A spearwife of the free folk, short and round-faced and pug-nosed, with skinny well-muscled legs, pretty blue-grey eyes set a little too far apart, crooked white teeth, and a thick shaggy mop of curly bright red hair that her people held to be lucky, kissed by fire. She came from a village beyond the Wall and learned the song of Bael the Bard at her mother's knee, kept Longspear Ryk for a brother in all but blood, and as a girl took a red-haired youth for her first lover at a feast and was so unimpressed that when he came back round Longspear broke his arm and chased him off. She fought in boiled leather and a doeskin shirt, with a short axe and a bone dagger, and carried a bow of goldenheart and dragonbone with arrows fletched in grey goose feathers.
She rode with Rattleshirt's war band in the Frostfangs, and at the Skirling Pass Qhorin Halfhand's rangers killed her companion Orell and another of her party and would have killed her too, but Jon Snow balked at putting his sword to a woman's throat and let her run when Qhorin gave the order. She rejoined her people in time to be there at the Halfhand's death; when Jon's blade went into Qhorin to win the trust of the free folk, she and the wildlings spared him over Rattleshirt's protests, and she took the Halfhand's hooded cloak for her own. South of the Fist with Mance Rayder's host she followed Tormund Giantsbane's column, and when Mance's wrath at the Watch turned against Jon she lied for him out loud, telling Mance she had taken Jon to her bed already, and so saved his life and bought him into the host. That night under the furs she made the lie true, and was his lover thereafter, and would tell him, often, that he knew nothing.
She climbed the cursed Wall in Styr the Magnar's raiding party of a hundred Thenns and made the descent without letting go of the rope, slept with Jon in a grotto inside the cave near Greyguard and told him the legend of Gendel and Gorne, and confessed there that Mance had never found the Horn of Joramun for all his digging. South of the Wall, at Queenscrown in a thunderstorm, Styr ordered Jon to cut an old man's throat and Jon would not; Ygritte cut it for him, and when Jon broke for the dark in the confusion of Summer's sudden appearance she put an arrow in his calf as he ran. He warned Castle Black before the raiders came, and during the assault on the gate she fell in the yard near the Lord Commander's Tower with a black brother's arrow in her. They carried her to him and she died smiling in his arms, telling him a last time that he knew nothing, Jon Snow; and after the battle Jon burned her body beyond the Wall, as her people would have wished.