Fire and Blood

Then up spoke Septon Mattheus, his voice thunderous as he berated the king and queen and prophesized that this abomination would once more plunge all of Westeros into war. “They shall curse your incest from the Dornish Marches to the Wall, and every pious son of the Mother and the Father shall denounce you as the sinners you are.” The septon’s face grew red and swollen as he raved, Benifer tells us, and spittle sprayed from his lips.

Jaehaerys the Conciliator is rightly honored in the annals of the Seven Kingdoms for his calm demeanor and even temper, but let no man think that the fire of the Targaryens did not burn in his veins. He showed it then. When Septon Mattheus finally paused for a breath, the king said, “I will accept chastisement from Her Grace my mother, but not from you. Hold your tongue, fat man. If another word passes your lips, I will have them sewn shut.”

Septon Mattheus spoke no more.

Lord Rogar was not so easily cowed. Blunt and to the point, he asked only if the marriage had been consummated. “Tell me true, Your Grace. Was there a bedding? Did you claim her maidenhead?”

“No,” the king replied. “She is too young.”

At that Lord Rogar smiled. “Good. You are not wed.” He turned to the knights who had accompanied him from King’s Landing. “Separate these children, gently if you please. Escort the princess to Sea Dragon Tower and keep her there. His Grace shall accompany us back to the Red Keep.”

But as his men moved forward, the seven knights of Jaehaerys’s Kingsguard stepped up and drew their swords. “Come no closer,” warned Ser Gyles Morrigen. “Any man who lays a hand upon our king and queen shall die today.”

Lord Rogar was dismayed. “Sheath your steel and move aside,” he commanded. “Have you forgotten? I am the King’s Hand.”

“Aye,” old Sour Sam answered, “but we’re the Kingsguard, not the Hand’s guard, and it’s the lad who sits the chair, not you.”

Rogar Baratheon bristled at Ser Samgood’s words, and answered, “You are seven. I have half a hundred swords behind me. A word from me and they will cut you to pieces.”

“They might kill us,” replied young Pate the Woodcock, brandishing his spear, “but you will be the first to die, m’lord, you have my word upon that.”

What might have happened next no man can say, had not Queen Alyssa chosen that moment to speak. “I have seen enough death,” she said. “So have we all. Put up your swords, sers. What is done is done, and now we all must needs live with it. May the gods have mercy on the realm.” She turned to her children. “We shall go in peace. Let no man speak of what happened here today.”

“As you command, Mother.” King Jaehaerys pulled his sister closer and put his arm around her. “But do not think that you shall unmake this marriage. We are one now, and neither gods nor men shall part us.”

“Never,” his bride affirmed. “Send me to the ends of the earth and wed me to the King of Mossovy or the Lord of the Grey Waste, Silverwing will always bring me back to Jaehaerys.” And with that she raised herself onto her toes and lifted her face to the king, and he kissed her full upon the lips whilst all looked on.[1 - Or so the confrontation at the gates of Dragonstone was set down by Grand Maester Benifer, who was there to witness it. From that day to this, the tale has been a favorite of lovesick maidens and their squires throughout the Seven Kingdoms, and many a bard has sung of the valor of the Kingsguard, seven men in white cloaks who faced down half a hundred. All of these tellings overlook the presence of the castle garrison, however; such records as have come down to us indicate that twenty archers and as many guardsmen were stationed on Dragonstone at this time, under the command of Ser Merrell Bullock and his sons Alyn and Howard. Where their loyalties lay at this time and what part they might have played in any conflict shall never be known, but to suggest the king’s Seven stood alone mayhaps presumes too much.]

When the Hand and the Queen Regent had made their departure, the king and his young bride closed the castle gates and returned to their chambers. Dragonstone would remain their refuge and their residence for the remainder of Jaehaerys’s minority. It is written that the young king and queen were seldom apart during that time, sharing every meal, talking late into the night of the green days of their childhood and the challenges ahead, fishing and hawking together, mingling with the island’s smallfolk in dockside inns, reading to one another from dusty leatherbound tomes they found in the castle library, taking lessons together from Dragonstone’s maesters (“for we still have much to learn,” Alysanne is said to have reminded her husband), praying beside Septon Oswyck. They flew together as well, all around the Dragonmont and oft as far as Driftmark.

If servants’ tales may be believed, the king and his new queen slept naked and shared many long and lingering kisses, abed and at table and at many other times throughout the day, yet never consummated their union. Another year and a half would pass before Jaehaerys and Alysanne would finally join as man and woman.

