Fire and Blood

Undoubtedly Princess Alysanne had handmaids and companions in the days that followed Maegor’s death. Their names and particulars have not come down to us, unfortunately. We do know that none of them came with the princess when she and Jaehaerys fled the Red Keep on their dragons. Aside from the seven knights of the Kingsguard and the castle garrison, cooks, stablehands, and other servants, the king and his bride were unattended on Dragonstone.

That was hardly proper for a princess, let alone for a queen. Alysanne must have her household, and in that her mother, Alyssa, saw an opportunity to undermine, and mayhaps undo, her marriage. The Queen Regent resolved to dispatch to Dragonstone a carefully selected company of companions and servants to see to the young queen’s needs. The plan, Grand Maester Benifer assures us, was Queen Alyssa’s … but it was one that Lord Rogar assented to gladly, for he saw at once a way to twist it to his own ends.

The aged Septon Oswyck, who had performed the wedding rites for Jaehaerys and Alysanne, kept the sept on Dragonstone, but a young lady of royal birth required one of her own sex to see to her religious instruction. Queen Alyssa sent three; the formidable Septa Ysabel, and two wellborn novices of Alysanne’s own age, Lyra and Edyth. To take charge of the serving girls and maids of Alysanne’s household, she dispatched Lady Lucinda Tully, the wife of the Lord of Riverrun, whose fierce piety was renowned through all the land. With her came her younger sister, Ella of House Broome, a modest maid whose name had briefly been offered as a match for Jaehaerys. Lord Celtigar’s daughters, so recently scorned by the Hand as being chinless, breastless, and witless, were included as well. (“We had as well get some use of them,” Lord Rogar supposedly told their father.) Three other girls of noble birth made up the remainder of the company, one each from the Vale, the stormlands, and the Reach: Jennis of House Templeton, Coryanne of House Wylde, and Rosamund of House Ball.

Queen Alyssa wanted her daughter attended by suitable companions of her own age and station, no doubt, but that was not her sole motivation in sending these ladies to Dragonstone. Septa Ysabel, the novices Edyth and Lyra, and the deeply pious Lady Lucinda and her sister had a further charge. It was the hope of the Queen Regent that these fiercely righteous women might impress upon Alysanne, and mayhaps even Jaehaerys, that for brother to lie with sister was an abomination in the eyes of the Faith. “The children” (as Alyssa persisted in calling the king and queen) were not evil, only young and willful; suitably instructed, they might see the error of their ways and repent their marriage before it tore the realm apart. Or so she prayed.

Lord Rogar’s motives were baser. Unable to rely on the loyalty of the castle garrison or the knights of the Kingsguard, the Hand needed eyes and ears on Dragonstone. All that Jaehaerys and Alysanne said and did was to be reported back to him, he made clear to Lady Lucinda and the others. He was especially anxious to learn if and when the king and queen intended on consummating their marriage. That, he stressed, must be prevented.

And mayhaps there was more.

And now unfortunately we must give some consideration to a certain distasteful book that first appeared in the Seven Kingdoms some forty years after the events presently being discussed. Copies of this book still pass from hand to hand in the low places of Westeros, and may oft be found in certain brothels (those catering to patrons able to read) and the libraries of men of low morals, where they are best kept under lock and key, hidden from the eyes of maidens, goodwives, children, and the chaste and pious.

The book in question is known under various titles, amongst them Sins of the Flesh, The High and the Low, A Wanton’s Tale, and The Wickedness of Men, but all versions bear the subtitle A Caution for Young Girls. It purports to be the testimony of a young maid of noble birth who surrendered her virtue to a groom in her lord father’s castle, gave birth to a child out of wedlock, and thereafter found herself partaking of every sort of wickedness imaginable during a long life of sin, suffering, and slavery.

If the author’s tale is true (parts of it strain credulity), during the course of her life she found herself a handmaid to a queen, the paramour of a young knight, a camp follower in the Disputed Lands of Essos, a serving wench in Myr, a mummer in Tyrosh, the plaything of a corsair queen in the Basilisk Isles, a slave in Old Volantis (where she was tattooed, pierced, and ringed), the handmaid of a Qartheen warlock, and finally the mistress of a pleasure house in Lys … before ultimately returning to Oldtown and the Faith. Purportedly she ended her life as a septa in the Starry Sept, where she set down this story of her life to warn other young maids not to do as she had done.

