Balon Greyjoy

Balon was born the eldest of the children Lord Quellon Greyjoy had with his second wife, Lady Sunderly; his father was already raising three children from an earlier marriage. The sea shaped him before any maester could: he scaled the Flint Cliffs at ten, handled an oar like a veteran by thirteen, and by fifteen had already killed his first man and taken his first two salt wives sailing alongside Dagmer Cleftjaw. By seventeen he commanded his own longship.

Balon, Euron and Victarion talked their father into throwing Pyke's ships behind Robert Baratheon's cause against the Targaryens, and the islands struck at the Reach as the war drew to a close. Quellon fell at the Battle of the Mander, and Balon returned to Pyke as the new head of the house.

Back home he learned that his youngest brother, Urrigon, had died of gangrene after a wound taken practicing the dance of the finger; the maester who tried to save the boy's hand failed, and Balon had the same treatment that killed his brother turned on the maester himself. The man died of fever soon after. Around this time Balon married Alannys Harlaw, who would bear him four children — Rodrik, Maron, Theon and Asha — though the marriage cooled over the years.

The ironborn had once ruled much of Westeros's western coast, proud that they paid for nothing they could take by force — they called it paying the iron price. Aegon Targaryen's conquest stripped that independence away, and Balon, now lord of the isles, believed the time had come to take it back.

In 289 AC, with the realm still settling after the fall of the Targaryens, Balon declared himself free of the Iron Throne and sent his fleet against Lannisport. The opening strike landed, but Robert Baratheon's answer came fast and hard: his eldest son Rodrik died with much of the fleet, and Maron fell defending Pyke. Balon bent the knee.

As surety for his loyalty, Eddard Stark took Theon, the only son Balon had left, to be raised as a ward at Winterfell.

In 297 AC a scandal broke within the family itself: Euron seduced Victarion's wife. To keep the blood from spilling between brothers, Euron was banished from the isles on pain of death should he return. Victarion, to settle his own honor, killed his wife with his own hands.

Balon never truly accepted the defeat of 289, and the War of the Five Kings gave him a second chance at a crown. When Robb Stark, already proclaimed King in the North, sent Theon to Pyke to offer an alliance against the Lannisters, Balon turned it down flat, asking his own son — dressed in Winterfell's silks — whether Eddard Stark had made him his own sweet daughter.

"I am the Greyjoy, Lord Reaper of Pyke, King of Salt and Rock, Son of the Sea Wind, and no man gives me a crown. I pay the iron price. I shall take my crown, as Urron Redhand did five thousand years ago," he declared, before turning his ships on the North while most of Robb's strength was far south, still fighting.

His forces seized Moat Cailin and burned camps along the way; Asha, Theon and Dagmer Cleftjaw carried the war to the Stony Shore, taking Deepwood Motte, Torrhen's Square, and finally Winterfell itself.

Now styled Ninth of his Name since the Grey King — King of the Iron Islands and the North, King of Salt and Rock, Son of the Sea Wind, Lord Reaper of Pyke — Balon died in 299 AC from a fall while crossing a bridge in Pyke during a storm.

The death came so suddenly that suspicion followed close behind it: that it had been no accident, and that the hand behind it belonged to his brother Euron.

With no clear heir, three names contended for the succession: Asha, his only daughter; Victarion, captain of the iron fleet; and the exiled Euron, whose return broke the oath that had kept him from the isles. Theon, held prisoner by House Bolton at the Dreadfort, was in no position to press any claim of his own.

Aeron, another of Balon's brothers, called a kingsmoot to decide who would take Pyke's crown. Euron won it by promising the ironborn something no other claimant could: the conquest of all Westeros with the power of dragons.