Talisa Stark
A healer from far-off Volantis who tends the wounded of both sides on the war's battlefields, and catches the eye of a young king (the show's lady of Robb's heart).
The fuller tale
Talisa exists nowhere in the books, and the show built her from an argument: if Robb Stark was going to fall in love on screen, the audience had to fall too. She introduces herself sawing off a soldier's foot — a highborn Volantene who fled the slave-city's gilded rot after a slave saved her drowning brother and she decided a life of harps and garden parties was a moral failure. She crossed the sea to practice healing where the wars are, which in these years means everywhere, and her field hospitals treat the wounded of both armies with a pointed indifference to whose banner they bled under.
Her courtship with Robb is conducted in exactly the register the rest of his life forbids: she teases the King in the North about his supper-table crown, argues casualties with him while elbow-deep in the consequences of his victories, and never once asks him for anything. He breaks a sworn marriage pact to marry her — the most expensive wedding vow in the tale — and she repays the story's cruel arithmetic by being, briefly, the one uncomplicated good thing in his war: a queen who keeps writing to her mother in Valyrian, keeps working the hospital tents, and tells her husband she is carrying his child in one of the show's few unguarded happy scenes.
She is also the show's most efficient tragedy engine. Everything about Talisa — the foreignness, the pregnancy, her presence at the Twins — was assembled to raise the Red Wedding's price, and the construction shows if you look for the joins: book purists grumbled, and a cottage industry of viewer theories insisted her letters home marked her as a Lannister spy. The show meant none of it. She is simply what she appears to be, which in this story is the most dangerous thing a person can afford to be.
The page and the screen
Talisa replaces the books' Jeyne Westerling, and the two could hardly be more different: Jeyne is a westerlands lord's sheltered daughter whom Robb marries out of honor after a single grief-stricken night, then leaves safely behind at Riverrun; Talisa is a foreign volunteer he marries for love and brings — fatally, and to book readers bafflingly — to Walder Frey's own hall. The swap trades the books' theme (honor's price) for the screen's (love's price), and it sharpens the massacre: the books' queen survives because Robb would never parade her before the Freys, while the show's dies precisely because the show wanted the knife to find everything he loved in one room. Nothing fills Talisa's space in the books; she is pure adaptation, invented whole.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Slain at the Red Wedding (S3·E9)
The healer from Volantis who married a king for love came to the Twins carrying his child. The Freys' knives found her belly first when the Rains of Castamere began to play.
At the Red Wedding, Talisa dies first. When the doors are barred and the Rains of Castamere begins, Lothar Frey crosses the hall and drives his dagger into her pregnant belly, again and again — the Freys' opening statement, made before a single quarrel flies at the king. Robb crawls to her through the slaughter and she dies in his arms, the child with her, moments before Roose Bolton finishes her husband. It is the show's cruelest invention: the books' Red Wedding kills a king and his mother; the show's added a wife and an unborn heir to the bill, and put them at the top of it. Jeyne Westerling, her book counterpart, is alive at Riverrun through all of it — Talisa's death belongs to the screen alone.