A Feast for Crows — Aeron I

The Damphair rises from the sea with hard news: Balon Greyjoy is dead and the Crow's Eye sits his chair; Aeron calls a kingsmoot to drown Euron's claim.

The chapter retold

Aeron Greyjoy, once the least devout of Balon's brothers, has become the Damphair — a priest of the Drowned God who drowns his converts half to death and calls it baptism. He surfaces from his wandering ministry to hard news: his brother Balon is dead, blown from a rope bridge in a storm at Pyke, and the succession is a vacuum the ambitious will race to fill. Aeron distrusts every candidate on offer, especially the brother he has not seen in years, and falls back on the oldest law the ironborn have — not inheritance but the kingsmoot, an ancient assembly of captains and ship's crews who will shout a king into being on Old Wyk, the way it was done before the Iron Islands ever bent the knee to a mainland crown.

The chapter reintroduces the ironborn as a culture unto themselves — reaving, drowning, praying to a god who demands salt water instead of sanctuary — and sets up the book's second major plot engine alongside King's Landing's court politics. Balon's death (confirmed here, having happened just off-page) leaves three legitimate claimants circling: Aeron's zealotry rules him out as a candidate but not as a kingmaker, and his summons for a kingsmoot is the ironborn's answer to a succession crisis that the rest of Westeros would have settled with a simple, bloody line of inheritance.

This movement: The Crows Gather

• The war winds down and the scavengers move in: the riverlands starve, the Faith arms, the Citadel schemes.
• Cersei rules for Tommen and stuffs the council with flatterers; Jaime refuses to be one of them.
• In the Iron Islands, Balon's death calls a kingsmoot — Aeron Damphair means to drown the succession in salt.
• Brienne rides out with Oathkeeper hunting a girl of three-and-ten with auburn hair.

The fallen — spoilers

• Balon Greyjoy — Blown from a storm-swayed bridge into the sea he worshipped — the day before his brother's sail returned.