The lascivious details of the author’s erotic adventures need not concern us here. Our only interest is in the early part of her sordid tale, the story of her youth … for the alleged author of A Caution for Young Girls is none other than Coryanne Wylde, one of the girls sent to Dragonstone as a companion to the little queen.

We have no way to ascertain the veracity of her story, nor even whether she was in truth the author of this infamous book (some argue plausibly that the text is the product of several hands, for the style of the prose varies greatly from episode to episode). Lady Coryanne’s early history, however, is confirmed in the accounts of the maester who served at the Rain House during her youth. At the age of thirteen, he records, Lord Wylde’s younger daughter was indeed seduced and deflowered by a “surly lad” from the stables. In A Caution for Young Girls, this lad is described as a handsome boy her own age, but the maester’s account differs, painting the seducer as a pox-scarred varlet of thirty years distinguished only by a “male member as stout as a stallion’s.”

Whatever the truth, the “surly lad” was gelded and sent to the Wall as soon as his deed was known, whilst Lady Coryanne was confined to her chambers to give birth to his baseborn son. The boy was sent away soon after birth, to Storm’s End, where he would be fostered by one of the castle stewards and his barren wife.

The bastard boy was born in 48 AC, according to the maester’s journals. Lady Coryanne was carefully watched afterward, but few beyond the walls of the Rain House knew of her shame. When the raven came to summon her to King’s Landing, her lady mother told her sternly that she was never to speak of her child or her sin. “In the Red Keep, they will take you for a maiden.” But as the girl made her way to the city, escorted by her father and a brother, they stopped for the night at an inn on the south bank of the Blackwater Rush, beside the ferry landing. There she found a certain great lord awaiting her arrival.

And here the tale grows even more tangled, for the identity of the man at the inn is a matter of some dispute, even amongst those who accept A Caution for Young Girls to contain a modicum of truth.

Over the years and centuries, as the book was copied and recopied, many changes and emendations crept into the text. The maesters who labor at the Citadel copying books are rigorously trained to reproduce the original word for word, but few mundane scribes are so disciplined. Such septons, septas, and holy sisters as copy and illuminate books for the Faith oft strike out or alter any passages they believe to be offensive, obscene, or theologically unsound. As virtually the whole of A Caution for Young Girls is obscene, it was not like to have been transcribed by either maesters or septons. Given the number of copies known to exist (hundreds, though as many more were burned by Baelor the Blessed), the scribes responsible were most likely septons expelled from the Faith for drunkenness, theft, or fornication, failed students who left the Citadel without a chain, hired quills from the Free Cities, or mummers (the worst of all). Lacking the rigor of maesters, such scribes oft feel free to “improve” on the texts they are copying. (Mummers in particular are prone to this.)

In the case of A Caution for Young Girls, such “improvements” largely consisted of adding ever more episodes of depravity and changing the existing episodes to make them even more disturbing and lascivious. As alteration followed alteration over the years, it became ever more difficult to ascertain which was the original text, to the extent that even maesters at the Citadel cannot agree as to the title of the book, as has been noted. The identity of the man who met Coryanne Wylde in the inn by the ferry, if indeed such a meeting ever took place, is another matter of contention. In the copies entitled Sins of the Flesh and The High and the Low (which tend to be the older versions, and the shortest), the man at the inn is indentified as Ser Borys Baratheon, eldest of Lord Rogar’s four brothers. In A Wanton’s Tale and The Wickedness of Men, however, the man is Lord Rogar himself.

All these versions agree on what happened next. Dismissing Lady Coryanne’s father and brother, the lord commanded the girl to disrobe so he might inspect her. “He ran his hands over every part of me,” she wrote, “and bade me turn this way and that and bend and stretch and open my legs to his gaze, until at last he pronounced himself satisfied.” Only then did the man reveal the purpose of the summons that had brought her to King’s Landing. She was to be sent to Dragonstone, a supposed maid, to serve as one of Queen Alysanne’s companions, but once there she was to use her wiles and her body to beguile the king into bed.

