Fire & Blood

Under the Regents—The Hooded Hand

Cregan Stark had stepped down as Hand of the King and announced his intention to return to Winterfell, but before he could take his leave of the south he faced a thorny problem.

Lord Stark had marched south with a great host, made up in large part of men unwanted and unneeded in the North, whose return would bring great hardship and mayhaps even death for the loved ones they had left behind. Legend (and Mushroom) tells us that it was Lady Alysanne who suggested an answer. The lands along the Trident were full of widows, she reminded Lord Stark; women, many burdened with young children, who had sent their husbands off to fight with one lord or another, only for them to fall in battle. With winter at hand, strong backs and willing hands would be welcome in many a hearth and home.

In the end, more than a thousand northmen accompanied Black Aly and her nephew Lord Benjicot when they returned to the riverlands after the royal wedding. “A wolf for every widow,” Mushroom japed, “he will warm her bed in winter, and gnaw her bones come spring.” Yet hundreds of marriages were made at the so-called Widow Fairs held at Raventree, Riverrun, Stoney Sept, the Twins, and Fairmarket. Those northmen who did not wish to marry instead swore their swords to lords both great and small as guards and men-at-arms. A few, sad to say, did turn to outlawry and met evil ends, but for the most part, Lady Alysanne’s matchmaking was a great success. The resettled northmen not only strengthened the riverlords who welcomed them, particularly House Tully and House Blackwood, but also helped revive and spread the worship of the old gods south of the Neck.

Other northerners chose to seek new lives and fortunes across the narrow sea. A few days after Lord Stark stepped down as the King’s Hand, Ser Marston Waters returned alone from Lys, whence he had been sent to hire sellswords. He gladly accepted a pardon for his past crimes, and reported that the Triarchy had collapsed. On the point of war, the Three Daughters were hiring free companies as fast as they could form, at wages he could not hope to match. Many of Lord Cregan’s northmen saw this as an opportunity. Why return to a land gripped by winter to freeze or starve when there was gold to be had across the narrow sea? Not one but two free companies were birthed as a result. The Wolf Pack, commanded by Hallis Hornwood, called Mad Hal, and Timotty Snow, the Bastard of Flint’s Finger, was made up entirely of northmen, whilst the Stormbreakers, financed and led by Ser Oscar Tully, included men from every part of Westeros.

Even as these adventurers prepared to take their leave of King’s Landing, others were arriving from every point of the compass for Prince Aegon’s coronation and the royal wedding. From the west came Lady Johanna Lannister and her father, Roland Westerling, Lord of the Crag; from the south, twoscore Hightowers from Oldtown, led by Lord Lyonel and the redoubtable Lady Samantha, his father’s widow. Though forbidden to wed, their passion for one another had become common knowledge by this time, and so great a scandal that the High Septon refused to travel with them, arriving three days later in the company of the Lords Redwyne, Costayne, and Beesbury.

Lady Elenda, the widow of Lord Borros, remained at Storm’s End with her infant son, but sent her daughters Cassandra, Ellyn, and Floris to represent House Baratheon. (Maris, the fourth daughter, had joined the silent sisters, Septon Eustace informs us. In Mushroom’s account, this was done after her lady mother had her tongue removed, but that grisly detail can be safely discounted. The persistent belief that the silent sisters are tongueless is no more than a myth; it is piety that keeps the sisters silent, not red-hot pincers.) Lady Baratheon’s father, Royce Caron, Lord of Nightsong and Marshal of the Marches, escorted the girls to the city, and would remain with them as their guardian.

Alyn Velaryon came ashore as well, and the Manderly brothers returned once more from White Harbor with a hundred knights in blue-green cloaks. Even from across the narrow sea they came, from Braavos and Pentos, all three of the Daughters, Old Volantis. From the Summer Isles appeared three tall black princes in feathered cloaks, whose splendor was a wonder to behold. Every inn and stable in King’s Landing was soon full, whilst outside the walls a city of tents and pavilions arose for those unable to find accomodations. A great deal of drinking and fornication took place, claims Mushroom; a great deal of prayer and fasting and good works, reports Septon Eustace. The tavernkeepers of the city waxed fat and happy for a time, as did the whores of Flea Bottom, and their sisters in the fine houses along the Street of Silk, though the common people complained about the noise and stink.

A desperate, fragile air of forced fellowship hung over King’s Landing in the days leading up to the wedding, for many of those crowding cheek by jowl into the city’s wine sinks and pot shops had stood upon opposite sides of battlefields a year ago. “If only blood can wash out blood, King’s Landing was full of the unwashed,” says Mushroom. Yet there was less fighting in the streets than most expected, with only three men killed. Mayhaps the lords of the realm had finally grown weary of war.

With the Dragonpit still largely in ruins, the wedding of Prince Aegon and Princess Jaehaera was celebrated out of doors, at the top of Visenya’s Hill, where towering grandstands were erected so the men and women of the nobility might sit in comfort and enjoy an unobstructed view. The day was cold but sunny, Septon Eustace records. It was the seventh day of the seventh moon of the 131st year after Aegon’s Conquest, a most auspicious date. The High Septon of Oldtown performed the rites himself, and a deafening roar went up from the smallfolk when His High Holiness declared the prince and princess one. Tens of thousands packed the streets cheering Aegon and Jaehaera as they were carried in an open litter up to the Red Keep, where the prince was crowned with a circlet of yellow gold, simple and unadorned, and proclaimed Aegon of House Targaryen, the Third of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, and Lord of the Seven Kingdoms. Aegon himself placed the crown upon the head of his child bride.

Though a solemn boy, the new king was undeniably handsome, lean of face and form, with silver-white hair and purple eyes, whilst the queen was a beautiful child. Their wedding was as lavish a spectacle as the Seven Kingdoms had seen since the coronation of Aegon II in the Dragonpit. All that was lacking were dragons. There would be no triumphal flight around the city walls for this king, no majestic descent upon the castle yard. And the more observant made note of another absence. The Dowager Queen was nowhere to be seen, though as Jaehaera’s grandmother, Alicent Hightower ought to have been present.

