Barbrey Ryswell

As a girl, Barbrey spent stretches of time at the Rills, where she crossed paths with Brandon Stark, then a ward of her father at Barrowton. Something more than friendship grew between them, and she lost her virginity to him well before anyone spoke of weddings. Lord Rodrik dreamed of marrying his daughter into House Stark, and for a while it looked like it would be Brandon.

The match fell apart when Lord Rickard Stark chose to wed his heir to Catelyn Tully instead. Barbrey never believed it was Brandon's own wish, and blames maester Walys for the arrangement more than the Starks themselves; she has distrusted maesters ever since. Her father tried again with Eddard Stark, but he too ended up promised to a Tully. Barbrey married Lord Willam Dustin instead.

Willam Dustin rode off to Robert's Rebellion barely half a year after the wedding, to fight beside Eddard Stark. Barbrey asked him to send his great-uncle instead, a veteran of an earlier war, but Willam insisted on going himself. Before he left, she gave him the finest stallion from her father's stables, and he swore he'd come home riding it.

Willam died at the Tower of Joy, and it was Eddard who brought the horse back to Barbrey, telling her that her husband had fallen with honor. He never brought the bones home, saying they'd been buried in Dorne. Yet he did trouble himself to carry his sister Lyanna's remains north. Barbrey never forgave him for that, and the grudge is still alive in her.

Domeric Bolton, her sister Bethany's son, served four years as Barbrey's page, and she grew genuinely fond of him — about the only Bolton she seems to have truly cared for.

After Domeric's death, Barbrey suspects Ramsay, Roose Bolton's bastard son, had a hand in it. She doesn't say so outright, but the suspicion stays with her.

When the War of the Five Kings breaks out, Barbrey sends a contingent from Barrowton to join Robb Stark, though she later admits she sent as few as she dared without drawing Winterfell's anger. Those same men, conveniently, keep her informed of everything happening in the army of the King in the North.

The Red Wedding costs Barbrey the men she'd sent with Robb, and ever since she's carried an open hatred for House Frey. In that same turn she draws closer to Roose Bolton and the Lannisters, the new power holders in the North.

When Roose Bolton decides to marry his son Ramsay to the girl everyone calls Arya Stark, Barbrey travels to Winterfell with supplies and the bride herself in her keeping. Before that, Roose brings Theon Greyjoy before her, and she's unsettled by his appearance; she asks Roose whether the prisoner is even in his right mind, and gets no clear answer.

Barbrey convinces Theon that only he, not Jon Snow — a bastard, and bound to the Wall — can vouch for the bride being who she claims to be. With that, she quietly folds him into the wedding's deception. She attends the ceremony and the feast, sitting beside Theon while no one else comes near him.

Later, on a walk down into Winterfell's crypts, Barbrey tells Theon the story of her love for Brandon Stark, and warns him: if Eddard Stark's bones ever pass through Barrowton, they'll go no further — she'll feed them to the dogs before letting them rest beside Lyanna. She demands his silence about what's been said.

When the first killings turn up at Winterfell, Barbrey speaks up for Theon against Aenys Frey's suspicions, pointing instead at the grudges the northmen still hold against House Frey after the Red Wedding — the Manderlys, the Umbers, and others who lost people there.