Whenever lords and council members traveled to Dragonstone to consult with the young king, as they did from time to time, Jaehaerys received them in the Chamber of the Painted Table where his grandsire had once planned his conquest of Westeros, with Alysanne ever by his side. “Aegon had no secrets from Rhaenys and Visenya, and I have none from Alysanne,” he said.

Though it might well have been that there were no secrets between them during these bright days in the morning of the marriage, their union itself remained a secret to most of Westeros. Upon their return to King’s Landing, Lord Rogar instructed all those who had accompanied them to Dragonstone to speak no word of what had transpired there, if they wished to keep their tongues. Nor was any announcement made to the realm at large. When Septon Mattheus attempted to send word of the match to the High Septon and Most Devout in Oldtown, Grand Maester Benifer burned his letter rather than dispatch a raven, on orders from the Hand.

The Lord of Storm’s End wanted time. Angry at the disrespect he felt the king had shown him and unaccustomed to defeat, Rogar Baratheon remained determined to find a way to part Jaehaerys and Alysanne. So long as their marriage remained unconsummated, he believed, a chance remained. Best then to keep the wedding secret, so it might be undone without anyone being the wiser.

Queen Alyssa wanted time as well, though for a different reason. What is done is done, she had said at the gates of Dragonstone, and so she believed … but memories of the bloodshed and chaos that had greeted the marriage of her other son and daughter still haunted her nights, and the Queen Regent was desperate to find some way to ascertain that history would not be repeated.

Meanwhile, she and her lord husband still had a realm to rule for the best part of a year, until Jaehaerys attained his sixteenth nameday and took the power into his own hands.

And so matters stood in Westeros as the Year of the Three Brides drew to an end, and gave way to a new year, the 50th since Aegon’s Conquest.

A Surfeit of Rulers

All men are sinners, the Fathers of the Faith teach us. Even the noblest of kings and the most chivalrous of knights may find themselves overcome by rage and lust and envy, and commit acts that shame them and tarnish their good names. And the vilest of men and the wickedest of women likewise may do good from time to time, for love and compassion and pity may be found in even the blackest of hearts. “We are as the gods made us,” wrote Septon Barth, the wisest man ever to serve as the Hand of the King, “strong and weak, good and bad, cruel and kind, heroic and selfish. Know that if you would rule over the kingdoms of men.”

Seldom was the truth of his words seen as clearly as during the 50th year after Aegon’s Conquest. As the new year dawned, all across the realm plans were being made to mark a half century of Targaryen rule over Westeros with feasts, fairs, and tourneys. The horrors of King Maegor’s rule were receding into the past, the Iron Throne and the Faith were reconciled, and the young King Jaehaerys I was the darling of smallfolk and great lords alike from Oldtown to the Wall. Yet unbeknownst to all but a few, storm clouds were gathering on the horizon, and faintly in the distance wise men could hear a rumble of thunder.

A realm with two kings is like a man with two heads, the smallfolk are wont to say. In 50 AC, the realm of Westeros found itself blessed with one king, a Hand, and three queens, as in King Maegor’s day … but whereas Maegor’s queens had been consorts, subservient to his will, living and dying at his whim, each of the queens of the half-century was a power in her own right.

In the Red Keep of King’s Landing sat the Queen Regent Alyssa, widow of the late King Aenys, mother to his son Jaehaerys, and wife to the King’s Hand, Rogar Baratheon. Just across Blackwater Bay on Dragonstone, a younger queen had arisen when Alyssa’s daughter Alysanne, a maid of thirteen years, had pledged her troth to her brother King Jaehaerys, against the wishes of her mother and her mother’s lord husband. And far to the west on Fair Isle, with the whole width of Westeros separating her from both mother and sister, was Alyssa’s eldest daughter, the dragonrider Rhaena Targaryen, widow of Prince Aegon the Uncrowned. In the westerlands, riverlands, and parts of the Reach, men were already calling her the Queen in the West.