As he was still but ten years of age, the new king’s first act was to name the men who would protect and defend him, and rule for him until he came of age. Ser Willis Fell, the sole survivor of the Kingsguard of King Viserys’s time, was made Lord Commander of the White Swords, with Ser Marston Waters as his second. As both men were considered greens, the remaining places in the Kingsguard were filled with blacks. Ser Tyland Lannister, recently returned from Myr, was made Hand of the King, whilst Lord Leowyn Corbray was named Protector of the Realm. The former had been a green, the latter a black. Over them would sit a council of regency, consisting of Lady Jeyne Arryn of the Vale, Lord Corlys Velaryon of Driftmark, Lord Roland Westerling of the Crag, Lord Royce Caron of Nightsong, Lord Manfryd Mooton of Maidenpool, Ser Torrhen Manderly of White Harbor, and Grand Maester Munkun, newly chosen by the Citadel to take up Grand Maester Orwyle’s chain of office.

(It is reliably reported that Lord Cregan Stark was also offered a place amongst the regents, but refused. Conspicuous omissions from the council included Kermit Tully, Unwin Peake, Sabitha Frey, Thaddeus Rowan, Lyonel Hightower, Johanna Lannister, and Benjicot Blackwood, but Septon Eustace insists that only Lord Peake was truly angered by his exclusion.)

This was a council of which Septon Eustace heartily approved, “six strong men and one wise woman, seven to rule us here on earth as the Seven Above rule all men from their heaven.” Mushroom was less impressed. “Seven regents were six too many,” he said. “Pity our poor king.” Despite the fool’s misgivings, most observers seemed to feel that the reign of King Aegon III had begun on a hopeful note.

The remainder of the year 131 AC was a time of departures, as the great lords of Westeros took their leaves of King’s Landing one by one to return to their own seats of power. Amongst the first to flee were the Three Widows, after bidding tearful farewells to the daughters, son, siblings, and cousins who would remain to serve the new king and queen as companions and hostages. Cregan Stark led his much-diminished host north along the kingsroad within a fortnight of the coronation; three days later, Lord Blackwood and Lady Alysanne set out for Raventree, with a thousand of Stark’s northerners as a tail. Lord Lyonel and his paramour, the Lady Sam, rode south for Oldtown with their Hightowers, whilst Lords Rowan, Beesbury, Costayne, Tarly, and Redwyne joined to escort His High Holiness to the same destination. Lord Kermit Tully and his knights returned to Riverrun, whilst his brother Ser Oscar set sail with his Stormbreakers for Tyrosh and the Disputed Lands.

There was one who did not depart as planned, however. Ser Medrick Manderly had agreed to take the men bound for the Wall as far as White Harbor on his galley North Star. From there they were to proceed overland to Castle Black. On the morning the North Star was to sail, however, a count of the condemned revealed a man was missing. Grand Maester Orwyle, it seemed, had experienced a change of heart as regarded taking the black. Bribing one of his guards to loose his fetters, he had changed into a beggar’s rags and disappeared into the stews of the city. Unwilling to linger any longer, Ser Medrick sentenced the guard who had freed Orwyle to take his place, and the North Star sought the sea.

By the end of 131 AC, Septon Eustace tells us, a “grey calm” had settled over King’s Landing and the crownlands. Aegon III sat the Iron Throne when required, but elsewise was little seen. The task of defending the realm fell to the Lord Protector, Leowyn Corbray, the day-to-day tedium of rule to the blind Hand, Tyland Lannister. Once as tall and golden-haired and dashing as his twin, the late Lord Jason, Ser Tyland had been left so disfigured by the queen’s torturers that ladies new to court had been known to faint at the sight of him. To spare them, the Hand took to wearing a silken hood over his head on formal occasions. This was perhaps a misjudgment, for it gave Ser Tyland a sinister aspect, and before very long the smallfolk of King’s Landing began to whisper tales of the malign masked sorcerer in the Red Keep.

Ser Tyland’s wits remained sharp, however. He might have been expected to have emerged from his torments a bitter man intent upon revenge, but this proved far from true. Instead the Hand claimed a curious failure of memory, insisting that he could not recall who had been black and who green, whilst demonstrating a dogged loyalty to the son of the very queen who had sent him to the torturers. Very quickly Ser Tyland achieved an unspoken dominance over Leowyn Corbray, of whom Mushroom says, “He was thick of neck and thick of wit, but never have I known a man to fart so loudly.” By law, both the Hand and the Lord Protector were subject to the authority of the council of regents, but as the days passed and the moon turned and turned again, the regents convened less and less often, whilst the tireless, blind, hooded Tyland Lannister gathered more and more power to himself.

The challenges he faced were daunting, for winter had descended upon Westeros and would endure for four long years, a winter as cold and bleak as any in the history of the Seven Kingdoms. The kingdom’s trade had collapsed during the Dance as well, countless villages, towns, and castles had been slighted or destroyed, and bands of outlaws and broken men haunted the roads and woods.

A more immediate problem was posed by the Dowager Queen, who refused to reconcile herself to the new king. The murder of the last of her sons had turned Alicent’s heart into a stone. None of the regents wished to see her put to death, some from compassion, others for fear that such an execution might rekindle the flames of war. Yet she could not be allowed to take part in the life of the court as before. She was too apt to rain down curses on the king, or snatch a dagger from some unwary guardsman. Alicent could not even be trusted in the company of the little queen; when last allowed to share a meal with Her Grace, she had told Jaehaera to cut her husband’s throat whilst he was sleeping, which set the child to screaming. Ser Tyland felt he had no choice but to confine the Queen Dowager to her own apartments in Maegor’s Holdfast; a gentle imprisonment, but imprisonment nonetheless.

The Hand then set out to restore the kingdom’s trade and begin the process of rebuilding. Great lords and smallfolk alike were pleased when he abolished the taxes enacted by Queen Rhaenyra and Lord Celtigar. With the Crown’s gold once more secure, Ser Tyland set aside a million golden dragons as loans for lords whose holdings had been destroyed during the Dance. (Though many availed themselves of this coin, the loans did bring about a rift between the Iron Throne and the Iron Bank of Braavos.) He also ordered the construction of three huge fortified granaries, in King’s Landing, Lannisport, and Gulltown, and the purchase of sufficient grain to fill them. (The latter decree drove up the price of grain sharply, which pleased those towns and lords with wheat and corn and barley to sell, but angered the proprietors of inns and pot shops, and the poor and hungry in general.)

