blackwater Rush, and refused the knee with his son beside him. Daenerys gave the order; Drogon's fire left two suits of armor in the ash.
The show ends him on principle — the only currency he ever respected. Captured after Daenerys's Dothraki and her dragon annihilate the Lannister-Tarly column at the Goldroad, Randyll refuses the knee with his heir at his side: he will not trade his loyalties at spear-point, he tells the foreign queen, and declines the Wall's mercy on the grounds that she has no authority to send him there. Dickon steps forward to share the sentence over his father's one flicker of protest. Daenerys gives the order; Drogon's fire takes them both, and the ashes blow across a field that used to be an army. Tyrion, who argued for mercy, and Samwell, who learns of it later from a kindness-blunted Jorah, both carry the scene forward as a question about their queen. In the published books Randyll Tarly is alive and consequential, a sword still hanging over several plots at once.
Their chapters, book by book
A Feast for Crows 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Book Randyll never faces the choice the show built for him: in the published pages the sack of Highgarden has not happened, and Randyll — master of laws on the boy king's council, with custody of the imprisoned Margaery — is positioned as the Reach's kingmaker rather than its casualty, his army camped where it can decide several futures at once. His justice at Maidenpool and his flaying contempt for Brienne are book-only textures; the Horn Hill dinner is show-only staging of an ultimatum the books deliver years earlier and crueler. The show's field execution has no book counterpart; in the novels the hardest man in the Reach is alive, armed, and holding hostages the plot badly wants.
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.