Fire and Blood

Their uprising proved short-lived. For every man of the Night’s Watch who joined their rebellion, ten remained true to their vows. Once joined by Lord Stark and his bannermen, the black brothers retook Rimegate and hanged the oathbreakers, save for Ser Olyver himself, who was beheaded by Lord Stark with his celebrated blade Ice. When word reached Sable Hall, the rebels there fled beyond the Wall in hopes of making common cause with the wildlings. Lord Walton pursued them, but two days north in the snows of the haunted forest, he and his men were set upon by giants. It was written afterward that Walton Stark slew two of them before he was dragged from his saddle and torn apart. His surviving men carried him back to Castle Black in pieces.

As for Ser Raymund Mallery and the other deserters, the wildlings gave them a cold welcome. Rebels or no, the free folk had no use for crows. Ser Raymund’s head was delivered to Eastwatch half a year later. When asked what had befallen the rest of his men, the wildling chieftain laughed and said, “We ate them.”

Brandon Stark’s second son, Alaric, became the Lord of Winterfell. He would rule the North for twenty-three years, an able man though a stern one … but for a long while he had no good to say of King Jaehaerys, for he blamed the king’s clemency for his brother Walton’s death, and was oft heard to say that His Grace should have beheaded Maegor’s men rather than sending them to the Wall.

Far removed from the troubles in the North, King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne remained in their self-imposed exile from the court, but they were anything but idle. Jaehaerys continued his rigorous training regimen with the knights of his Kingsguard every morn, and devoted his evenings to poring over accounts of the reign of his grandsire Aegon the Conqueror, on which he wished to model his own rule. Dragonstone’s three maesters assisted him in these inquiries, as did the queen.

As the days passed, more and more visitors made their way to Dragonstone to talk with the king. Lord Massey of Stonedance was the first to appear, but Lord Staunton of Rook’s Rest, Lord Darklyn of Duskendale, and Lord Bar Emmon of Sharp Point came hard on his heels, followed by the Lords Harte, Rollingford, Mooton, and Stokeworth. Young Lord Rosby, whose father had taken his own life when King Maegor fell, turned up as well, sheepishly pleading for the young king’s forgiveness, which Jaehaerys was pleased to grant. Though Daemon Velaryon, as the Crown’s lord admiral and master of ships, was in King’s Landing with the regents, that did not prevent Jaehaerys and Alysanne from flying their dragons to Driftmark and touring his shipyards, escorted by his sons, Corwyn, Jorgen, and Victor. When word of these meetings reached Lord Rogar in King’s Landing he grew furious and went so far as to ask Lord Daemon if the Velaryon fleet could be used to prevent these “lords lickspittle” from crawling to Dragonstone to curry favor with the boy king. Lord Velaryon’s reply was blunt. “No,” he said. The Hand took this as a further sign of disrespect.

Meanwhile, Queen Alysanne’s new ladies-in-waiting and companions had settled in on Dragonstone, and it soon became apparent that her mother’s hope that these Wise Women might persuade the little queen that her marriage was unwise and impious had gone seriously awry. Neither prayer, sermons, nor readings from The Seven-Pointed Star could shake Alysanne Targaryen’s conviction that the gods had meant her to marry her brother Jaehaerys, to be his confidant and helpmate and the mother of his children. “He will be a great king,” she told Septa Ysabel, Lady Lucinda, and the others, “and I will be a great queen.” So firm was she in her belief, and so gentle and kindly and loving in all else, that the septa and the other Wise Women found they could not condemn her, and with every passing day they clove more to her side.

Lord Rogar’s own plan to drive Jaehaerys and Alysanne apart fared no better. The young king and his queen were to spend their lives together, and though they would famously quarrel and part later in life, only to reunite, Septon Oswyck and Maester Culiper both tell us that never a cloud nor harsh word troubled their time together on Dragonstone before Jaehaerys reached his majority.

Did Coryanne Wylde fail to bed the king? Is it possible that she never made the attempt? Is the whole tale of the meeting at the inn mayhaps a fiction? Any of these are possible. The author of A Caution for Young Girls would have it otherwise, but here that infamous text becomes even more unreliable, splintering off into half a dozen contradictory versions of events, each more vulgar than the last.