Though he called a halt to work on the gargantuan statues of Prince Aemond and Prince Daeron that had been commissioned by Aegon II (not before the heads of the two princes had been carved), the Hand set hundreds of stonemasons, carpenters, and builders to work on the repair and restoration of the Dragonpit. The gates of King’s Landing were strengthened at his command, so they might better be able to resist attacks from within the city walls as well as without. The Hand also announced the Crown’s funding for the construction of fifty new war galleys. When questioned, he told the regents that this was meant to provide work for the shipyards and defend the city from the fleets of the Triarchy…but many suspected Ser Tyland’s real purpose was to lessen the Crown’s dependence on House Velaryon of Driftmark.

The Hand might also have been mindful of the continuing war in the west when he set the shipwrights to work. Whilst the ascent of Aegon III did mark an end to the worst of the carnage of the Dance of the Dragons, it is not wholly correct to assert that the young king’s coronation brought peace to the Seven Kingdoms. Fighting continued in the west through the first three years of the boy king’s reign, as Lady Johanna of Casterly Rock continued to resist the depredations of Dalton Greyjoy’s ironborn in the name of her son, young Lord Loreon. The details of their war lie outside our purpose here (for those who would know more, the relevant chapters of Archmaester Mancaster’s Sea Demons: A History of the Children of the Drowned God of the Isles are especially good). Suffice it to say that whilst the Red Kraken had proved a valuable ally to the blacks during the Dance, the coming of peace demonstrated that the ironmen had no more regard for them than for the greens.

Though he stopped short of openly declaring himself King of the Iron Isles, Dalton Greyjoy paid little heed to any of the edicts coming from the Iron Throne during these years…mayhaps because the king was a boy, and his Hand a Lannister. When commanded to cease his raiding, Greyjoy continued as before. Told to restore the women his ironmen had carried off, he replied that “only the Drowned God may sunder the bond between a man and his salt wives.” Instructed to return Fair Isle to its former lords, he replied, “Should they come rising back up from beneath the sea, we shall gladly give them back what once was theirs.”

When Johanna Lannister attempted to build a new fleet of warships to take the battle to the ironmen, the Red Kraken descended on her shipyards and put them to the torch, and made off with another hundred women in the nonce. The Hand sent an angry reproach, to which Lord Dalton replied, “The women of the west prefer men of iron to cowardly lions, it would seem, for they jump into the sea and plead with us to take them.”

Across Westeros, the winds of war were blowing up the narrow sea as well. The murder of Sharako Lohar of Lys, the admiral who had presided over the Triarchy’s disaster in the Gullet, proved to be the spark that engulfed the Three Daughters in flames, fanning the smoldering rivalries of Tyrosh, Lys, and Myr into open war. It is now commonly accepted that Sharako’s death was a personal matter; the arrogant admiral was slain by one of his rivals for the favor of a courtesan known as the Black Swan. At the time, however, his death was seen as a political killing, and the Myrish were suspected. When Lys and Myr went to war, Tyrosh seized the opportunity to assert its dominion over the Stepstones.

To press that claim, the Archon of Tyrosh called up Racallio Ryndoon, the flamboyant captain-general who had once commanded the Triarchy’s forces against Daemon Targaryen. Racallio overran the islands in a trice and put the reigning King of the Narrow Sea to death…only to decide to claim his crown for himself, betraying the Archon and his native city. The confused four-sided war that followed had the effect of closing the southern end of the narrow sea to trade, cutting off King’s Landing, Duskendale, Maidenpool, and Gulltown from commerce with the east. Pentos, Braavos, and Lorath were similarly affected, and sent envoys to King’s Landing in hopes of bringing the Iron Throne into a grand alliance against Racallio and the quarrelsome Daughters. Ser Tyland entertained them lavishly, but refused their offer. “It would be a grave mistake for Westeros to become embroiled in the endless quarrels of the Free Cities,” he told the council of regents.

That fateful year 131 AC came to a close with the seas aflame both east and west of the Seven Kingdoms and blizzards descending on Winterfell and the North. Nor was the mood in King’s Landing a happy one. The smallfolk of the city had already begun to grow disenchanted with their boy king and little queen, neither of whom had been seen since the wedding, and whispers about “the hooded Hand” were spreading. Though the “reborn” Shepherd had been taken by the gold cloaks and relieved of his tongue, others had risen in his place to preach of how the King’s Hand practiced the forbidden arts, drank baby’s blood, and was besides “a monster who hides his twisted face from gods and men.”

Within the walls of the Red Keep, there were whispers about the king and queen as well. The royal marriage was troubled from the first. Both bride and groom were children; Aegon III was now eleven, Jaehaera only eight. Once wed, they had very little contact with one another save on formal occasions, and even that was rare, as the little queen was loath to leave her chambers. “Both of them are broken,” Grand Maester Munkun declared in a letter to the Conclave. The girl had witnessed the murder of her twin brother at the hands of Blood and Cheese. The king had lost all four of his own brothers, then watched his uncle feed his mother to a dragon. “These are not normal children,” Munkun wrote. “They have no joy in them; they neither laugh nor play. The girl wets her bed at night and weeps inconsolably when she is corrected. Her own ladies say that she is eight, going on four. Had I not laced her milk with sweetsleep before the wedding, I am convinced the child would have collapsed during the ceremony.”

As for the king, the new Grand Maester went on, “Aegon shows little interest in his wife, or any other girl. He does not ride or hunt or joust, but neither does he enjoy sedentary pursuits such as reading, dancing, or singing. Though his wits seem sound enough, he never initiates a conversation, and when spoken to his answers are so curt one would think the very act of talking was painful to him. He has no friends save for the bastard boy Gaemon Palehair, and seldom sleeps through the night. During the hour of the wolf he can oft be found standing by a window, gazing up at the stars, but when I presented him with Archmaester Lyman’s Kingdoms of the Sky, he showed no interest. Aegon seldom smiles and never laughs, but neither does he display any outward signs of anger or fear, save in regards to dragons, the very mention of which sends him into a rare rage. Orwyle was wont to call His Grace calm and self-possessed; I say the boy is dead inside. He walks the halls of the Red Keep like a ghost. Brothers, I must be frank. I fear for our king, and for the kingdom.”

