Roose Bolton
Lord of the Dreadfort, the most powerful of the Stark bannermen: soft-spoken, bloodless, and unreadable, a leech-loving lord whose stillness unsettles everyone around him.
A soul born at The Dreadfort, sworn to House Bolton.
The fuller tale
Season One
A Northern bannerman in Robb Stark's war council, quiet, precise, and prone to mentioning his bastard son up at the Dreadfort so casually that nobody thinks to ask more about him. Recommends leeches over speed and is usually right; present at the Whispering Wood when Robb's ambush captures Jaime Lannister, offering counsel that is always sound and never warm.
Season Two
Given Harrenhal to hold once Tywin abandons it, and runs the ruined castle as a grim, undermanned garrison, more concerned with the war's arithmetic than with the prisoners passing through it — among them a girl working under a false name, though he never has reason to look twice at her.
Season Three
Brought into the Freys' plan for Robb Stark's wedding feast by Tywin's offer of the North as payment, and stands inside the hall at the Twins while Robb and Catelyn Stark are killed under his own roof's hospitality — the last thing Robb sees is the fact that a man he trusted was in on it. Named Warden of the North for his trouble.
Season Four
Rules the North from the Dreadfort as its new Warden, more concerned with consolidating a conquest nobody else in the North accepts than with comfort, and sends his son Ramsay to finish taking Moat Cailin from the ironborn — backing whatever ugliness gets the job done, so long as it works.
Season Five
Has taken a new wife, Walda Frey, for the trueborn heir Ramsay isn't, and treats his bastard's usefulness and his bastard's danger as the same fact, to be managed rather than resolved. Approves Ramsay's marriage to Sansa Stark as a way to make Bolton rule of the North look legitimate rather than merely won, and holds Winterfell against Stannis Baratheon's advance by letting Ramsay handle the parts of the war he has no stomach to watch himself.
Season Six
Walda gives him the trueborn son he's waited years for, and he has perhaps a day to enjoy it before Ramsay, unwilling to share Winterfell with a brother, puts a knife in his father's stomach and tells him, almost gently, that his time is up.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Slain at Winterfell (S6·E2)
The Lord of the Dreadfort, who put a dagger in his king at the Red Wedding, received the same courtesy from his own bastard at Winterfell — Ramsay's blade in the gut the moment a trueborn heir was announced.
In the show, Roose Bolton dies exactly as he lived — at close quarters, quietly, mid-calculation. When word comes to Winterfell that Walda has delivered a son, Ramsay embraces his father, and the audience has half a second to read the arithmetic in his eyes before the dagger goes into Roose's gut: a trueborn heir existing means a legitimized bastard's claim expiring, and Ramsay does to his father precisely what his father did to his king. The maester is instructed to announce that Lord Bolton was poisoned by his enemies; Walda and the newborn are dealt with within the hour. It is the Red Wedding's logic brought home to roost — betrayal as house tradition, passed father to son like the name. In the books, no such scene has occurred: Roose is alive at Winterfell in the published telling, though sharing a castle with Ramsay, a war, and several thousand people who remember the Red Wedding — a life-expectancy chart all its own.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 2 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Book Roose is alive. As the published volumes close he holds Winterfell with Stannis marching on it, his Frey and Manderly allies knifing each other in his own hall, a false Stark bride bleeding sympathy toward his son's enemies, and the North's old houses remembering all around him — the quiet lord's position anything but quiet. His show death at Ramsay's hand is, so far, television only. The books also deepen his menace in ways the show only gestures at: his account of Ramsay's conception is one of the saga's most chilling monologues, his 'a peaceful land, a quiet people' credo gives the character a stated philosophy, and the fan theory that the ageless, unblinking lord is something stranger than a man — built from leeches, pale eyes and a certain timelessness — remains a durable cottage industry the text neither feeds nor kills. Michael McElhatton's performance gave the show's Roose a dry, watchful gravity that made him many viewers' favorite monster; readers would say the books' version is the same man with the temperature turned three degrees lower.
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.