Septa Mordane
The septa who schooled the Stark girls in needlework and courtesy, patient with Sansa and forever exasperated by Arya.
The fuller tale
Septa Mordane is the South's ambassador to Winterfell's nursery: the devout, starched instructress installed in the Stark household — by Catelyn's southern piety — to make ladies out of the North's daughters. Her curriculum is needlework, courtesy, deportment and the Seven, and her results split neatly down the middle of her classroom. Sansa is the vindication of her life's work, praised as the finest needle in the North; Arya is its refutation, a daily skirmish of crooked stitches, escaped lessons and questions no septa's catechism anticipates. The famous verdict — Arya has the hands of a blacksmith — is meant as despair and lands, across the following seasons, as prophecy.
She goes south with her charges and her certainties, and King's Landing is unkind to both. In the capital she remains what she has always been — chaperone, standards-bearer, the voice reminding two increasingly frightened girls that a lady's armor is courtesy — and the story quietly honors the substance under the starch: her lessons are half of what keeps Sansa alive in the years ahead, the courtesies deployed like shieldwork in rooms full of enemies. Mordane herself is granted no such rooms. When the Hand's household falls, the septa's story ends the way of the loyal retainers the great game never counts — but her teaching outlives the teacher in every measured curtsy Sansa ever hides behind.
The page and the screen
The tellings differ mostly in weight. The books keep Mordane strictly through the girls' eyes — a figure of Sansa's comfort and Arya's persecution, wine-fond at feasts and scandalized on schedule — while the show gives her small independent moments, including a walk through the throne room with Sansa that lets her admit her own history. Her function is identical in both: she is the embodiment of the southern code Sansa must outgrow without discarding, and the first adult casualty of the girls' education in what courtesy cannot stop. The novels never dramatize her end at all — it arrives as an image reported through Sansa's ordeal — where the show stages her final moments directly.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Killed in the purge of the Stark household (S1·E9)
The books: Killed in the fall of House Stark (AGOT, ch. 68)
When the Stark household was put to the sword she sent Sansa running and stood her ground on the steps of the sept. Her head ended on the walls beside her lord's — loyal service, cruelly repaid.
She dies in the purge of the Stark household, and both tellings mark her among its bravest. When the Lannister trap closes on the Tower of the Hand — Ned arrested, the household put to the sword — the show gives Mordane a last act of pure duty: hearing the fighting, she sends Sansa running and turns to face the armored men coming up the stair, standing her ground on the steps to buy her pupil the moments that matter. The books do not show the sword fall; they show the arithmetic afterward. Joffrey, walking Sansa along the battlements in his idea of courtship, presents the spiked heads of the household — her father's, and beside it the septa's — and instructs her to look. Loyal service to House Stark, repaid the capital's way: her head on the walls next to her lord's, and her life's work walking below, curtsying to the king because her septa taught her how.