Walda Bolton
Fat Walda, a plump and cheerful Frey girl chosen by Roose Bolton for a bride ÔÇö for her weight in silver, the story goes.
A soul born at The Twins, sworn to House Bolton.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Killed at Winterfell (alive in the books) (S6┬ÀE2)
Fat Walda Frey, Roose's young wife, had barely delivered the Bolton heir when Ramsay led her and the newborn to the kennels. He was very much looking forward to meeting his brother, he said, and opened the gates.
In the show, Walda's death follows her son's birth by hours. With Roose murdered mid-embrace and the birth announcement still fresh, Ramsay invites his stepmother and the newborn ÔÇö the trueborn heir whose existence unmakes him ÔÇö down to the kennels, saying he is looking forward to meeting his baby brother. Walda understands too late, pleads for the child, and Ramsay opens the cages: the hounds take mother and infant both while he watches. Even by the show's standards it landed as a floor not previously reached, and it is pure invention ÔÇö in the published books Walda Bolton is alive at Winterfell, her child unborn, her husband undead, and her kindly obliviousness intact. Few characters' fates differ more completely between the tellings.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Book Walda is alive: pregnant at Winterfell through A Dance with Dragons, exchanging pleasantries in a castle full of murderers, her child not yet born and Roose still breathing beside her. Her show fate ÔÇö and her infant's ÔÇö is television's invention, part of the compressed Bolton succession the show engineered to hand Ramsay the North on schedule. The books also give her marriage more texture than the screen had time for: Roose's deadpan account of choosing her by the pound, and his admission that she has made him, against all his own principles, something like happy, are among the saga's strangest grace notes.
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.