His fears, alas, would prove to be well founded. As bad as 131 AC had been, the next two years would be much worse.

It began on an ominous note when the former Grand Maester Orwyle was discovered in a brothel called Mother’s, near the lower end of the Street of Silk. Shorn of his hair and beard and chain of office and going by the name Old Wyl, he had earned his bread by sweeping, scrubbing, inspecting patrons of the house for pox, and mixing moon tea and potions of tansy and pennyroyal for Mother’s “daughters” to rid themselves of unwanted children. No one paid Old Wyl any mind until he took it upon himself to teach some of Mother’s younger girls to read. One of his pupils demonstrated her new skill to a serjeant in the gold cloaks, who grew suspicious and led the old man in for questioning. The truth soon emerged.

The penalty for deserting the Night’s Watch is death. Though Orwyle had not yet sworn vows, most still considered him an oathbreaker. There was no question of allowing him to take ship for the Wall. The original sentence of death that Lord Stark had pronounced on him must apply, the regents agreed. Ser Tyland did not deny this, though he pointed out that the office of King’s Justice had yet to be filled, and as a blind man he was a poor choice to swing the sword himself. Using that for his pretext, the Hand instead confined Orwyle to a tower cell (large, airy, and far too comfortable, some charged) “until such time as a suitable headsman can be found.” Neither Septon Eustace nor Mushroom were deceived; Orwyle had served with Ser Tyland on Aegon II’s green councils, and plainly old friendship and the memory of all they had endured played some part in the Hand’s decision. The former Grand Maester was even provided with quill, ink, and parchment, so that he might continue his confessions. And so he did for the best part of two years, setting down the lengthy history of the reigns of Viserys I and Aegon II that would later prove to be such an invaluable source for his successor’s True Telling.

Less than a fortnight later, reports reached King’s Landing of bands of wildlings from the Mountains of the Moon descending upon the Vale of Arryn in large numbers to raid and plunder, and Lady Jeyne Arryn left the court and sailed for Gulltown to see to the defense of her own lands and people. There were ominous stirrings along the Dornish Marches too, for Dorne had a new ruler in the person of Aliandra Martell, a brazen girl of ten-and-seven who fancied herself “the new Nymeria” and had every young lord south of the Red Mountains vying for her affections. To deal with their incursions, Lord Caron took his leave of King’s Landing as well, hastening back to Nightsong in the Dornish Marches. Thus the seven regents became five. The most influential of those was plainly the Sea Snake, whose wealth, experience, and alliances made him the first amongst equals. Even more tellingly, he seemed the only man the young king was willing to trust.

For all these reasons, the realm suffered a terrible blow on the sixth day of the third moon of 132 AC, when Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides, collapsed whilst ascending the serpentine steps in the Red Keep of King’s Landing. By the time Grand Maester Munkun came rushing to his aid, the Sea Snake was dead. Seventy-nine years of age, he had served four kings and a queen, sailed to the ends of the earth, raised House Velaryon to unprecedented levels of wealth and power, married a princess who might have been a queen, fathered dragonriders, built towns and fleets, proved his valor in times of war and his wisdom in times of peace. The Seven Kingdoms would never see his like again. With his passing, a great hole was torn in the tattered fabric of the Seven Kingdoms.

Lord Corlys lay in state beneath the Iron Throne for seven days. Afterward his remains were carried back to Driftmark aboard the Mermaid’s Kiss, captained by Marilda of Hull with her son Alyn. There the battered hull of the ancient Sea Snake was floated once again and towed out into the deep waters east of Dragonstone, where Corlys Velaryon was buried at sea aboard the very ship that had given him his name. It was said afterward that as the hull went down, the Cannibal swept overhead, his great black wings spread in a last salute. (A moving touch, but most likely a later embroidery. From all we know of the Cannibal, he would have been more apt to eat the corpse than salute it.)

The baseborn Alyn of Hull, now Alyn Velaryon, had been the Sea Snake’s chosen heir, but his succession was not uncontested. It will be recalled that in the time of King Viserys, a nephew of Lord Corlys, Ser Vaemond Velaryon, had put himself forward as the true heir to Driftmark. This rebellion cost him his head, but he left a wife and sons behind. Ser Vaemond had been the son of the elder of the Sea Snake’s brothers. Five other nephews, sired by another brother, had claims as well. When they took their case before the sick and failing Viserys, they made the grievous mistake of questioning the legitimacy of his daughter’s children. Viserys had their tongues removed for this insolence, though he let them keep their heads. Three of the “silent five” had died during the Dance, fighting for Aegon II against Rhaenyra…but two survived, together with Ser Vaemond’s sons, and all came forward now, insisting that they had more right to Driftmark than “this bastard of Hull, whose mother was a mouse.”

Ser Vaemond’s sons Daemion and Daeron took their claim to the council in King’s Landing. When the Hand and the regents ruled against them, they wisely chose to accept the decision and be reconciled with Lord Alyn, who rewarded them with lands on Driftmark on the condition that they contribute ships to his fleet. Their silent cousins chose a different course. “Lacking tongues with which to make their appeal, they preferred to argue with swords,” says Mushroom. However, the plot to murder their young lord went awry when the guards at Castle Driftmark proved loyal to the Sea Snake’s memory and his chosen heir. Ser Malentine was slain during the attempt; his brother captured. Condemned to death, Ser Rhogar saved his head by taking the black.

Alyn Velaryon, the bastard born of Mouse, was formally installed as Lord of the Tides and Master of Driftmark. Whereupon he set out for King’s Landing to claim the Sea Snake’s place amongst the regents. (Even as a boy, Lord Alyn never lacked for boldness.) The Hand thanked him and sent him home…understandably, as Alyn Velaryon was but sixteen in 132 AC. Lord Corlys’s seat upon the council of regents had already been offered to an older and more seasoned man: Unwin Peake, Lord of Starpike, Lord of Dunstonbury, Lord of Whitegrove.

Ser Tyland had a far more pressing concern in 132 AC: the matter of succession. Whilst Lord Corlys had been old and frail, his sudden death had nonetheless served as a grim reminder that any man could die at any time, even seemingly healthy young kings like Aegon III. War, illness, accident…there were so many ways to die, and if the king should perish, who then would follow him?

