Yara Greyjoy

Balon's daughter (Asha in the books), a hard-handed reaver and ship's captain who commands ironborn as easily as her father ever did — and everything her brother wishes he could be.

The fuller tale

The first time the story shows us Yara Greyjoy, she is a stranger at the Lordsport docks offering a cocky young lordling a ride to the castle — and letting Theon fumble at her the whole way up, saying nothing, because the joke is better the longer it runs. In Balon’s hall the punchline lands: the woman he pawed is his own sister, and while he was learning table manners at Winterfell she was learning to captain ships, command reavers and hold their father’s attention. One scene, and the show has drawn the whole family: the heir who left, the daughter who stayed, and the old man who long ago decided which of them counted.

She is everything the ironborn say they respect, inconveniently packaged. When Balon strikes at the North it is Yara who gets the real command — thirty longships against Deepwood Motte, taken clean — while her brother is thrown a fishing village and a sneer. She leads from the deck, keeps her crews by competence rather than blood-right, and delivers the tale’s hardest-headed loyalty: she sails to the Dreadfort with fifty of her best to pull Theon out of Ramsay’s kennels, and when the wreckage that answers to the name Reek refuses to leave, she looks at it and tells her men her brother is dead. It is cruel, accurate for the moment, and exactly what a captain says to stop good men dying for a ghost.

Her father’s death puts the driftwood crown within reach, and at the kingsmoot she claims it — the first woman ever to stand for it, with Theon, restored to something like himself, standing witness for her instead of for his own claim. Their uncle Euron takes the crown anyway, with bluster and a confessed murder, and Yara does the arithmetic of surviving him in about a minute: she and Theon steal the best ships of the Iron Fleet that same night and sail for the one power in the world that might outbid a madman.

The alliance she strikes with Daenerys Targaryen is a small landmark in the tale — two women, both bypassed heirs of violent houses, dealing fleet-for-crown across a map table without a marriage in sight. Yara’s price for the Iron Islands’ independence is steep in the other direction: the reaving stops, the Old Way dies, her people become sailors instead of thieves. She pays for the pact quickly — Euron falls on her fleet in the night, kills her allies, and drags her to King’s Landing lashed to his prow — and endures her uncle’s captivity until the brother she once wrote off as dead boards a ship under fire and cuts her loose. The nod she gives Theon afterward carries more weight than most of the story’s speeches.

She spends the last war retaking the Iron Islands in Daenerys’s name, holding them ready as a refuge that is never needed, and comes to the Dragonpit council still loyal to her dead queen — pointedly unenthusiastic about pardoning the men who killed her. She leaves as she began: ruling Pyke, the first woman to hold it in her own right, her family reduced to a name she carries alone. The books tell her story under another name, Asha, and give it different roads — but on either page she is the answer to the Greyjoy question nobody at the kingsmoot wanted to hear: the best man for the driftwood crown was never a man.

The page and the screen

The rename is the famous difference — Asha of the books became Yara on screen, reportedly to keep casual viewers from tangling her with the wildling Osha — but the divergence runs deeper than a syllable. Book-Asha never allies with Daenerys, never falls into Euron’s hands, and never sails a rescue to the Dreadfort; her war takes her from a failed kingsmoot bid to capture by Stannis Baratheon in the northern snows, a storyline the show never touches. The show’s Yara gets the fleets, the pacts and the endgame; her book counterpart gets the interiority — and readers wanting the fuller portrait should read her under her own entry, and her own name.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In The Night Lands — Commands thirty ships; her brother commanded a horse here.

Season Four. In The Laws of Gods and Men — Came for a brother; left without one. "My brother is dead."

Season Six. In The Door — Lost a crown by a shout; stole a fleet by dawn. In Battle of the Bastards — Two queens shake on a new world.

In the books

A Clash of Kings. In Wolves and Krakens — Asha in the books — introduces herself unforgettably on the road to Pyke.

A Feast for Crows. In The Kingsmoot — Asha loses the moot and sails before her uncle thinks of marriage.

Where they stand, season by season

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.