“Jaehaerys is a man-maid like as not, and besotted with his sister,” this man supposedly told her, “but Alysanne is but a child and you are a woman any man would want. Once His Grace tastes your charms he may come to his senses and abandon this folly of a marriage. He may even choose to keep you afterward, who can say? There can be no question of marriage, of course, but you would have jewels, servants, whatever you might want. There are rich rewards in being a king’s bedwarmer. If Alysanne should discover you abed together, so much the better. She is a prideful girl and would be quick to abandon an unfaithful spouse. And if you should get with child again, you and the babe would be well taken care of, and your father and mother will be richly rewarded for your service to the Crown.”[3]

Can we put any credence in this tale? At this late date, so far removed from the events in question, with all the principals long dead, there is no way to be certain. Beyond the testimony of the girl herself, we have no source to verify that this meeting by the ferry ever took place. And if some Baratheon did indeed meet privily with Coryanne Wylde before she reached King’s Landing, we cannot know what words he might have spoken to her. He could as easily have simply been instructing her in her duties as a spy and tattle, as the other girls had been instructed.

Archmaester Crey, writing at the Citadel in the last years of King Jaehaerys’s long reign, believed that the meeting at the inn was a clumsy calumny intended to blacken the name of Lord Rogar, and went so far as to attribute the lie to Ser Borys Baratheon himself, who quarreled bitterly with his brother in later life. Other scholars, including Maester Ryben, the Citadel’s foremost expert on banned, forbidden, fraudulent, and obscene texts, put the story down as no more than a bawdy tale of the sort known to excite the lust of young boys, bastards, whores, and the men who partake of their favors. “Amongst the smallfolk there are always men of a lascivious character who delight in tales of great lords and noble knights despoiling maidens,” Ryben wrote, “for this persuades them that their betters share their own base lusts.”

Mayhaps. Yet there are certain things that we do know beyond a doubt that may allow us to draw our own conclusions. We do know that the younger daughter of Morgan Wylde, Lord of the Rain House, was deflowered at an early age and gave birth to a bastard boy. We can be reasonably certain that Lord Rogar knew of her shame; not only was he Lord Morgan’s liege, but the child was placed in his own household. We know that Coryanne Wylde was amongst the maids who were sent to Dragonstone as companions for Queen Alysanne … a singularly curious choice, if a lady-in-waiting was all she was meant to be, for scores of other young girls of noble birth and suitable age were also available, girls whose maidenheads were intact and whose virtue was beyond reproach.

“Why her?” many have asked in the years since. Did she have some special gift, some particular charm? If so, no one remarked on it at the time. Could Lord Rogar or Queen Alyssa have been indebted to her lord father or lady mother for some past favor or kindness? We have no record of it. No plausible explanation for the selection of Coryanne Wylde has ever been offered, save for the simple, ugly answer proferred by A Caution for Young Girls: she was sent to Dragonstone not for Alysanne, but for Jaehaerys.[4]

Court records indicate that Septa Ysabel, Lady Lucinda, and the other women chosen for Alysanne Targaryen’s household boarded the trading galley Wise Woman at dawn on the seventh day of the second moon of 50 AC, and left for Dragonstone on the morning tide. Queen Alyssa had sent word of their coming ahead by raven, yet even so she had some concern that the Wise Women, as they became known from that day forth, would find the gates of Dragonstone closed to them. Her fears were unfounded. The little queen and two Kingsguard met them at the harbor as they disembarked, and Alysanne welcomed each of them with glad smiles and gifts.

Before we relate what happened afterward, let us turn our gaze briefly to Fair Isle, where Rhaena Targaryen, the “Queen in the West,” resided with her new husband and a court of her own.

It will be recalled that Queen Alyssa had been no more pleased by her eldest daughter’s third marriage than by the one her son would soon make, though Rhaena’s marriage was of less consequence. She was not alone in this, for in truth Androw Farman was a curious choice for one with the blood of the dragon in her veins.

The second son of Lord Farman, not even the heir, Androw was said to be a handsome boy with pale blue eyes and long flaxen hair, but he was nine years younger than the queen, and even at his own father’s court there were those who scorned him as “half a girl” himself, for he was soft of speech and gentle of nature. A singular failure as a squire, he had never become a knight, having none of the martial skills of his lord father and elder brother. For a time, his sire had considered sending him to Oldtown to forge a maester’s chain, until his own maester told him that the boy was simply not clever enough, and could hardly read nor write. Later, when asked why she had chosen such an unpromising spouse, Rhaena Targaryen replied, “He was kind to me.”

