Rickard Stark
Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North in the years before the tale, remembered for his four children and his southron ambitions.
A soul of House Stark, born at Winterfell.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
Died before the story ÔÇö before this story begins.
When Brandon Stark rode to King's Landing shouting for Rhaegar's head, Aerys arrested him ÔÇö and summoned his father to answer for it. Rickard came south demanding trial by combat, an old right no king could decently refuse. Aerys granted it, and named fire as the crown's champion. They hung the Lord of Winterfell from the rafters of his own king's throne room in his full armor and cooked him in it, while pyromancers tended the flame and the court watched.
The books add the detail that makes it unbearable: Brandon was made to watch, a Tyroshi strangling device around his neck and his sword laid just out of reach, so that the son choked himself to death straining to save the father. The show, wisely, only ever describes it ÔÇö even that story flinches from staging it. Every sword raised in Robert's Rebellion answers this one afternoon, and 'burn' is not a word the Stark children ever use lightly afterward.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Neither telling ever puts Rickard on stage; he exists in both as testimony. The difference is texture. The show gives him a handful of lines of dialogue ÔÇö Ned's clipped account of what the Mad King did ÔÇö and moves on. The books keep circling back: Jaime, who stood in the throne room that day as a Kingsguard of sixteen, carries the memory like a stone; Lady Barbrey Dustin serves up the revisionist reading of his marriage politics in A Dance with Dragons; and the crypt statues give him a fixed address in Bran's chapters. Book readers can assemble a portrait of Rickard's ambitions that show viewers are never offered.