Two sisters and a mother, the three queens were bound by blood and grief and suffering … and yet between them lay shadows old and new, growing darker by the day. The amity and unity of purpose that had enabled Jaehaerys, his sisters, and their mother to topple Maegor the Cruel had begun to fray, as long-simmering resentments and divisions made themselves felt. For the remainder of the regency the boy king and his little queen would find themselves deeply at odds with the King’s Hand and the Queen Regent, in a rivalry that would continue into Jaehaerys’s own reign and threaten to plunge the Seven Kingdoms back into war.[2 - It should be noted, lest we be charged with omission, that there was a fourth queen in Westeros in 50 AC. The twice-widowed Queen Elinor of House Costayne, who had found King Maegor dead upon the Iron Throne, had departed King’s Landing after Jaehaerys’s ascent. Dressed in the robes of a penitent and accompanied only by a handmaid and one leal man-at-arms, she made her way to the Eyrie in the Vale of Arryn to visit the eldest of her three sons by Ser Theo Bolling, and thence to Highgarden in the Reach, where her second son had been fostered to Lord Tyrell. Once satisfied of their well-being, the former queen reclaimed her youngest boy and repaired to her father’s seat at Three Towers in the Reach, where she declared she would live quietly for the remainder of her life. Fate, and King Jaehaerys, had other plans for her, as we shall relate later. Suffice it to say that Queen Elinor played no role in the events of 50 AC.]

The immediate cause of the tension was the king’s sudden and secret marriage to his sister, which had taken the Hand and the Queen Regent unawares and thrown their own plans and schemes into disarray. It would be a mistake to believe that was the sole cause of the estrangement, however; the other weddings that had made 49 AC the Year of the Three Brides had also left scars.

Lord Rogar had never asked Jaehaerys for leave to wed his mother, an omission the boy king took for a sign of disrespect. Moreover, His Grace did not approve of the match; as he would later confess to Septon Barth, he valued Lord Rogar as a counselor and friend, but he did not need a second father, and thought his own judgment, temperament, and intelligence to be superior to his Hand’s. Jaehaerys also felt he should have been consulted about his sister Rhaena’s marriage, though he felt that slight less keenly. Queen Alyssa, for her part, was deeply hurt that she had neither been advised of nor invited to Rhaena’s wedding on Fair Isle.

Away in the west, Rhaena Targaryen nursed her own grievances. As she confided to the old friends and favorites she had gathered around her, Queen Rhaena neither understood nor shared her mother’s affection for Rogar Baratheon. Though she honored him grudgingly for rising in support of her brother Jaehaerys against their uncle Maegor, his inaction when her own husband, Prince Aegon, faced Maegor in the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye was something she could neither forget nor forgive. Also, with the passage of time Queen Rhaena grew ever more resentful that her own claim to the Iron Throne, and that of her daughters, had been disregarded in favor of that of “my baby brother” (as she was wont to call Jaehaerys). She was the firstborn, she reminded those who would listen, and had been a dragonrider before any of her siblings, yet all of them and “even my own mother” had conspired to pass her over.

Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to say that Jaehaerys and Alysanne had the right of it in the conflicts that arose during the last year of their mother’s regency, and to cast Queen Alyssa and Lord Rogar as villains. That is how the singers tell the tale, certainly; the swift and sudden marriage of Jaehaerys and Alysanne was a romance unequaled since the days of Florian the Fool and his Jonquil, to hear them sing of it. And in songs, as ever, love conquers all. The truth, we submit, is a deal less simple. Queen Alyssa’s misgivings about the match grew out of genuine concern for her children, the Targaryen dynasty, and the realm as a whole. Nor were her fears without foundation.

Lord Rogar Baratheon’s motives were less selfless. A proud man, he had been stunned and angered by the “ingratitude” of the boy king he had regarded as a son, and humiliated when forced to back down at the gates of Dragonstone before half a hundred of his men. A warrior to the bone, Rogar had once dreamed of facing Maegor the Cruel in single combat, and could not stomach being shamed by a lad of fifteen years. Lest we think too harshly of him, however, we would do well to remember Septon Barth’s words. Though he would do some cruel, foolish, and evil things during his last year as Hand, he was not a cruel or evil man at heart, nor even a fool; he had been a hero once, and we must remember that even as we look at the darkest year of his life.

In the immediate aftermath of his confrontation with Jaehaerys, Lord Rogar could think of little else but the humiliation he had suffered. His lordship’s first impulse was to return to Dragonstone with more men, enough to overwhelm the castle garrison and resolve the situation by force. As for the Kingsguard, Lord Rogar reminded the council that the White Swords had sworn to lay down their lives for the king and “I shall be pleased to give them that honor.” When Lord Tully pointed out that Jaehaerys could simply close the gates of Dragonstone against them, Lord Rogar was undeterred. “Let him. I can take the castle by storm if need be.” In the end only Queen Alyssa could reach his lordship through his wroth and dissuade him from this folly. “My love,” she said softly, “my children ride dragons, and we do not.”

