Sansa Stark

The eldest Stark daughter was raised on songs about knights and queens, and went south at twelve as the betrothed of Prince Joffrey. She survived the court that killed her father — starving, beaten, and forced to smile through it — and learned from Cersei Lannister and Petyr Baelish the two lessons every player of the game teaches: never say what you think, and never forget what they did.

Traded to Tyrion, then smuggled out of the city, she was delivered to the Vale as 'Alayne Stone' and tutored in deception while Littlefinger picked clean her mother's family. She escaped that too — Ramsay Bolton's Winterfell was her worst schooling, and her flight from it with Theon Greyjoy was her first act of her own.

Back in the North she rallied the knights of the Vale, took Winterfell for her family, and was named Lady of Winterfell when the fighting ended. Her story is the realm's clearest argument that a Stark learned in the south is worth ten raised on winter snow.