House Greyjoy
Ironborn lords of Pyke and the bleak Iron Islands, who follow the Drowned God and the Old Way of reaving. A golden kraken on black — and in Dalton Greyjoy, the Red Kraken, a lord who reads a realm at war as an open invitation to take the iron price along every undefended coast.
The fuller tale
The Iron Islands keep their own counsel through most quarrels that do not touch salt water, and the ironborn’s relationship to the Dance is characteristically transactional: We Do Not Sow means, among other things, that Pyke has no intention of planting itself firmly in either camp until it is clear which crown is worth the planting.
Lord Dalton Greyjoy is courted by both sides for the same reason — a fleet that could contest the Velaryon navy’s command of the western waters is worth more to whichever crown secures it than almost any land army on offer. The Greens move first, dangling the mastership of ships and the admiralty itself if Dalton will bring the Iron Fleet around to fight Corlys Velaryon directly. Dalton, characteristically, waits to hear the other offer before answering either.
It is Daemon Targaryen, reading the Red Kraken’s temperament better than the green council manages to, who suggests the winning approach is not an office but an appetite — appeal to what Dalton actually wants, which is plunder rather than rank, and the Blacks close the deal. Rather than risk his ships in a fleet action against Velaryon’s navy, Dalton turns the Iron Fleet loose on an undefended coast instead, at exactly the moment Jason Lannister’s death leaves the Westerlands without a lord capable of answering him.
The raids that follow — Lannisport sacked, gold and captives both taken, a rich coastline picked clean while its garrison is still arguing over who commands it — serve no grand strategy beyond Pyke’s own enrichment, and that is rather the point. The Iron Islands emerge from a mainland civil war richer, unsieged, and entirely unbothered by which crown eventually wins it, the purest demonstration in the whole Dance of an old ironborn instinct: why sow a crop you can simply take from someone else’s harvest.
The page and the screen
The negotiation between Dalton Greyjoy and both crowns is largely a matter of chronicle summary in Fire & Blood — offers made and weighed off the page, reported after the fact rather than dramatized as they happen. The show has more room to let Dalton’s calculating, opportunistic character play out in scene rather than in retrospect, giving him a more immediate, personality-driven presence than the source material, which mostly tracks him through the consequences of his choices rather than the choices themselves.