Androw’s father had been kind to her as well, offering her refuge on Fair Isle after the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye, when her uncle, King Maegor, was demanding her capture and the Poor Fellows of the realm were denouncing her as a vile sinner and her daughters as abominations. Some have put forward the suggestion that the widowed queen took Androw for her husband in part to repay his father for that kindness, for Lord Farman, himself a second son who had never expected to rule, was known to have great fondness for Androw, despite his deficiencies. Mayhaps there is some truth in that assertion, but another possibility, first put forward by Lord Farman’s maester, may cut closer to the bone. “The queen found her true love on Fair Isle,” Maester Smike wrote to the Citadel, “not with Androw, but with his sister, Lady Elissa.”

Three years Androw’s elder, Elissa Farman shared her brother’s blue eyes and long flaxen hair, but elsewise she was as unlike him as a sibling could be. Sharp of wit and sharper of tongue, she loved horses, dogs, and hawks. She was a fine singer and a skilled archer, but her great love was sailing. The Wind Our Steed were the words of the Farmans of Fair Isle, who had sailed the western seas since the Dawn Age, and Lady Elissa embodied them. As a child, it was said that she spent more time at sea than upon the land. Her father’s crews used to laugh to see her climbing the rigging like a monkey. She sailed her own boat around Fair Isle at the age of four-and-ten, and by the time she was twenty she had voyaged as far north as Bear Island and as far south as the Arbor. Oftimes, to the horror of her lord father and lady mother, she spoke of her desire to take a ship beyond the western horizon to learn what strange and wondrous lands might lie on the far side of the Sunset Sea.

Lady Elissa had been twice betrothed, once at twelve and once at sixteen, but she had frightened off both boys, as her own father admitted ruefully. In Rhaena Targaryen, however, she found a like-minded companion, and in her the queen found a new confidant. Together with Alayne Royce and Samantha Stokeworth, two of Rhaena’s oldest friends, they became nigh inseparable, a court within the court that Ser Franklyn Farman, Lord Marq’s elder son, dubbed “the Four-Headed Beast.” Androw Farman, Rhaena’s new husband, was admitted to their circle from time to time, but never so often as to be taken for a fifth head. Most tellingly, Queen Rhaena never took him flying with her on the back of her dragon, Dreamfyre, an adventure she shared frequently with the ladies Elissa, Alayne, and Sam (in fairness, it is more than possible that the queen invited Androw to share the sky with her only to have him decline, for he was not of an adventurous disposition).

It would be a mistake to regard Queen Rhaena’s time at Faircastle as an idyll, however. Not everyone welcomed her presence, by any means. Even here on this distant isle there were Poor Fellows, angered that Lord Marq, like his father before him, had given support and sanctuary to one they regarded as an enemy of the Faith. The continued presence of Dreamfyre on the island was also creating problems. Glimpsed every few years, a dragon was a wonder and a terror to behold, and it was true that some of the Fair Islanders took pride in having “a dragon of our own.” Others, however, were made anxious by the presence of the great beast, especially as she grew larger … and hungrier. Feeding a growing dragon is no small thing. And when it became known that Dreamfyre had produced a clutch of dragon eggs, a begging brother from the inland hills began to preach that Fair Isle would soon be overrun by dragons “devouring sheep and cows and men alike,” unless a dragonslayer came forth to put an end to the scourge. Lord Farman sent forth knights to seize the man and silence him, but not before thousands had heard his prophecies. Though the preacher died in the dungeons under Faircastle, his words lived on, filling the ignorant with fear wherever they were heard.

Even within the walls of Lord Farman’s own seat, Queen Rhaena had enemies, chief amongst them his lordship’s heir. Ser Franklyn had fought in the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye and taken a wound there, blood shed in the service of Prince Aegon the Uncrowned. His grandsire had died upon that battlefield together with his eldest son, and it had been left to him to bring their corpses home to Fair Isle. Yet it seemed to him that Rhaena Targaryen showed little remorse for all the grief she had brought to House Farman, and little gratitude to him personally. He also resented her friendship with his sister, Elissa; instead of encouraging her in what he regarded as her wild, willful ways, Ser Franklyn thought the queen should be enjoining her to do her duty to her house by making an appropriate marriage and producing children. Nor did he appreciate the manner in which the Four-Headed Beast had somehow become the center of court life at Faircastle, whilst his lord father and himself were increasingly disregarded. In that he was well justified. More and more highborn lords from the westerlands and beyond were visiting Fair Isle, Maester Smike noted, but when they came it was to have audience with the Queen in the West, not with the minor lordling of a small isle and his son.