It would not do for the wanton at the heart of that tale to admit that Jaehaerys had rejected her, or that she never found the opportunity to lure him into a bedchamber. Instead we are offered an assortment of lewd adventures, a veritable feast of filth. A Wanton’s Tale insists that Lady Coryanne not only bedded the king, but also all seven members of the Kingsguard. His Grace supposedly gave her to Pate the Woodcock after he had sated his own lusts, Pate passed her to Ser Joffrey in turn, and so it went. The High and the Low omits these details, but tells us that Jaehaerys not only welcomed the girl into his bed, but also brought Queen Alysanne in to frolic with them in episodes most often associated with the infamous pleasure houses of Lys.

A somewhat more plausible tale is told in Sins of the Flesh, wherein Coryanne Wylde does indeed lure King Jaehaerys into her bed, only to find him fumbling, uncertain, and over-hasty, as many boys of his age are known to be when first abed with a maid. By that time, however, Lady Coryanne had grown to admire and respect Queen Alysanne, “as if she were my own little sister,” and had developed warm feelings for Jaehaerys as well. Instead of attempting to undo the king’s marriage, therefore, she took it upon herself to help make it a success by educating His Grace in the art of giving and receiving carnal pleasure, so that he might not prove incapable when the time came to bed his young wife.

This tale could well be as fanciful as the others, but it has a certain sweetness to it that has led some scholars to allow that it might, mayhaps, have happened. Lewd fables are not history, however, and history has only one sure thing to tell us about Lady Coryanne of House Wylde, the putative author of A Caution for Young Girls. On the fifteenth day of the sixth moon of 50 AC, she departed Dragonstone under the cover of night in the company of Ser Howard Bullock, the younger son of the commander of the castle garrison. A married man, Ser Howard left his wife behind him, though he took most of her jewelry. A fishing boat carried him and Lady Coryanne to Driftmark, where they took ship for the Free City of Pentos. From there they made their way to the Disputed Lands, where Ser Howard signed on to a free company called, with a singular lack of inspiration, the Free Company. He would die in Myr three years later, not in battle but in a fall from his horse after a night of drinking. Alone and penniless, Coryanne Wylde moved on to the next of the trials, tribulations, and erotic adventures recounted in her book. We need hear no more of her.

By the time word of Lady Coryanne’s flight with her purloined jewels and purloined husband reached the ears of Lord Rogar in the Red Keep, it had become obvious that his plan had failed, as had Queen Alyssa’s. Piety and lust had both proved unable to break the bond between Jaehaerys Targaryen and his Alysanne.

Moreover, word of the king’s marriage had begun to spread. Too many men had witnessed the confrontation at the castle gates, and the lords who had called at Dragonstone afterward had not failed to notice Alysanne’s presence at the king’s side, or the obvious affection between them. Rogar Baratheon might talk of tearing out tongues, but he was helpless against the whispers that spread throughout the land … and even across the narrow sea, where the magisters of Pentos and the sellswords of the Free Company were doubtless entertained by the tales Coryanne Wylde had to tell.

“It is done,” the Queen Regent told her councillors when she realized the truth at last. “It is done and cannot be undone, Seven save us. We must needs live with it, and we must use all our powers to protect them from what may come.” She had lost two sons to Maegor the Cruel, and a coldness lay between her and her oldest daughter; she could not bear the thought of being forever estranged from the two children who remained to her.

Rogar Baratheon could not yield as gracefully, however, and his wife’s words woke in him a fury. In front of Grand Maester Benifer, Septon Mattheus, Lord Velaryon, and the rest, he spoke to her contemptuously. “You are weak,” he declared, “as weak as your first husband was, as weak as your son. Sentiment may be forgiven in a mother, but not in a regent, and never in a king. We were fools to crown Jaehaerys. He thinks only of himself, and he will be a worse king than his father was. Thank the gods that it is not too late. We must act now and put him aside.”

A hush fell over the chamber at those words. The Queen Regent stared at her lord husband in horror and then, as if to prove that he had spoken truly, began to weep, her tears running silent down her cheeks. Only then did the other lords find their tongues. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” asked Lord Velaryon. Lord Corbray, Commander of the City Watch, shook his head and said, “My men will never stand for it.” Grand Maester Benifer exchanged a glance with Prentys Tully, the master of laws. Lord Tully said, “Do you mean to claim the Iron Throne for yourself, then?”

