Selyse Baratheon
Stannis's stern, sour queen, wholly given over to the red god's fire and rather less devoted to her scarred daughter.
A soul of House Baratheon, born at Brightwater Keep.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died at Winterfell's ruin (S5┬ÀE10)
Stannis's queen, who watched her daughter burn and called it the Lord's will, broke before the march reached Winterfell. They found her hanging from a tree in the snow.
In the show she outlives her daughter by hours. Selyse assents to the burning as the god's will ÔÇö she has always been quickest to sign the god's invoices ÔÇö but the sound of Shireen calling for her breaks the zealot where years of grief could not, and she has to be held back from the pyre she blessed. They found her at dawn hanged from a tree at the camp's edge, the god's will apparently having omitted to sustain her. In the published books Selyse is alive at Castle Black with Shireen, her fool, and her little court ÔÇö a woman the story has parked next to a powder keg, unburned and unbereaved, so far.
Their chapters, book by book
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The show's Selyse is the queen's-men faction compressed into one woman ÔÇö the books spread her fanaticism across a party of lords (Axell Florent chief among them) and keep Selyse herself colder and pettier than the show's tormented believer. The books also add the grotesque poignancy of her situation at the Wall: presiding over Wildling weddings and diplomatic feasts as a queen of nothing, sniffing at everyone the story likes. Her final-season arc is show-only in every particular, because the books' Selyse remains at Castle Black, alive, her daughter beside her ÔÇö the pyre that defines the show's version has no book counterpart yet, and readers dread the counterpart more than they doubt it.
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.