The Queen Regent, no less than her husband, wished to have the king’s rash marriage undone, for she was convinced that word of it would once again set the Faith against the Crown. Her fears were fanned by Septon Mattheus; once away from Jaehaerys, and secure in the knowledge that his lips would not be sewn shut, the septon found his tongue again, and spoke of little else but how “all decent folk” would condemn the king’s incestuous union.

Had Jaehaerys and Alysanne returned to King’s Landing in time to celebrate the new year, as Queen Alyssa prayed (“They will come to their senses and repent this folly,” she told the council), reconciliation might have been possible, but that did not happen. When a fortnight came and went and then another, and still the king did not reappear at court, Alyssa announced her intention to return to Dragonstone, this time alone, to beg her children to come home. Lord Rogar angrily forbade it. “If you go crawling back to him, the boy will never listen to you again,” he said. “He has put his own desires ahead of the good of the realm, and that cannot be allowed. Do you want him to end as his father did?” And so the queen bent to his will and did not go.

“That Queen Alyssa wished to do the right thing, no man should doubt,” Septon Barth wrote years later. “Sad to say, however, she oft seemed at a loss as to what that thing might be. She desired above all to be loved, admired, and praised, a yearning she shared with King Aenys, her first husband. A ruler must sometimes do things that are necessary but unpopular, however, though he knows that opprobrium and censure must surely follow. These things Queen Alyssa could seldom bring herself to do.”

Days passed and turned to weeks and thence to fortnights, whilst hearts hardened and men grew more resolute on both sides of Blackwater Bay. The boy king and his little queen remained on Dragonstone, awaiting the day when Jaehaerys would take the rule of the Seven Kingdoms in his own hands. Queen Alyssa and Lord Rogar continued to hold the reins of power in King’s Landing, searching for a way to undo the king’s marriage and avert the calamity they were certain was to come. Aside from the council, they told no one of what had transpired on Dragonstone, and Lord Rogar commanded the men who had accompanied them to speak no word of what they had seen, at the penalty of losing their tongues. Once the marriage had been annulled, his lordship reasoned, it would be as if it had never happened so far as most of Westeros was concerned … so long as it remained secret. Until the union was consummated, it could still easily be set aside.

This would prove to be a vain hope, as we know now, but to Rogar Baratheon in 50 AC it seemed possible. For a time he must surely have drawn encouragement from the king’s own silence. Jaehaerys had moved swiftly to marry Alysanne, but having done the deed he seemed in no great haste to announce it. He certainly had the means to do so, had he so desired. Maester Culiper, still spry at eighty, had been serving since Queen Visenya’s day, and was ably assisted by two younger maesters. Dragonstone had a full complement of ravens. At a word from Jaehaerys, his marriage could have been proclaimed from one end of the realm to the other. He did not speak that word.

Scholars have debated ever since as to the reasons for his silence. Was he repenting a match made in haste, as Queen Alyssa would have wished? Had Alysanne somehow offended him? Had he grown fearful of the realm’s response to the marriage, recalling all that had befallen Aegon and Rhaena? Was it possible that Septon Mattheus’s dire prophecies had shaken him more than he cared to admit? Or was he simply a boy of fifteen who had acted rashly with no thought to the consequences, only to find himself now at a loss as to how to proceed?

Arguments can and have been made for all these explanations, but in light of what we know now about Jaehaerys I Targaryen, they ultimately ring hollow. Young or old, this was a king who never acted without thinking. To this writer it seems plain that Jaehaerys was not repenting his marriage and had no intention of undoing it. He had chosen the queen he wanted and would make the realm aware of that in due course, but at a time of his own choosing, in a manner best calculated to lead to acceptance: when he was a man grown and a king ruling in his own right, not a boy who had wed in defiance of his regent’s wishes.

The young king’s absence from court did not go unnoticed for long. The ashes of the bonfires lit in celebration of the new year had scarce grown cold before the people of King’s Landing began asking questions. To curtail the rumors, Queen Alyssa put out word that His Grace was resting and reflecting on Dragonstone, the ancient seat of his house … but as more time passed, with still no sign of Jaehaerys, lords and smallfolk alike began to wonder. Was the king ill? Had he been made a prisoner, for reasons yet unknown? The personable and handsome boy king had moved amongst the people of King’s Landing so freely, seemingly delighting in mingling with them, that this sudden disappearance seemed unlike him.

