Ygritte
A free folk spearwife, red-haired and sharp-tongued (kissed by fire, and lucky for it), quick to tell any crow how little he knows.
A soul born at Beyond the Wall, sworn to The Free Folk.
The fuller tale
Season Two
One of Qhorin Halfhand's wildling captives turns out to be nobody's captive for long: Ygritte survives the ambush that kills the rest of her raiding party, and Jon Snow is given the job of executing her alone in the woods, blade to a kneeling woman's neck, and cannot make himself do it. What was supposed to take five minutes turns into days of the two of them alone in the haunted forest, Jon trying to march her back to the Wall as a prisoner and Ygritte making it very clear who actually has the upper hand between them, needling him with the same four words until they stick: you know nothing, Jon Snow. She leads him — deliberately or not, she never quite says — straight back into the hands of Mance Rayder's army.
Season Three
She gets exactly what she wants out of the season: Jon Snow turned wildling in earnest, sharing her furs and her cause and, for one night in a cave behind a waterfall, her bed, no crows or oaths standing between them. She teaches him what the free folk actually are — not monsters, just people locked out of the only good land left by a wall and a war they never started — and half believes she has made a convert. When Jon breaks during the raid on the farm, refusing to help kill an old man who never did any of them harm, she reads it correctly before anyone else does. He runs; she puts three arrows in his back rather than let him go clean, and then, with a clear shot at the fourth, does not take it.
Season Four
She marches on Castle Black with Tormund's raiding party still furious at Jon Snow and still, underneath it, not entirely able to hate him the way the betrayal should warrant. In the chaos of the assault she has him at her mercy again, this time with nothing stopping her, and hesitates exactly long enough for a boy named Olly to put an arrow through her from the wall above. She dies in Jon's arms by the fire, in the room where they first slept together, asking only to stay a little longer in the cave they never should have left, and telling him, for the last time and without the sting she used to put in it, that he still knows nothing.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell in the battle for the Wall (S4·E9)
The girl kissed by fire drew her bow on Jon Snow in the burning yard of Castle Black and hesitated — and a boy from a village she'd raided didn't. She died in Jon's arms: 'We should have stayed in that cave.'
On the page. An arrow beneath the Wall (ASOS, ch. 56)
The girl kissed by fire fell in the battle beneath the Wall, an arrow through her chest that Jon prayed wasn't his. She died in his arms in the ashes of the fight, still telling him he knew nothing.
She dies in Jon Snow’s arms in the wreck of the battle for Castle Black. On screen she has him at bowshot in the burning yard — and hesitates, the bow trembling between love and war, until Olly’s arrow takes her through the back. In the books Jon finds her among the wounded when the fighting ebbs, an arrow in her chest that no one will ever claim, her hair the last warm color in a yard full of ash. Both tellings give her the same dying words — that they should have stayed in that cave — and Jon the same answer, that he’ll take her back there. He keeps the promise the only way left: her body is burned north of the Wall, in the free air, as the free folk do, and the fire her hair was kissed by takes the rest of her home.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
A Storm of Swords 4 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The show hands her death an author: Olly, the boy whose village her band destroyed, puts the arrow in her back in the burning yard of Castle Black — grief answering grief, and Jon holds her as she goes. The books are crueler by being vaguer: Jon finds her dying after the battle with a shaft through her chest, and the tale never says whose it was; he prays it wasn’t his, and gets no answer. Book-Ygritte is also a fraction more feral and more mythic — it is she who tells the tale of Bael the Bard and insists the Starks have wildling blood, and her jealous streak (the show’s cave idyll notwithstanding) runs hotter on the page. Both tellings agree on the essentials: the red hair, the creed, and the last line about the cave.
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.