“If he dies without an heir, we shall dance again, however much we may mislike the music,” Lord Manfryd Mooton warned his fellow regents. Queen Jaehaera’s claim was as strong as the king’s, and stronger in the minds of some, but the notion of placing that sweet, simple, frightened child on the Iron Throne was madness, all agreed. King Aegon himself, when asked, put forward his cupbearer, Gaemon Palehair, reminding the regents that the boy had “been a king before.” That was impossible as well.

In truth, there were only two claimants the realm was like to accept: the king’s half-sisters Baela and Rhaena Targaryen, Prince Daemon’s twin daughters by his first wife, Lady Laena Velaryon. The girls were now sixteen years of age, tall and slim and silver-haired, very much the darlings of the city. King Aegon seldom set foot outside the Red Keep after his coronation, and his little queen never left her own apartments, so for most of the past year, it had been Rhaena or Baela riding out to hunt or hawk, giving alms to the poor, receiving envoys and visiting lords with the King’s Hand, serving as hostess at feasts (of which there were few), masques, and balls (of which there had been none as yet). The twins were the only Targaryens the people ever saw.

Yet even here, the council encountered difficulty and division. When Leowyn Corbray said, “Lady Rhaena would make a splendid queen,” Ser Tyland pointed out that Baela had been the first from her mother’s womb. “Baela is too wild,” countered Ser Torrhen Manderly. “How can she rule the realm when she cannot rule herself?” Ser Willis Fell agreed. “It must be Rhaena. She has a dragon, her sister does not.” When Lord Corbray answered, “Baela flew a dragon, Rhaena only has the hatchling,” Roland Westerling replied, “Baela’s dragon brought down our late king. There are many in the realm who will not have forgotten that. Crown her and we will rip all the old wounds open once again.”

Yet it was Grand Maester Munkun who put an end to the debate when he said, “My lords, it makes no matter. They are both girls. Have we learned so little from the slaughter? We must abide by primogeniture, as the Great Council ruled in 101. The male claim comes before the female.” Yet when Ser Tyland said, “And who is this male claimant, my lord? We seem to have killed them all,” Munkun had no answer but to say he would research the issue. Thus the crucial question of succession remained unsettled.

This uncertainty did little to spare the twins from the fawning attentions of all the suitors, confidants, companions, and similar flatterers eager to befriend the king’s presumed heirs, though the sisters reacted to these lickspittles in vastly different ways. Where Rhaena delighted in being the center of court life, Baela bristled at praise, and seemed to take pleasure in mocking and tormenting the suitors who fluttered around her like moths.

As young girls, the twins had been inseparable, and impossible to tell apart, but once parted, their experiences had shaped them in very different ways. In the Vale, Rhaena had enjoyed a life of comfort and privilege as Lady Jeyne’s ward. Maids had brushed her hair and drawn her baths, whilst singers composed odes to her beauty and knights jousted for her favor. The same was true at King’s Landing, where dozens of gallant young lords competed for her smiles, artists begged leave to draw or paint her, and the city’s finest dressmakers sought the honor of making her gowns. And everywhere that Rhaena went came Morning, her young dragon, oft as not coiled about her shoulders like a stole.

Baela’s time on Dragonstone had been more troubled, ending with fire and blood. By the time she came to court, she was as wild and willful a young woman as any in the realm. Rhaena was slender and graceful; Baela was lean and quick. Rhaena loved to dance; Baela lived to ride…and to fly, though that had been taken from her when her dragon died. She kept her silver hair cropped as short as a boy’s, so it would not whip about her face when she was riding. Time and time again she would escape her ladies to seek adventure in the streets. She took part in drunken horse races along the Street of the Sisters, engaged in moonlight swims across the Blackwater Rush (whose powerful currents had been known to drown many a strong swimmer), drank with the gold cloaks in their barracks, wagered coin and sometimes clothing in the rat pits of Flea Bottom. Once she vanished for three days and refused to say where she had been when she returned.

Even more gravely, Baela had a taste for unsuitable companions. Like stray dogs, she brought them home with her to the Red Keep, insisting that they be given positions in the castle, or be made part of her own retinue. These pets of hers included a comely young juggler, a blacksmith’s apprentice whose muscles she admired, a legless beggar she took pity on, a conjurer of cheap tricks she took for an actual sorcerer, a hedge knight’s homely squire, even a pair of young girls from a brothel, twins, “like us, Rhae.” Once she turned up with an entire troupe of mummers. Septa Amarys, who had been given charge of her religious and moral instruction, despaired of her, and even Septon Eustace could not seem to curb her wild ways. “The girl must be wed, and soon,” he told the King’s Hand, “else I fear that she may bring dishonor down upon House Targaryen, and shame His Grace, her brother.”

Ser Tyland saw the sense in the septon’s counsel…but there were perils as well. Baela did not lack for suitors. She was young, beautiful, healthy, wealthy, and of the highest birth; any lord in the Seven Kingdoms would be glad to take her for his wife. Yet the wrong choice could have grave consequences, for her husband would stand very close to the throne. An unscrupulous, venal, or overly ambitious mate might cause no end of war and woe. A score of possible candidates for Lady Baela’s hand were considered by the regents. Lord Tully, Lord Blackwood, Lord Hightower (as yet unwed, though he had taken his father’s widow as a paramour) were all put forth, as were a number of less likely choices, including Dalton Greyjoy (the Red Kraken boasted of having a hundred salt wives, but had never taken a rock wife), a younger brother of the Princess of Dorne, and even that rogue Racallio Ryndoon. All of them were ultimately discarded for one reason or another.

Finally the Hand and the council of regency decided to grant Lady Baela’s hand in marriage to Thaddeus Rowan, Lord of Goldengrove. Rowan was no doubt a prudent choice. His second wife had died the year previous, and he was known to be seeking a suitable young maid to take her place. His virility was beyond question; he had fathered two sons on his first wife, and five more on his second. As he had no daughters, Baela would be the unquestioned mistress of his castle. His four youngest sons were still at home, and in need of a woman’s hand. The fact that all Lord Rowan’s offspring were male counted heavily in his favor; if he were to sire a son on Lady Baela, Aegon III would have a clear successor.

