Ros
A shrewd, ambitious redheaded woman from near Winterfell who works her way from a northern brothel into the trade and intrigues of King's Landing.
A soul born at The North.
The fuller tale
Season Three
Littlefinger wins the Vale-sized game with Varys and ships Ros to Joffrey's crossbow.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Killed in the Red Keep (S3┬ÀE6)
The clever girl from the Winterfell brothel rose all the way into Littlefinger's confidence, and Varys's. When Baelish found the leak he gave her to Joffrey, who ended her with a crossbow in the Red Keep.
She dies for the leak. When her warnings to Varys about Sansa Stark cross Littlefinger's plans once too often, Baelish audits his own house, identifies the informer, and ÔÇö in his velvet way, narrating his philosophy of useful failures to an unrelated audience ÔÇö writes her off as a bad investment. He gives her to Joffrey. The show reveals the transaction after the fact, in a single image without dialogue: Ros in the king's chambers, bound to the bedpost, dead of a crossbow with the bolts placed at the young king's leisure ÔÇö Joffrey lounging opposite with the weapon, a boy finished with a new toy. It is among the show's coldest cuts precisely because no scene of it exists: her death is shown as Littlefinger describes disposal, a line item. Being show-only, she has no book fate ÔÇö the women who share her duties on the page, Alayaya among them, survive their punishments.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
No Ros exists in the novels; she is a composite the show built to give faces and continuity to the books' scattered brothel scenes. Her narrative duties are performed on the page by several women ÔÇö Chataya and her daughter Alayaya in King's Landing, whose establishment shelters Tyrion's secrets and who suffer for their proximity to him; the unnamed Winterfell girls of Theon's chapters; and the anonymous informants any spymaster keeps among the pillows. Alayaya in particular absorbs the books' version of her jeopardy: seized and threatened by Cersei as leverage against Tyrion, whipped on Joffrey's order, but alive. The show found it could not keep hiring new actresses for one function, consolidated the role, and ÔÇö having made her a person ÔÇö made her fate one of its early statements that television inventions enjoyed no plot armor.