Shae
A camp follower, clever and sharp-tongued, who becomes something more to a Lannister who ought to know better.
A soul born at The Free Cities.
The fuller tale
Season One
A camp follower Tyrion takes a liking to in the Riverlands and brings back to King's Landing with him, which is not remotely the kind of thing a Lannister is supposed to do out loud. She is installed as a handmaid to Sansa Stark for cover, a job she performs with more genuine warmth than the assignment requires, and the affection between her and Tyrion reads, against both their expectations, as something closer to real than either wants to call it.
Season Two
Still playing lady's maid to Sansa while quietly running Tyrion's household and, increasingly, keeping Sansa upright through a year that keeps trying to break her. During the riot after Joffrey's name day and again through the terror of the Blackwater, Shae stays close and steady in a way no one is paying her to do, protective of a girl she was only ever supposed to be watching.
Season Three
Undone by Tyrion's marriage to Sansa, which he insists is politics and nothing more, and which she experiences as exactly what it looks like — being quietly replaced by a wife he didn't choose either, in a house where nobody asked what she wanted. Tyrion tries to save her the only way he knows how, arranging passage to Pentos and a fortune to make the exile bearable, and she takes it as the rejection it partly is and refuses to go. Tywin finds her in his son's chambers near season's end and settles the matter himself, with jewels, a threat, and the flattest cruelty the old man has in him.
Season Four
Takes the stand at Tyrion's trial for Joffrey's murder and tells the court a version of their life together designed to hurt him as badly as possible — calling him a monster, describing a conspiracy with Sansa that never happened — payment in kind for a betrayal she never stopped believing was real. Tyrion, loose in the Red Keep on his way out of the city for good, finds her in his father's bed instead of his own and strangles her with a chain before turning the crossbow meant for his escape on Tywin himself. It is the last thing he does in King's Landing, and neither Shae nor the father he shoots leaves that room alive.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died in the Tower of the Hand (S4·E10)
Tyrion's lover bore false witness at his trial and was found in his father's bed. She reached for a knife when he found her there, and Tyrion strangled her with the golden chain she wore — the Hand's chain.
On the page. Died in the Hand's chambers (ASOS, ch. 78)
She bore false witness at Tyrion's trial and he found her in Tywin's own bed, the Hand's chain of golden hands around her throat. He twisted it. Wherever whores go, she went first.
Both tellings end her in the same bed, and it is the worst bed in Westeros. Escaping the black cells on the night before his execution, Tyrion detours to the Tower of the Hand and finds Shae in his father's sheets — the final proof of where her testimony was arranged and what it purchased. In the show she wakes, whispers his name, and goes for a knife; they struggle, and Tyrion strangles her with the golden chain she wears — a chain of linked hands, the Hand's own emblem — then sits a long moment with the body, apologizing, before taking the crossbow off the wall. The books stage it swifter and bleaker: she calls him her giant of Lannister, the endearment now a courtesan's reflex, and he kills her with the chain and feels, he tells us, almost nothing yet — the numbness itself the horror. In both versions she is the first death on the worst night of Tyrion's life, and the reason the second one happens: it is finding Shae there that turns an escape into a reckoning, and sends him up the ladder to the privy with the crossbow cocked.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Clash of Kings 2 chapters that name them
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Book Shae is a different creature wearing the same name. The novels write her as a teenaged camp follower who performs affection with complete professionalism — readers see the mercenary machinery from the first scene, and the tragedy runs entirely through Tyrion, who knows he is buying the performance and lets himself believe it anyway; the affair is his self-deception, not their romance. The show's great renovation was to make Shae older, sharper and genuinely in love, which rewires every downstream scene: her jealousy of Sansa, her refusal of the diamonds and the exit, and the trial's betrayal all become the wreckage of something real rather than the routine conclusion of a contract. Her book fate arrives amid another difference — on the page her last patron's bed belongs to a man mid-confession about Tysha, a wound the show cut. Readers argue about which Shae is crueler to Tyrion; the answer is each, differently.
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.