Queen Alysanne, for her part, was in no haste to return to court. “Here I have you to myself, day and night,” she told Jaehaerys. “When we go back, I shall be fortunate to snatch an hour with you, for every man in Westeros will want a piece of you.” For her, these days on Dragonstone were an idyll. “Many years from now when we are old and grey, we shall look back upon these days and smile, remembering how happy we were.”

Jaehaerys himself no doubt shared some of these sentiments, but the young king had other reasons for remaining on Dragonstone. Unlike his uncle Maegor, he was not prone to bursts of rage, but he was more than capable of anger, and he would never forget nor forgive his deliberate exclusion from the council meetings wherein his marriage and that of his sister were being discussed. And whilst he would always remain grateful to Rogar Baratheon for helping him to the Iron Throne, Jaehaerys did not intend to be ruled by him. “I had one father,” he said to Maester Culiper during those days on Dragonstone, “I do not require a second.” The king recognized and appreciated the virtues of the Hand, but he was aware of his flaws as well, flaws that had become very apparent in the days leading up to the Golden Wedding, when Jaehaerys himself had sat in audience with the lords of the realm whilst Lord Rogar was hunting, drinking, and deflowering maidens.

Jaehaerys was aware of his own shortcomings too—shortcomings he intended to rectify before he sat the Iron Throne. His father, King Aenys, had been slighted as weak, in part because he was not the warrior that his brother Maegor was. Jaehaerys was determined that no man would ever question his own courage or skill at arms. On Dragonstone he had Ser Merrell Bullock, commander of the castle garrison, his sons Ser Alyn and Ser Howard, a seasoned master-at-arms in Ser Elyas Scales, and his own Seven, the finest fighters in the realm. Every morning Jaehaerys trained with them in the castle yard, shouting at them to come at him harder, to press him, harry him, and attack him in every way they knew. From sunrise till noon he worked with them, honing his skills with sword and spear and mace and axe whilst his new queen looked on.

It was a hard and brutal regimen. Each bout ended only when the king himself or his opponent declared him dead. Jaehaerys died so often that the men of the garrison made a game of it, shouting “The king is dead” every time he fell, and “Long live the king” when he struggled to his feet. His foes began a contest, wagering with one another to see which of them could kill the king the most. (The victor, we are told, was young Ser Pate the Woodcock, whose darting spear purportedly gave His Grace fits.) Jaehaerys was oft bruised and bloody by evening, to Alysanne’s distress, but his prowess improved so markedly that near the end of his time on Dragonstone, old Ser Elyas himself told him, “Your Grace, you will never be a Kingsguard, but if by some sorcery your uncle Maegor himself were to rise from the grave, my coin would be on you.”

One evening, after a day in which Jaehaerys had been severely tested and battered, Maester Culiper said to him, “Your Grace, why do you punish yourself so harshly? The realm is at peace.” The young king only smiled and replied, “The realm was at peace when my grandsire died, but scarcely had my father climbed onto the throne than foes rose up on every side. They were testing him, to learn if he was strong or weak. They will test me as well.”

He was not wrong, though his first trial, when it came, was to be of a very different nature, one that no amount of training in the yards of Dragonstone could possibly have prepared him for. For it was his worth as a man, and his love for his little queen, that were to be put to the test.

We know very little about the childhood of Alysanne Targaryen; as the fifthborn child of King Aenys and Queen Alyssa, and a female, observers at court found her of less interest than her older siblings who stood higher in the line of succession. From what little has come down to us, Alysanne was a bright but unremarkable girl; small but never sickly, courteous, biddable, with a sweet smile and a pleasing voice. To the relief of her parents, she displayed none of the timidity that had afflicted her elder sister, Rhaena, as a small child. Neither did she exhibit the willful and stubborn temperament of Rhaena’s daughter Aerea.

As a princess of the royal household, Alysanne would of course have had servants and companions from an early age. As an infant certainly she would have had a wet nurse; like most noble women, Queen Alyssa did not give suck to her own children. Later a maester would have taught her to read and write and do sums, and a septa would have instructed her in piety, deportment, and the mysteries of the Faith. Girls of common birth would have served as her maids, washing her clothing and emptying her chamberpot, and in good time she would certainly have taken ladies of a like age and noble blood as companions, to ride and play and sew with.