Asha Greyjoy

Asha is born at Pyke, the only daughter of Lord Balon Greyjoy and Lady Alannys Harlaw. Her older brothers, Rodrik and Maron, die fighting in their father's war against the Iron Throne, and young Theon is sent off to Winterfell as Eddard Stark's ward and hostage. Of Balon's four children, she is the one who stays in the castle.

As a girl she isn't much to look at — bony knees, a face covered in pimples. Her uncle Victarion still remembers her swimming naked in the sea, dragging a rag doll along. With her brothers dead or gone, Balon starts treating her as the heir he no longer has, and Alannys raises her to fear no one.

After Theon leaves, Alannys takes in five other children at Pyke. One of them, Tristifer Botley, is closest to Asha in age, and the two experiment together during puberty, though his feelings run deeper than hers. Maester Qalen catches them, and Tris is sent away to Blacktyde.

In time Asha grows into a striking, headstrong young woman, and her father ends up raising her as his heir. Even so, she prefers Ten Towers, her uncle Rodrik Harlaw's seat, to Pyke. At sixteen she loses her virginity to a Lysene sailor.

Around 293 or 294 AC she sails the Black Wind on a trading run that takes her to Lannisport and the Reach. There she gives peaches to one of her lovers, Qarl the Maid.

In 297 AC Asha is fighting Lysene pirates in the Stepstones when, back on the Islands, her father exiles her uncle Euron Crow's Eye for getting Victarion's third wife with child.

When Theon comes back to the Islands, word is that Asha is on Great Wyk running an errand for their father. In fact she is posing as Esgred, wife to a young carpenter named Sigrin, and flirts with her own brother without him recognizing her. Theon's arrogance amuses her; finding out who she really is, and what she now stands to inherit, feels to him like a betrayal.

At the feast that night, Asha sits in the place of honor beside Balon, and Theon feels doubly deceived. When he confronts her about the lies, she answers by showing him an axe — her husband — and a dagger she'd kept between her breasts — her child.

In her father's invasion of the North, Asha commands thirty longships and takes Deepwood Motte. She visits Theon after he seizes Winterfell but refuses to stay and help hold it, too far inland for her liking. The ten men she leaves behind eventually abandon him before Winterfell falls.

After Balon's death, Asha returns to the Islands and claims the Seastone Chair, arguing that as the dead king's daughter the throne is hers by right. At Ten Towers she tells her uncle Rodrik Harlaw that she searched for Theon among the bodies at Winterfell without being able to identify him. Most of her backing comes from her mother's people, House Harlaw.

Rodrik offers to name her his heir at Ten Towers, though not head of the house; she turns him down. On Old Wyk she finds she has less support than she'd counted on, and offers her uncle Victarion, Lord Captain of the Iron Fleet, a shared rule if he'll make her his Hand. He refuses — no King of the Isles has ever had a Hand, let alone a woman — and rejects her plan to end the war besides.

At the kingsmoot her uncle Aeron Damphair calls, Asha puts herself forward fifth, with Qarl the Maid, Tristifer Botley, and Ser Harras Harlaw as her champions. She offers the ironborn the spoils her father's war actually won them — pebbles from the Stony Shore, pinecones from Deepwood Motte, turnips from Winterfell — and proposes giving up the northern invasion to settle the coastal lands already held. She wins plenty of support, but Victarion holds an equally solid block, and the two camps are on the edge of fighting when a dragon horn sounds low across the beach, silencing everyone. Soon after, Asha leaves without a clear plan.

Back at Deepwood Motte after the kingsmoot, Asha learns her uncle Euron has married her by proxy to Erik Ironmaker. She curses the move, though she admires the cunning of it — it stops her from offering her hand to some other lord in exchange for support.

At Deepwood Motte the ironborn dwindle and start to starve. When King Stannis attacks, the survivors are captured trying to reach their ships, Asha among them. She becomes part of the column Stannis marches toward Winterfell.

A snowstorm halts the march three days short of the castle, supplies running out, and talk starts among Stannis's men of sacrificing her to R'hllor to end the snow. Frozen and starving, they're found by Tycho Nestoris of the Iron Bank of Braavos, traveling with Theon, who has escaped Winterfell. In that reunion the siblings' roles are reversed: Theon recognizes her, but she doesn't recognize him.