This Lord Rogar denied vehemently. “Never. Do you take me for a usurper? I want only what is best for the Seven Kingdoms. No harm need come to Jaehaerys. We can send him to Oldtown, to the Citadel. He is a bookish boy, a maester’s chain will suit him.”

“Then who shall sit the Iron Throne?” demanded Lord Celtigar.

“Princess Aerea,” Lord Rogar answered at once. “There is a fire in her Jaehaerys does not have. She is young, but I can continue as her Hand, shape her, guide her, teach her all she must know. She has the stronger claim, her mother and father were King Aenys’s first and secondborn, Jaehaerys was fourth.” His fist slammed against the table then, Benifer tells us. “Her mother will support her. Queen Rhaena. And Rhaena has a dragon.”

Grand Maester Benifer recorded what followed. “A silence fell, though the same words were on the lips of us all: ‘Jaehaerys and Alysanne have dragons too.’ Qarl Corbray had fought in the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye, had witnessed the terrible sight of dragon fighting dragon. For the rest of us, the Hand’s words conjured visions of Old Valyria before the Doom, when dragonlord contended with dragonlord for supremacy. It was an awful vision.”

It was Queen Alyssa who broke the spell, through her tears. “I am the Queen Regent,” she reminded them. “Until my son shall come of age, all of you serve at my pleasure. Including the Hand of the King.” When she turned to her lord husband, Benifer tells us that her eyes looked as hard and dark as obsidian. “Your service no longer pleases me, Lord Rogar. Leave us and return to Storm’s End, and we need never speak again of your treason.”

Rogar Baratheon looked at her incredulously. “Woman. You think you can dismiss me? No.” He laughed. “No.”

That was when Lord Corbray rose to his feet and drew his sword, the Valyrian steel blade called Lady Forlorn that was the pride of his house. “Yes,” he said, and laid the blade upon the table, its point toward Lord Rogar. Then and only then did his lordship realize that he had gone too far, that he stood alone against every man in the room. Or so Benifer tells us.

His lordship said no further word. His face pale, he stood and removed the golden brooch that Queen Alyssa had given him as a token of his office, flung it at her contemptuously, and strode from the room. He took his leave of King’s Landing that very night, crossing the Blackwater Rush with his brother Orryn. There he lingered for six days, whilst his brother Ronnal assembled their knights and men-at-arms for the march home.

Legend tells us that Lord Rogar awaited their coming in the selfsame inn beside the ferry where he, or his brother Borys, had met with Coryanne Wylde. When the Baratheon brothers and their levies finally set out for Storm’s End, they had barely half as many men as had marched with them two years before to topple Maegor. The rest, it would seem, preferred the alleys and inns and temptations of the great city to the rainy woods, green hills, and moss-covered cottages of the stormlands. “I never lost so many men in battle as I did to the fleshpots and alehouses of King’s Landing,” Lord Rogar would say bitterly.

One of those lost was Aerea Targaryen. On the night of Lord Rogar’s dismissal, Ser Ronnal Baratheon and a dozen of his men forced their way into her chambers in the Red Keep, intending to take her with them … only to find that Queen Alyssa had stolen a march on them. The girl was already gone, and her servants knew not where. It would be learned later that Lord Corbray had removed her, at the Queen Regent’s command. Dressed in the rags of a common girl of the lowest order, with her silver-gold hair dyed a muddy brown, Princess Aerea would spend the rest of the regency working in a stable near the King’s Gate. She was eight years old and loved horses; years later, she would say that this was the happiest time of her life.

Sad to say, there was to be little happiness for Queen Alyssa in the years to come. Her dismissal of her husband as the Hand of the King had destroyed any affection that Lord Rogar might ever have felt for her; from that day forth, their marriage was a ruined castle, an empty shell haunted by ghosts. “Alyssa Velaryon had survived the death of her husband and her two eldest sons, a daughter who perished in the cradle, years of terror under Maegor the Cruel, and a rift with her remaining children, but she could not survive this,” Septon Barth would write, when he looked back upon her life. “It shattered her.”