Lord Thaddeus was a bluff, hearty, cheerful man, well-liked and well-respected, a doting husband and a good father to his sons. He had fought for Queen Rhaenyra during the Dance, and had done so ably and with valor. He was proud without being arrogant, just in judgment but not vindictive, loyal to his friends, dutiful in religious matters without being excessively pious, untroubled by overweening ambition. Should the throne pass to Lady Baela, Lord Rowan would make the perfect consort, supporting her with all his strength and wisdom without seeking to dominate her or usurp her rightful place as ruler. Septon Eustace tells us that the regents were very pleased with the result of their deliberations.

Baela Targaryen, when informed of the match, did not share their pleasure. “Lord Rowan is forty years my senior, bald as a stone, with a belly that weighs more than I do,” she purportedly told the King’s Hand. Then she added, “I’ve bedded two of his sons. The eldest and thirdborn, I think it was. Not both at once, that would have been improper.” Whether there is any truth to this we cannot say. Lady Baela was known to be deliberately provocative at times. If that was her purpose here, she was successful. The Hand sent her back to her rooms, posting guards at her door to make certain she remained there until the regents could convene.

Yet a day later, he discovered to his dismay that Baela had fled the castle by some secret means (later it was found she had climbed out a window, swapped clothes with a washerwoman, and walked out the front gate). By the time the hue and cry went up, she was halfway across Blackwater Bay, having hired a fisherman to carry her to Driftmark. There she sought out her cousin, the Lord of the Tides, and poured out her woes to him. A fortnight later, Alyn Velaryon and Baela Targaryen were married in the sept on Dragonstone. The bride was sixteen, the groom nearly seventeen.

Several of the regents, outraged, urged Ser Tyland to appeal to the High Septon for an annulment, but the Hand’s own response was one of bemused resignation. Prudently, he had it put about that the marriage had been arranged by king and court, believing that it was Lady Baela’s defiance that was the scandal rather than her choice of spouse. “The boy comes from noble blood,” he assured the regents, “and I do not doubt that he will prove as loyal as his brother.” Thaddeus Rowan’s wounded pride was appeased by a betrothal to Floris Baratheon, a maid of fourteen years widely considered to be the prettiest of the “Four Storms,” as Lord Borros’s four daughters had become known. In her case, it was a misnomer. A sweet girl, if somewhat frivolous, she was to die in childbed two years later. The stormy marriage would prove to be the one made on Dragonstone, as the years would prove.

For the Hand and council of regents, Baela Targaryen’s midnight flight across Blackwater Bay had confirmed all their doubts about her. “The girl is wild, willful, and wanton, as we feared,” Ser Willis Fell declared mournfully, “and now she has tied herself to Lord Corlys’s upjumped bastard. A snake for a sire, a mouse for a mother…is this to be our prince consort?” The regents were in agreement; Baela Targaryen could not be King Aegon’s heir. “It must be Lady Rhaena,” declared Mooton, “provided she is wed.”

This time, at Ser Tyland’s insistence, the girl herself was made a part of the discussions. Lady Rhaena proved to be as tractable as her sister had been willful. She would of course wed whomever the king and council wished, she allowed, though “it would please me if he was not so old he could not give me children, nor so fat that he would crush me when we are abed. So long as he is kind and gentle and noble, I know that I shall love him.” When the Hand asked if she had any favorites amongst the lords and knights who had paid her suit, she confessed that she was “especially fond” of Ser Corwyn Corbray, whom she had first met in the Vale whilst a ward of Lady Arryn.

Ser Corwyn was far from an ideal choice. A second son, he had two daughters from a previous marriage. At thirty-two, he was a man, not a green boy. Yet House Corbray was ancient and honorable, Ser Corwyn a knight of such repute that his late father had given him Lady Forlorn, the Valyrian steel blade of the Corbrays. His brother Leowyn was the Protector of the Realm. That alone would have made it difficult for the regents to raise objection. And so the match was made: a quick betrothal, followed by a hasty wedding a fortnight later. (The Hand would have preferred a longer betrothal, but the regents felt it prudent for Rhaena to wed quickly, in the event that her sister was already with child.)

The twins were not the only ladies of the realm to wed in 132 AC. Later that same year, Benjicot Blackwood, Lord of Raventree, led a retinue up the kingsroad to Winterfell, to stand witness at the marriage of his aunt Alysanne to Lord Cregan Stark. With the North already in the grip of winter, the journey took thrice as long as expected. Half the riders lost their horses as the column struggled through howling snowstorms, and thrice Lord Blackwood’s carts were attacked by bands of outlaws, who carried off much of the column’s food and all the wedding gifts. The wedding itself was said to be splendid, however; Black Aly and her wolf pledged their troth before the heart tree in Winterfell’s icy godswood. At the feast afterward, four-year-old Rickon, Lord Cregan’s son by his first wife, sang a song for his new stepmother.

Lady Elenda Baratheon, the widow of Storm’s End, also took a new husband that year. With Lord Borros dead and Olyvar an infant, Dornish incursions into the stormlands had grown more numerous, and the outlaws of the kingswood were proving troublesome. The widow felt the need of a man’s strong hand to keep the peace. She chose Ser Steffon Connington, second son of the Lord of Griffin’s Roost. Though twenty years younger than Lady Elenda, Connington had proved his valor during Lord Borros’s campaign against the Vulture King, and was said to be as fierce as he was handsome.

Elsewhere, men were more concerned with war than weddings. All along the Sunset Sea, the Red Kraken and his ironmen continued to raid and reave. Tyrosh, Myr, Lys, and the three-headed alliance of Braavos, Pentos, and Lorath battled one another across the Stepstones and the Disputed Lands, whilst the rogue kingdom of Racallio Ryndoon pinched shut the bottom of the narrow sea. In King’s Landing, Duskendale, Maidenpool, and Gulltown, trade withered. Merchants and traders came howling to the king…who either refused to see them, or was not allowed to, depending on whose chronicle we trust. The spectre of famine loomed in the North, as Cregan Stark and his lords bannermen watched their food stores dwindle, whilst the Night’s Watch turned back an ever-increasing number of wildling incursions from beyond the Wall.

