The Iron Islands were brought under Aegon Targaryen’s rule by submission, joining the realm south of the Wall apart from Dorne. Their later history in Fire & Blood shows the limits of that incorporation: royal policy sought to bind the islands to the wider realm through service and marriage, while ironborn leaders could still defy the Iron Throne, and disputes over the Seastone Chair could draw the islands into prolonged violence.

Incorporation into the Realm

After the submission of the Iron Islands, Aegon’s government worked to reconcile former enemies to Targaryen rule. Aegon encouraged the great houses to send younger children to court, where they could serve in the royal household and witness the king’s justice. His queens also arranged marriages intended to connect noble families across the realm. One such plan linked Tarth to the islands: when the Evenstar’s triplet daughters were born, Rhaenys arranged betrothals for them with Houses Corbray, Hightower, and Harlaw. The match with House Harlaw placed an island house within the broader network of royal alliances.

This policy treated marriage and court service as instruments of political cohesion, not simply as private arrangements. Yet the later history of the islands shows that inclusion did not erase local power or guarantee obedience. The Iron Throne’s authority could be acknowledged in principle and resisted in practice.

Dalton Greyjoy and Defiance of Royal Authority

During the early reign of Aegon III, Dalton Greyjoy continued raiding despite commands from the Iron Throne to stop and to return women taken during his campaigns. He also refused to restore Fair Isle to its former lords. His conduct made clear that the end of the Dance of the Dragons had not brought an end to conflict in the west: the ironborn had fought alongside the Blacks, but peace revealed that they were no more loyal to them than to the Greens.

Johanna Lannister tried to build a fleet to carry the war to the ironborn. Dalton attacked her shipyards and took more women, while the Hand’s reproach failed to change his course. His disregard for royal orders was bound up with his own power at sea: he paid little heed to edicts issued in the name of a boy king and a Lannister Hand, and continued to act as a ruler whose reach exceeded the obedience the Iron Throne could enforce.

Dalton’s Death and the Succession Struggle

Dalton’s rule ended at Faircastle on the eve of the battle for which he had assembled his fleet against Alyn Velaryon. Tess, one of Dalton’s salt wives, killed him with his own dagger while he slept, then threw herself into the sea. The accounts leave Tess’s life largely unknown; her name is the one certain detail about her beyond the circumstances of Dalton’s death. The episode overturned the expected course of the conflict: the Red Kraken was not defeated in battle, but killed within his own household.

His death quickly weakened the power he had built. As the news spread, captains abandoned the fleet and sailed home. Dalton had no rock wife, and his heirs were two young sons by salt wives, three sisters, and several ambitious cousins. Under the law of the islands, the Seastone Chair passed to his eldest salt son, Toron, who was not yet six. His mother could not act as regent in the way a rock wife might have done. The succession therefore lacked an uncontested adult guardian, and the captains understood that a struggle for power was likely.

Invasion and the Cost of Division

The succession conflict became a three-sided fight. Dalton’s sisters and their husbands seized Toron and put his mother to death. His cousins, joined by lords of Harlaw and Blacktyde, raised up his half-brother Rodrik. On Great Wyk, supporters backed Sam Salt, who claimed descent from the black line. By the time this struggle had continued for half a year, rival claims had left the islands vulnerable to intervention from outside.

Ser Leo Costayne arrived with a fleet and landed Lannister forces on Pyke, Great Wyk, and Harlaw. Alyn Velaryon had refused to take part in Johanna Lannister’s campaign of vengeance, but Costayne accepted her appeal and may have been influenced by her promise to marry him if he brought the Iron Islands under her son’s rule. He failed to achieve that objective: he died on Great Wyk, and three quarters of his fleet were seized or sunk.

The invasion nonetheless exacted a severe price. Lannister forces burned ships, homes, and villages, and killed members of the ironborn families involved in the conflict. Thousands more died from starvation after the attackers carried away stores of grain and salt fish or destroyed what they could not take. Toron remained on the Seastone Chair after the defenders repelled the assault on Pyke, but Rodrik was captured and taken to Casterly Rock, where Johanna had him gelded and made him her son’s fool.

A Contested Place in the Seven Kingdoms

The Iron Islands’ history in these episodes is shaped by the gap between nominal submission and effective control. Royal marriages and participation in the court offered ways to bind the islands to the realm, but Dalton’s raids demonstrated how far an ironborn lord could act beyond the Crown’s commands. After his death, the island succession system offered a formal heir but no stable regency, and rival claimants turned the islands’ internal divisions into an opening for Lannister intervention. The outcome left Toron in possession of the chair, but at the cost of devastation and continuing vulnerability to the ambitions of mainland lords.