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.
A soul of House Baratheon, born at Dragonstone.
The fuller tale
Season Five
Melisandre tempts Jon; Stannis explains greyscale to Shireen the only way he can: I fought for you. In The Dance of Dragons ÔÇö "I want to help." She never knew with what. Stannis burns Shireen. The princess who taught men to read screams her father's name.
Where they stand. Castle Black.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Burned at Dragonstone's cause (S5┬ÀE9)
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 ÔÇö who moments before offered to help her father in any way she could ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö 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.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Book Shireen is a younger, more peripheral figure ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö Selyse, Melisandre, the queen's men ÔÇö that readers least trust with a girl whose blood is a king's.
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.