Late that year, a dreadful contagion swept across the Three Sisters. The Winter Fever, as it was called, killed half the population of Sisterton. The surviving half, believing that the disease had come to their shores on a whaler from the Port of Ibben, rose up and butchered every Ibbenese sailor they could lay hands on, setting fire to their ships. It made no matter. When the disease crossed the Bite to White Harbor, the prayers of the septons and the potions of the maesters proved equally powerless against it. Thousands died, amongst them Lord Desmond Manderly. His splendid son Ser Medrick, the finest knight in the North, survived him by only four days before succumbing to the same affliction. As Ser Medrick had been childless, this had a further calamitous consequence, in that the lordship devolved upon his brother Ser Torrhen, who was thence forced to give up his place on the council of regents to take up the rule of White Harbor. That left four regents, where once there had been seven.

So many lords, both great and small, had perished during the Dance of the Dragons that the Citadel rightly names this time the Winter of the Widows. Never before or since in the history of the Seven Kingdoms have so many women wielded so much power, ruling in the place of their slain husbands, brothers, and fathers, for sons in swaddling clothes or still on the teat. Many of their stories have been collected in Archmaester Abelon’s mammoth When Women Ruled: Ladies of the Aftermath. Though Abelon treats hundreds of widows, we must needs confine ourselves to fewer. Four such women played crucial parts in the history of the realm in late 132 and early 133 AC, whether for good or ill.

Foremost of these was Lady Johanna, the widow of Casterly Rock, who ruled the domains of House Lannister for her young son, Lord Loreon. She had appealed time and time again to Aegon III’s Hand, her late lord husband’s twin, for aid against the reavers, but none had been forthcoming. Desperate to protect her people, Lady Johanna at last donned a man’s mail to lead the men of Lannisport and Casterly Rock against the foe. The songs tell of how she slew a dozen ironmen beneath the walls of Kayce, but those may be safely put aside as the work of drunken singers (Johanna carried a banner into battle, not a sword). Her courage did help inspire her westermen, however, for the raiders were soon routed and Kayce was saved. Amongst the dead was the Red Kraken’s favorite uncle.

Lady Sharis Footly, the widow of Tumbleton, achieved a different sort of fame by her efforts to restore that shattered town. Ruling in the name of her infant son (half a year after Second Tumbleton, she had given birth to a lusty dark-haired boy whom she proclaimed her late lord husband’s trueborn heir, though it was far more likely that the boy had been sired by Bold Jon Roxton), Lady Sharis pulled down the burned shells of shops and houses, rebuilt the town walls, buried the dead, planted wheat and barley and turnips in the fields where the camps had been, and even had the heads of the dragons Seasmoke and Vermithor cleaned and mounted and displayed in the town square, where travelers paid good coin to view them (a penny for a look, a star to touch them).

In Oldtown, relations between the High Septon and Lord Ormund’s widow, the Lady Sam, continued to worsen when she ignored His High Holiness’s command to remove herself from her stepson’s bed and take vows as a silent sister as penace for her sins. Righteous in his wroth, the High Septon condemned the Dowager Lady of Oldtown as a shameless fornicator and forbade her to set foot in the Starry Sept until she had repented and sought forgiveness. Instead Lady Samantha mounted a warhorse and burst into the sept as His High Holiness was leading a prayer. When he demanded to know her purpose, Lady Sam replied that whilst he had forbidden her to set foot in the sept, he had said naught about her horse’s hooves. Then she commanded her knights to bar the doors; if the sept was closed to her, it would be closed to all. Though he quaked and thundered and called down maledictions upon “this harlot on a horse,” in the end the High Septon had no choice but to relent.

The fourth (and last, for our purposes) of these remarkable women emerged from the twisted towers and blasted keeps of Harrenhal, that vast ruin beside the water of the Gods Eye. Shunned and forgotten since Daemon Targaryen and his nephew Aemond had met there for their final flight, Black Harren’s accursed seat had become a haunt of outlaws, robber knights, and broken men, who sallied forth from behind its walls to prey upon travelers, fisherfolk, and farmers. A year ago, they had been few, but of late their numbers had grown, and it was being said that a sorceress ruled over them, a witch queen of fearsome power. When these tales reached King’s Landing, Ser Tyland decided it was time to reclaim the castle. This task he entrusted to a knight of the Kingsguard, Ser Regis Groves, who set out from the city with half a hundred seasoned men. At Castle Darry, he was joined by Ser Damon Darry with a like number. Rashly, Ser Regis assumed this would be more than sufficient to deal with a few squatters.

Arriving before the walls of Harrenhal, however, he found the gates closed and hundreds of armed men on the battlements. There were at least six hundred souls within the castle, a third of them men of fighting age. When Ser Regis demanded to speak to their lord, a woman emerged to treat with him, with a child beside her. The “witch queen” of Harrenhal proved to be none other than Alys Rivers, the baseborn wet nurse who had been the prisoner and then the paramour of Prince Aemond Targaryen, and now claimed to be his widow. The boy was Aemond’s, she told the knight. “His bastard?” said Ser Regis. “His trueborn son and heir,” Alys Rivers spat back, “and the rightful king of Westeros.” She commanded the knight to “kneel before your king” and swear him his sword. Ser Regis laughed at this, saying, “I do not kneel to bastards, much less the baseborn whelp of a kinslayer and a milk cow.”

What happened next remains a matter of some dispute. Some say that Alys Rivers merely raised a hand, and Ser Regis began to scream and clutch his head, until his skull burst apart, spraying blood and brains. Others insist the widow’s gesture was a signal, at which a crossbowman on the battlements let fly a bolt that took Ser Regis through an eye. Mushroom (who was hundreds of leagues away) has suggested that perhaps one of the men on the walls was skilled in the use of a sling. Soft lead balls, when slung with sufficient force, have been known to cause the sort of explosive effect that Groves’s men saw and attributed to sorcery.

Whatever the case, Ser Regis Groves was dead in an instant. Half a heartbeat later, the gates of Harrenhal burst open, and a swarm of howling riders charged forth. A bloody fight ensued. The king’s men were put to rout. Ser Damon Darry, being well-horsed, well-armored, and well-trained, was one of the few to escape. The witch queen’s minions hunted him all through the night before abandoning the chase. Some thirty-two men lived to return to Castle Darry, of the hundred that had set out.

