Rickon Stark

The youngest wolf, a wild little boy barely out of the nursery, with a black direwolf named Shaggydog.

The fuller tale

Rickon is the Stark the war never let grow up. The youngest of the five, three years old when the banners were called, he understood exactly enough of what was happening — father gone, mother gone, Robb gone, Bran broken — to be furious at all of it. His direwolf, Shaggydog, black-pelted and green-eyed, grew as wild as his boy: biting chained, snapping at maesters, the pack's temper concentrated in its smallest member. Old Nan called him a little wildling; the tale suggests she was underselling it.

After Theon's sack of Winterfell, the surviving Starks split to double their odds, and Rickon's road bent away from Bran's — north with Osha, the wildling woman who had become his keeper, into years the tale mostly leaves dark. The show surfaces him at Last Hearth under the Umbers' protection; the books ship him somewhere stranger — Skagos, the cannibal isle of unicorn rumors, an address so unpromising that only Davos Seaworth is thought reliable enough to go and fetch him back.

His importance to the story is brutally simple: he is a trueborn Stark heir, male, and locatable — which makes him, depending on the holder, a banner to rally the North or a loose end to snip. The tale keeps him a child throughout: barely any lines, barely any scenes, a boy passed between protectors while grown men calculate his value. Of all the Stark children, Rickon is the one the story uses rather than follows — and the injustice of that is, in the end, rather the point of him.

The page and the screen

The two tellings send him to different hiding places and different fates. The show's Umbers sell him to Ramsay Bolton, Shaggydog's head delivered as proof, and his story ends before Winterfell's walls; the books' Rickon is alive on Skagos as far as anyone knows, with Osha, with his wolf, and with a rescue mission (Davos, dispatched by Wyman Manderly, whose price for supporting a Stark restoration is precisely this boy) already sailing at the close of the published volumes. Book readers may yet get the Rickon storyline the show spent as arrow-fodder — a wild Stark heir raised half-feral among cannibals is not a card the books deal idly.

In the show, season by season

Season Six. In Oathbreaker — The youngest wolf, handed to the cruelest master.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Umbers deliver a gift to Ramsay: Osha, Rickon Stark, and the head of his direwolf. (S6·E3)
• Manderly's price for White Harbor's knights is a smuggler's errand: Rickon Stark lives, on an island of cannibals and unicorns — bring the boy home, and the North rises. (ADWD 30)

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

The show: Killed before the Battle of the Bastards (S6·E9)

Ramsay's 'game' let the youngest Stark run across the field before Winterfell while arrows fell around him. Jon rode for him; the last arrow was faster. The trap it baited nearly killed the North's whole cause.

Ramsay Bolton produced Rickon before the Battle of the Bastards for one purpose: bait. On the field before Winterfell he cut the boy loose and told him to run to his brother — then took his bow and loosed arrow after arrow, unhurried, while Jon galloped to close the distance. The last arrow arrived first, taking Rickon through the heart a stride from rescue, and the trap closed exactly as designed: Jon's discipline shattered, and the northern line charged early into the slaughter Ramsay had prepared. He died a hostage's death — used, not fought — and in the books, where he was never taken, no such death exists: Rickon Stark remains alive on Skagos in the published telling.