Asha Greyjoy

Balon's daughter and true heir in all but law: a ship's captain with an axe in her belt and a crew that would follow her into the Drowned God's halls. The show renamed her Yara.

The fuller tale

Asha Greyjoy — Yara, if you met her on television — grew up on Pyke as the child who stayed, and made staying into a career her father could not ignore. With her brothers dead in the rebellion and Theon hostage in the North’s keeping, Balon raised his daughter to the work sons do: ships, salt, steel. By the time the story reaches the islands she captains the Black Wind, dresses as she pleases, carries an axe at one hip and dirks at the other — her husband and her suckling babes, she calls them, to the horror of properly married ladies — and commands the loyalty of crews who would follow her over the world’s edge because she has never once given them a stupid order.

Her introduction in the books is one of the saga’s great cold-blooded jokes. Theon, homeward bound and full of himself, meets a shipwright’s pretty wife called Esgred on the Lordsport road and spends the ride to Pyke flirting outrageously and boasting of his prospects — only to watch “Esgred” stroll into their father’s hall and take her seat as his sister. She let him talk. She always lets people talk; it is the cheapest intelligence-gathering there is, and Asha has never paid the gold price for anything she could have free.

In her father’s war she is the competence the strategy doesn’t deserve. She takes Deepwood Motte and — unlike her brother at Winterfell — holds it, garrisons it, and grasps the truth she later carries to the kingsmoot: the ironborn can raid the North forever and rule it never. Her claim at the moot beneath Nagga’s ribs is built on exactly that heresy — peace, trade, land the ironborn can actually keep — and the captains cheer her nerve, laugh at her sense, and crown her uncle Euron’s promises of dragons instead. Wit, in her experience, loses to spectacle roughly always.

Euron’s crown makes the islands unsafe for her, a point he makes with characteristic humor by marrying her off in absentia to a fat ancient of a lord, with a seal standing proxy at the wedding. Asha declines to be a prize — she slips home to Deepwood Motte and her diminished crews, and is holding it still when Stannis Baratheon comes down out of the hills with his clansmen and takes the wood, her men, and her. The march on Winterfell that follows is told partly through her eyes: the snows, the burnings, the king who will not turn back — and at its end, the reunion that breaks her harder than capture did, with the flinching, white-haired thing the Boltons made of her little brother.

As the published books leave her, she is Stannis’s prisoner and something closer to his counselor, camped in the snow before Winterfell with Theon beside her and the battle unfought. Her meaning in the saga has held steady from her first chapter: Asha is the argument the Iron Islands keep refusing to hear — that the Old Way is a suicide pact with better songs — and the tale’s driest demonstration that being right is not a power. The show sailed her under the name Yara into alliances and rescues the books never staged; the books keep Asha where Martin seems to want her, in the cold, clear-eyed, still alive, still outvoted.

The page and the screen

Asha’s book road and Yara’s show road part ways almost completely after the kingsmoot. The books send her not to Daenerys but into Stannis Baratheon’s hands at Deepwood Motte, then on the death-march toward Winterfell as prisoner and point-of-view — snowbound chapters the show never adapted, including her forced proxy marriage and her reunion with the ruin of Theon in the enemy camp. The show’s counterpart storylines — the Targaryen pact, Euron’s prow, the brother’s rescue — have no book equivalent at all. She is also, in the books, half a Harlaw: her mother’s kin at Ten Towers, above all her uncle Rodrik the Reader and his famous library, give her a hinterland of allies and irony the screen never had time to visit.

Mentioned in the chronicle

• At Deepwood Motte the kraken's daughter reads letters from a broken home — then Stannis's host comes out of the trees, and Asha Greyjoy is the king's prize. (ADWD 27)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.