Walder Frey
The Late Lord Frey: near ninety, spiteful, and lord of the only bridge across the Green Fork — with a brood of children and grandchildren beyond counting, and a long memory for slights.
A soul of House Frey, born at The Twins.
The fuller tale
Season One
Lord of the Crossing, and he never lets anyone forget what that phrase is worth. Robb Stark needs the Twins to move his army north of the Trident, and Walder Frey makes him pay for it in the coin he values most — not gold, but obligation: safe passage and swords in exchange for a marriage pact, Robb's own hand promised to one of Frey's numerous daughters once the war is won. He extracts the promise slowly, relishing the King in the North's need of him, and lets Robb cross the river knowing exactly how much leverage he has just banked.
Season Two
Brienne and Jaime go south; Robb marries Talisa and breaks his word to Walder Frey.
Season Three
Collects on a debt Robb Stark never intended to pay in full. The marriage broken, the insult worn for a season, Frey accepts amends in a different shape — Edmure Tully in his daughter Roslin's bed instead of Robb in one of his — and hosts the wedding at the Twins with every appearance of a grudge finally settled. The music, the wine, and the goodwill last exactly as long as it takes his men to bar the doors. He gives the signal himself, calm as a man closing a ledger, and the Starks he has fed and toasted all evening die in his hall before the night is out.
Season Six
Killed in his own castle years later, at the hands of a girl he never recognized wearing a face that was not her own — the debt for the Twins called in at last, long after he thought he had closed the account for good.
Season Seven
A feast at the Twins: Walder Frey toasts his men with poisoned wine — worn by Arya Stark.
How it ends for them
On the screen. His throat cut at his own table (alive in the books) (S6·E10)
The Late Lord Frey dined alone on a pie he found oddly savory, served by a girl whose face was not her own. Arya Stark told him where his sons were before she cut his throat — the North remembers, and so do wolves.
The show kills him twice, in a sense, and Arya Stark is both deaths. In the sixth season’s finale a serving girl lays a meat pie before him and waits while he pokes at it, asking after his sons Lothar and Black Walder; she tells him they are already here — baked into the pie he has been eating — then peels off a face he does not recognize, tells him the last thing he will ever see is a Stark smiling down at him, and opens his throat the way his men opened her mother’s.
The second death is the house’s. Weeks later, “Lord Walder” — Arya behind his face — summons every Frey male of consequence to the Twins, toasts their great deeds with poisoned wine, and watches the hall fall down around her while the wives, spared deliberately, look on. Her exit line does the accounting: the North remembers. In the published books, none of this has happened — Walder Frey still lives, though between Lady Stoneheart’s nooses and Manderly’s kitchens, the books make it clear the interest on his debt is compounding.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The Red Wedding is nearly identical in both tellings; the divergence is what the story does with him afterward. The show gives Walder two seasons of decline and an ending at Arya Stark’s hands; in the published books he is alive at the Twins — old, guarded, and watching his house die around the edges. The books distribute the vengeance instead: Freys hang from riverland trees wherever the Brotherhood rides under its new leadership, and at White Harbor three Frey envoys vanish before Wyman Manderly serves his famous pies at a wedding feast while a singer plays the Rat Cook — the books’ broad wink at the same justice the show made literal. Book-canon also gave Riverrun itself to a Frey, Walder’s son-in-law Emmon, an occupation the show replaced with a botched siege.
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.