None of this was of great concern to the queen and her familiars so long as Marq Farman ruled in Faircastle, for his lordship was an amiable and good-natured man who loved all his children, his wayward daughter and weakling son included, and loved Rhaena Targaryen for loving them as well. Less than a fortnight after the queen and Androw Farman had celebrated the first anniversary of their union, however, Lord Marq died suddenly at his own table, choking to death upon a fish bone at the age of six-and-forty. And with his passing, Ser Franklyn became the Lord of Fair Isle.

He wasted little time. On the day after his father’s funeral, he summoned Rhaena to his great hall (he would not deign to go to her), and commanded her to remove herself from his island. “You are not wanted here,” he told her. “You are not welcome here. Take your dragon with you, and your friends, and my little brother, who would surely piss his breeches if he were made to stay. But do not presume to take my sister. She will remain here, and she will be wed to a man of my choosing.”

Franklyn Farman did not lack for courage, as Maester Smike wrote in a letter to the Citadel. He did lack for sense, however, and in that moment he did not seem to realize how close he stood to death. “I could see the fire in her eyes,” the maester said, “and for a moment I could see Faircastle burning, the white towers blackening and collapsing into the sea as flames leapt from every window and the dragon wheeled about again and again.”

Rhaena Targaryen was the blood of the dragon, and far too proud to linger long where she was not wanted. She departed Fair Isle that very night, taking wing for Casterly Rock upon Dreamfyre after instructing her husband and companions to follow her by ship, “with all those who might love me.” When Androw, flushed with anger, offered to face his brother in single combat, the queen quickly dissuaded him. “He would cut you to pieces, my love,” she told him, “and were I to be thrice widowed, men would name me a witch or worse and hound me from Westeros.” Lyman Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, had sheltered her before, she reminded him. Queen Rhaena was confidant that he would welcome her again.

Androw Farman, Samantha Stokeworth, and Alayne Royce set out to follow the next morning, together with more than forty of the queen’s friends, servants, and hangers-on, for Her Grace had gathered a sizable coterie about her as the Queen in the West. Lady Elissa was with them as well, for she had no intention of remaining behind; her ship, the Maiden’s Fancy, had been made ready for the crossing. When the queen’s party reached the docks, however, they found Ser Franklyn waiting for them. The rest of them could go, and good riddance, he announced, but his sister would remain on Fair Isle to be wed.

The new lord had brought only half a dozen men with him, however, and he had seriously misjudged the love the smallfolk bore his sister, particularly the sailors, shipwrights, fisherfolk, porters, and other denizens of the dockside districts, many of whom had known her since she was a small girl. As Lady Elissa confronted her brother, spitting defiance at him and demanding that he get out of her way, a crowd gathered around them, growing angrier by the moment. Oblivious to their mood, his lordship attempted to seize his sister … whereupon the onlookers rushed forward, overwhelming his men before they could draw their blades. Three of them were shoved off the docks into the water, whilst Lord Franklyn himself was thrown into a ship’s hold full of fresh-caught cod. Elissa Farman and the rest of the queen’s friends boarded Maiden’s Fancy untouched and set sail for Lannisport.

Lyman Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, had given Rhaena and her husband Aegon the Uncrowned refuge when Maegor the Cruel was demanding their heads. His bastard son, Ser Tyler Hill, had fought with Prince Aegon under the Gods Eye. His wife, the formidable Lady Jocasta of House Tarbeck, had befriended Rhaena during her time at the Rock and had been the first to discern that she was with child. Just as the queen had expected, they welcomed her now, and when the rest of her party landed in Lannisport, the Lannisters took them in as well. A lavish feast was held in their honor, an entire stable was given over to Dreamfyre, and Queen Rhaena, her husband, and her companions of the Four-Headed Beast were assigned a regally appointed suite of apartments deep in the bowels of the Rock itself, safe from any harm. There they lingered for more than a moon’s turn, enjoying the hospitality of the wealthiest house in all of Westeros.