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).
A soul of House Stark, born at Volantis.
The fuller tale
Season Two
Brienne and Jaime go south; Robb marries Talisa and breaks his word to Walder Frey.
Where they stand. The Crag.
Season Three
Talisa, Robb, Catelyn, Grey Wind ÔÇö the King in the North falls with his kingdom.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Slain at the Red Wedding (S3┬ÀE9)
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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö Talisa's death belongs to the screen alone.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
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 ÔÇö fatally, and to book readers bafflingly ÔÇö 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.