Contemporary reports from Grand Maester Benifer agree. With Lord Rogar gone, Queen Alyssa named her brother Daemon Velaryon as Hand of the King, dispatched a raven to Dragonstone to tell her son Jaehaerys some (but not all) of what had occurred, and then retired to her chambers in Maegor’s Holdfast. For the remainder of her regency, she left the rule of the Seven Kingdoms to Lord Daemon, and took no further part in public life.

It would be pleasant to report that Rogar Baratheon, once back at Storm’s End, reflected on the error of his ways, repented his mistakes, and became a chastened man. Sadly, that was not his lordship’s nature. He was a man who knew not how to yield. The taste of defeat was like bile in the back of his throat. In war, he would boast, he would ne’er lay down his axe whilst life remained in his body … and this matter of the king’s marriage had become a war to him, one he was determined to win. One last folly remained to him, and he did not shrink from it.

Thus it was that in Oldtown, at the motherhouse attached to the Starry Sept, Ser Orryn Baratheon appeared suddenly with a dozen men-at-arms and a letter bearing Lord Rogar’s seal, demanding that the novice Rhaella Targaryen be turned over to them immediately. When questioned, Ser Orryn would say only that Lord Rogar had urgent need of the girl at Storm’s End. The ploy might well have worked, but Septa Karolyn, who had the door of the motherhouse that day, had a spine of steel and a suspicious nature. Whilst placating Ser Orryn with the pretext of sending for the girl, she sent instead to the High Septon. His High Holiness was (mayhaps fortunately, for both the child and the realm) asleep, but his steward (a former knight, who had been a captain in the Warrior’s Sons until they were abolished) was awake and wary.

In place of a frightened girl, the Baratheon men found themselves confronted by thirty armed septons under the command of the steward, Casper Straw. When Ser Orryn brandished a sword, Straw calmly informed him that twoscore of Lord Hightower’s knights were on their way (a lie, as it happened), whereupon the Baratheons surrendered. Under questioning, Ser Orryn confessed the entire plot: he was to deliver the girl to Storm’s End, where Lord Rogar planned to force her to confess that she was the actual Princess Aerea, not Rhaella. Then he meant to name her queen.

The Father of the Faithful, a man as gentle as he was weak of will, heard Orryn Baratheon’s confession and forgave him. This did not prevent Lord Hightower, once informed, from throwing the captive Baratheons into a dungeon and dispatching a full account of the affair to both the Red Keep and Dragonstone. Donnel Hightower, who had rightly been named Donnel the Delayer for his reluctance to take the field against Septon Moon and his followers, seemed to have no fear of offending Storm’s End by imprisoning Lord Rogar’s own brother. “Let him come and try to prise him free,” he said when his maester worried about how the former Hand might react. “His own wife took his hand and cut his balls off, and soon enough the king will have his head.”

Across the width of Westeros, Rogar Baratheon fumed and raged when he learned of his brother’s failure and imprisonment … but he did not call his banners, as many had feared. Instead he fell into despair. “I am done,” he told his own maester glumly. “It is the Wall for me, if the gods are good. If not, the boy will have my head and make a gift of it to his mother.” Having sired no children by either of his wives, he commanded his maester to draft a will and confession, wherein he absolved his brothers Borys, Garon, and Ronnal of having played any role in his wrongdoing, begged for mercy for his youngest brother, Orryn, and named Ser Borys as heir to Storm’s End. “All I did and all I tried to do was for the good of the realm and the Iron Throne,” he ended.

His lordship would not have long to wait to know his fate. The regency was almost at an end. With the former Hand and Queen Regent both wounded and silent, Lord Daemon Velaryon and the remaining members of the queen’s council ruled the realm as best they could, “saying little and doing less” in the words of Grand Maester Benifer.

On the twentieth day of the ninth moon of 50 AC, Jaehaerys Targaryen reached his sixteenth nameday and became a man grown. By the laws of the Seven Kingdoms, he was now old enough to rule in his own right, with no further need of a regent. All across the Seven Kingdoms, lords and smallfolk alike waited to see what kind of king he would be.