Ryger Rivers

"I need lessons in courtesy from you, bastard? Your mother would still be a milkmaid if I hadn't squirted you into her belly!"

- Walder Frey to his bastard son

Ryger Rivers is a minor character in the first season. He is played by guest star Bryan McCaugherty and only appears in "Baelor." Ryger Rivers is a bastard son of Lord Walder Frey, the head of House Frey and Lord of the Crossing.

Season 1
Ryger is present when Catelyn Stark visits Lord Walder Frey to negotiate passage for her son's army across the trident. Like his trueborn half-brother, Stevron Frey, Ryger admonishes his father to remember his courtesies. Lord Frey dismisses his son and reminds him that he's a bastard born of a milkmaid.

In the books
In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Ser Walder Rivers is the eldest and most prominent of Lord Walder Frey's bastard offspring. He is a gruff, dour man with grey hair. Though not a trueborn Frey, he is often put in positions of responsibility for the house due to his strong reputation as a warrior. His personal coat of arms follows the tradition of heraldry for bastards by reversing the colors of his noble parent's House: a silver-grey castle on blue beneath a red bend sinister. The TV series changed the House Frey sigil: in the books, it is the two towers and bridge of the Twins colored blue, on a silver-grey background. The TV series made the towers white, and over the same grey field, but now above a blue escutcheon which is drawn to resemble the waves of the Green Fork of the Trident River. The color change may be because after the blue river was added as an escutcheon at the bottom, it would have been visually confusing to have the castle be the same color as the water. Unfortunately this makes the Frey sigil in the TV series resemble the reversed color-scheme used by bastards in the books. If the TV series were to follow the same scheme of reversing the established color-scheme of a sigil for bastards, Walder Rivers' sigil would be a blue castle on a silver-grey background.

However, the lines spoken in the Season 1 episode this character appears in fit part of the dialogue spoken in A Game of Thrones by another of Lord Frey's baseborn children, Ryger Rivers, who is described as being young and whose mother milked goats.

During the Red Wedding, Walder Rivers commanded the assault on the Stark soldiers' camps outside of the Twins.