As the centuries went on, the Ironborn gave in to the inheritance that Urron Redhand insisted be the new tradition. For thousands of years the descendants of Urron Redhand ruled the Iron Islands as Kings, son after son became King. The Old Way once left the Ironborn, after Urron Redhand, the first King of the Iron Islands, turned the Isles into an inherited hereditary monarchy. The seas around the isles are stormy, frequently wreaking havoc with their considerable force. The Iron Islands are the smallest of the regions of the Westeros. They are made of small, barely-fertile rocks with few safe harbors. The islands are ruled from Pyke, the seat of House Greyjoy on the island of the same name. Some of the Iron Islands are used for sheep grazing or are uninhabited. Eight days sail northwest of Great Wyk is a smaller grouping of thirteen clustered around the Lonely Light. The main grouping of islands numbers thirty-one, with the seven major isles being Pyke, Great Wyk, Old Wyk, Harlaw, Saltcliffe, Blacktyde, and Orkmont. They are roughly west of the riverlands, northwest of the westerlands, and south of the north. The Iron Islands is an archipelago in Ironman's Bay, located in the Sunset Sea off the western coast of Westeros.

4.7 The War of the Trident (290AA - 292AA).

4.5 War of the Shield (236 AA - 243 AA).

4.4 The Second Ironborn Civil War (101AA - 102AA).

I remembered the salt iron taste in the air. I saw a colonel on horseback, stripped to his shirt and cantering through the gently rolling surf. I saw the seabirds, crow black against the sky. I saw the golden sunset, bloody out to the horizon. They used the wooden stumps of the breakers as our binding posts and tied me to a chair to keep me upright.

They took me to the beach at sunrise with the other deserters – men with staring eyes and fluttering limbs. They told me I kicked the body and made an obscene gesture. I remembered his mouth had filled up with blood as I stood over him it ran across his lip and hurried down his cheek, staining his collar. When it was done, they said I gazed at his body with indifference. When he realised the hour, he seemed surprised, but then he smiled a trifle foolishly and bent his head in acceptance. And once, he lifted his hand to me as though in greeting.

I remembered he had slipped into unconsciousness and appeared to dream a curious expression playing across his features. I remembered the ivy-covered walls – the leaves oddly mutilated, the stones chipped from countless bullets. I remember I placed a chalk mark over his heart. I remembered we carried him from the infirmary on a stretcher and tied him to a chair in the stonebreaker’s yard to keep him upright. I remembered condemned footfalls on the great Kilmainham staircase and the glimmer of candlelight on faces upturned to the cell doors. I remembered the cold and the dark and the salt iron taste of carbine smoke and blood. I remembered Kilmainham, one year earlier. They say a dog grown accustomed to licking the blood form the butcher’s shop floor will never be cured of the habit. They found me, hours later, curled inside a sewage pipe, the wound pussing through my clothes. I wandered helplessly across the broken field, my boots filling with blood. He covered this poor debris with a little straw and carried the hat piteously to the medical station. Danny picked up his hat and scraped the brains into it.

The captain had had his brains blown against the side of the trench. Something struck my legs and knocked me into welcome darkness. I did not hear the plummeting bomb, but I felt the displacement of the air. The captain was reading citations and pinning so many ribbons to Danny’s jacket it looked like his heart had burst. All day we were under heavy assault from the bellowing, belching railway guns at Ypres, artillery rounds screaming overhead.

Salt iron wars