Shireen Baratheon

Shireen was born at Dragonstone in 289 AC to Lord Stannis Baratheon and Lady Selyse Florent, and contracted greyscale as a small child — a disease that kills most who catch it, or disfigures those it spares. She survived, unusually, though it left half her face and much of her neck cracked and grey, marks she has grown up wearing in a court that prizes little so much as appearance.

Selyse, who wanted a son and got a scarred daughter instead, treats Shireen with a coldness the text never quite lets Stannis notice; Stannis himself, stern and undemonstrative with nearly everyone he meets, offers Shireen the one unguarded warmth in his entire character — teaching her his letters, letting her keep the addled fool Patchface for company, and, in one of the rare moments the maester's ledger records him speaking gently to anyone at all, telling her the story of the day she was born.

With no living son, Stannis has named Shireen his heir before his own bannermen — a fact he invokes and Selyse resents in roughly equal measure — and brought her north with the royal household when his war shifted from the Iron Throne to the defense of the Wall.

As the published chronicle stands, Shireen remains at Castle Black and, later, the reclaimed Nightfort, under Maester Aemon's watch, her part in her father's war against the dead — and against Melisandre's visions of kings and fire — left unresolved on the page.