Shireen Baratheon
Stannis's only child, a bright, bookish girl scarred by greyscale, who teaches those around her their letters and asks too many good questions.
The fuller tale
Shireen is the argument that gentleness can survive anywhere. Daughter of the realm's sternest lord and its sourest lady, raised on a volcanic rock in a court of fanatics, half her face stiffened by the greyscale that nearly killed her in the cradle — and out of all that comes the sweetest, most curious child in the story, hoarding books the way her house hoards grudges. Dragonstone's carved dragons frighten her; its library does not. She names sea battles and dead kings the way other girls name dolls.
The tale gives her one great power, and she uses it on the least likely people. She teaches Davos Seaworth — a knight, a lord, her father's Hand, and an illiterate smuggler's son terrified of letters — to read, patiently, as though it were the most natural friendship in the world. Even Stannis, who rations his warmth like siege stores, unbends for her: the show gives them the story's most surprising tender scene, the king telling his daughter how he refused to let the maesters ship her off to die when the greyscale came, because she was the Princess Shireen of House Baratheon, and his. In a story obsessed with what parents owe children, Shireen is the debt stated plainly.
In the books her orbit is smaller and safer, at least so far: she is left at Castle Black with her mother when Stannis marches south, playing at monsters-and-maidens with her fool Patchface, whose drowned riddles unsettle everyone but her, and befriending the wildling princess's boy. Melisandre watches her with an interest that readers have learned to dread — king's blood, the red woman notes, runs in small veins too. The pieces the show assembled stand on the board in the books, not yet moved.
The page and the screen
Book Shireen is a younger, more peripheral figure — no reading lessons with Davos (the books give him a maester for that), but a richer household: Patchface the fool, whose eerie songs Melisandre calls dangerous, exists only in the books, and Shireen's friendship with Edric Storm, her bastard cousin, is a book thread the show never picks up because it cut the boy entirely. The crucial structural difference is geography: the show takes her on her father's southern march; the books leave her at the Wall, in the exact custody of the people — Selyse, Melisandre, the queen's men — that readers least trust with a girl whose blood is a king's.
In the show, season by season
Season Five. In The Dance of Dragons — "I want to help." She never knew with what.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Burned at Dragonstone's cause (S5·E9)
The sweetest soul in the story was given to the flames by her own father, in the snows before Winterfell, to buy a thaw and a victory. The Lord of Light took Melisandre's offering and gave Stannis nothing but ashes.
The show gives her the story's hardest scene to watch. With Stannis's march to Winterfell frozen in, his supplies burned and his cause dying in the snow, Melisandre offers the old remedy: king's blood, given to the fire. Stannis consents. Shireen — who moments before offered to help her father in any way she could — is burned at the stake before the whole army, calling for the parents who stand and watch, her mother breaking at the last and her father not. It buys a thaw and loses him everything: the sellswords desert, Selyse is dead by morning, and the army that marches on Winterfell is a ghost of one. In the published books Shireen is alive at Castle Black, far from her father — though her guardians there include Melisandre and the queen's men, and readers note grimly that the author has promised the fire is not only the show's invention.