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.
A soul of House Greyjoy, born at Pyke.
The fuller tale
Season Two
Sent by her father to take Deepwood Motte, and does it without ceremony, holding the castle while her younger brother goes chasing glory of his own choosing. She rides into Winterfell after Theon has already claimed it, sees exactly what it is — an empty seat, twenty men, and a Stark boy's castle held by a Greyjoy nobody sent there for that purpose — and offers to take her brother home rather than let him drown in it. He refuses her. She leaves him to it, and the choice will cost them both more than either expects.
Season Three
A box arrives at Pyke addressed to her father, containing proof of what has been done to her brother at the Dreadfort, and the message underneath it is plain: this is what becomes of Greyjoys who reach for more than the sea gives them. Balon receives it as confirmation of what he already suspected and writes Theon off as spent. Yara does not. She sits through her father's verdict without arguing him out of it in the hall, already working out, in private, what she is willing to spend to prove him wrong.
Season Four
In The Laws of Gods and Men — Came for a brother; left without one. "My brother is dead." Yara raids the Dreadfort for Theon and finds Reek in a kennel who won't come.
Where they stand. The Dreadfort and Pyke.
Season Six
Pyke buries a king it never mourned and calls a Kingsmoot to choose the next one, and Yara makes her case with the plainest platform in the hall — enough wars fought and lost on other men's ambitions, and a captain who can hold what the ironborn already have instead of drowning more of them chasing more. It loses to a bolder promise. Euron arrives mid-vote, announces he is the one who killed Balon, and offers the captains conquest instead of restraint; the salt-and-rock throne goes to him. Yara does not stay to contest it twice — she and Theon take the fastest ships in the fleet before Euron can stop them and sail for Meereen, where she offers Daenerys Targaryen ships and men in exchange for a crown that answers to no one but the Iron Islands itself.
Season Seven
Her fleet, carrying Ellaria Sand and Oberyn's daughters north to seal the Dornish alliance, sails into her uncle's ambush in open water, and the fight that follows is not close. Euron cuts down two of the Sand Snakes in the boarding, takes Ellaria and the third alive, and corners Yara herself; Theon, frozen by the same paralysis that has followed him since Winterfell, goes over the side instead of to her aid, and she is dragged off in chains while her own men watch him swim away.
Season Eight
Held on Euron's ships through the winter, and freed only when Theon finally does what he could not do at sea and comes back for her with a knife. She sends him south to die at Winterfell settling his own accounts and sails home to settle hers, retaking the Iron Islands in his place. She is at the council in the ruins of King's Landing when the realm's lords choose their next ruler, and leaves it with the one thing she came for: the Iron Islands, hers, answering to no crown but its own.
How it ends for them
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.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
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.