Catelyn Stark

Catelyn Tully came north to marry a man she had never met, in place of a betrothed brother killed in a war, and built from that unpromising start a genuine marriage and a houseful of children she would have burned the world to protect. Her fierce, sometimes ungenerous loyalty to her own blood — she never warmed to her husband's bastard son, and said so plainly — sits alongside a political shrewdness the North too often underestimated, mistaking a mother's grief for a lack of a stateswoman's judgment. When her husband and children scattered across the war-torn realm, Catelyn rode from siege to siege trying to hold a family together with negotiation, hostage-taking, and sheer will, a labor the war repaid with almost nothing but loss. A maester notes that history has been unkind to Catelyn Stark chiefly because it has believed her son's bannermen's excuses rather than her own counsel, which was, rather more often than not, correct.