The next day, a thirty-third made his appearance. Having been captured with a dozen others, he had been forced to watch them die by torture one by one before being turned loose to deliver a warning. “I’m to tell you what she said,” he gasped, “but you can’t laugh. The widow put a curse on me. Any man o’ you laughs, I die.” When Ser Damon assured him that no one was going to laugh at him, the messenger said, “Don’t come again unless you mean to bend your knees, she says. Any man who comes near her walls will die. There’s power in them stones, and the widow’s woken it. Seven save us all, she has a dragon. I seen it.”

The name of the messenger is lost to us, along with the name of the man who laughed. But someone did, one of Lord Darry’s men. The messenger looked at him, stricken, then clutched at his throat and began to wheeze. Unable to draw breath, he was dead in moments. Supposedly the imprints of a woman’s fingers could be seen upon his skin, as if she had been in the room, choking him.

The death of a Kingsguard knight was greatly troubling to Ser Tyland, though Unwin Peake discounted Ser Damon Darry’s talk of sorcery and dragons and put down the death of Regis Groves and his men to outlaws. The other regents concurred. A stronger force would be required to root them out of Harrenhal, they concluded as that “peaceful” year of 132 AC came to its end. But before Ser Tyland could organize such an assault, or even consider who might take Ser Regis’s place in Aegon’s Seven, a threat far worse than any “witch queen” descended on the city. For on the third day of 133 AC, Winter Fever arrived in King’s Landing.

Whether or not the fever had been born in the dark forests of Ib and brought to Westeros by a whaler, as the Sistermen believed, it was assuredly moving from port to port. White Harbor, Gulltown, Maidenpool, and Duskendale had been afflicted, each in turn; there were reports that Braavos was being ravaged as well. The first sign of the disease was a red flush of the face, easily mistaken for the bright red cheeks that many men exhibit after exposure to the frosty air of a cold winter’s day. But fever followed, slight at first, but rising, ever rising. Bleeding did not help, nor garlic, nor any of the various potions, poultices, and tinctures that were tried. Packing the afflicted in tubs of snow and icy water seemed to slow the course of the fever, but did not halt it, those maesters who grappled with the disease soon found. By the second day the victim would begin to shiver violently and complain of being cold, though he might feel burning hot to the touch. On the third day came delirium and bloody sweats. By the fourth day the man was dead…or on the path to recovery, should the fever break. Only one man in four survived the Winter Fever. Not since the Shivers ravaged Westeros during the reign of Jaehaerys I had such a terrible pestilence been seen in the Seven Kingdoms.

In King’s Landing, the first signs of the fatal flush were seen along the riverside amongst the sailors, ferrymen, fishermongers, dockers, stevedores, and wharfside whores who plied their trades beside the Blackwater Rush. Before most had even realized they were ill, they had spread the contagion throughout every part of the city, to rich and poor alike. When word reached court, Grand Maester Munkun went himself to examine some of those afflicted, to ascertain whether this was indeed the Winter Fever and not some lesser illness. Alarmed by what he saw, Munkun did not return to the castle, for fear that he himself might have been afflicted by his close contact with twoscore feverish whores and dockers. Instead he sent his acolyte with an urgent letter to the King’s Hand. Ser Tyland acted immediately, commanding the gold cloaks to close the city and see that no one entered or left until the fever had run its course. He ordered the great gates of the Red Keep barred as well, to keep the disease from king and court.

The Winter Fever had no respect for gates or guards or castle walls, alas. Though the fever seemed to have grown somewhat less potent as it moved south, tens of thousands turned feverish in the days that followed. Three-quarters of those died. Grand Maester Munkun proved to be one of the fortunate fourth and recovered…but Ser Willis Fell, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, was struck down together with two of his Sworn Brothers. The Lord Protector, Leowyn Corbray, retired to his chambers when stricken and tried to cure himself with hot mulled wine. He died, along with his mistress and several of his servants. Two of Queen Jaehaera’s maids grew feverish and succumbed, though the little queen herself remained hale and healthy. The Commander of the City Watch died. Nine days later, his successor followed him into the grave. Nor were the regents spared. Lord Westerling and Lord Mooton both grew ill. Lord Mooton’s fever broke and he survived, though much weakened. Roland Westerling, an older man, perished.

One death may have been a mercy. The Dowager Queen Alicent of House Hightower, second wife of King Viserys I and mother to his sons, Aegon, Aemond, and Daeron, and his daughter Helaena, died on the same night as Lord Westerling, after confessing her sins to her septa. She had outlived all of her children and spent the last year of her life confined to her apartments, with no company but her septa, the serving girls who brought her food, and the guards outside her door. Books were given her, and needles and thread, but her guards said Alicent spent more time weeping than reading or sewing. One day she ripped all her clothing into pieces. By the end of the year she had taken to talking to herself, and had come to have a deep aversion to the color green.

In her last days the Queen Dowager seemed to become more lucid. “I want to see my sons again,” she told her septa, “and Helaena, my sweet girl, oh…and King Jaehaerys. I will read to him, as I did when I was little. He used to say I had a lovely voice.” (Strangely, in her final hours Queen Alicent spoke often of the Old King, but never of her husband, King Viserys.) The Stranger came for her on a rainy night, at the hour of the wolf.

All these deaths were recorded faithfully by Septon Eustace, who takes care to give us the inspiring last words of every great lord and noble lady. Mushroom names the dead as well, but spends more time on the follies of the living, such as the homely squire who convinced a pretty bedmaid to yield her virtue to him by telling her he had the flush and “in four days I will be dead, and I would not die without ever knowing love.” The ploy proved so successful that he returned to it with six other girls…but when he failed to die, they began to talk, and his scheme unraveled. Mushroom attributes his own survival to drink. “If I drank sufficient wine, I reasoned I might never know I was sick, and every fool knows that the things you do not know will never hurt you.”

During those dark days, two unlikely heroes came briefly to the fore. One was Orwyle, whose gaolers freed him from his cell after many other maesters had been laid low by the fever. Old age, fear, and long confinement had left him a shell of the man that he had been, and his cures and potions proved no more efficacious than those of other maesters, yet Orwyle worked tirelessly to save those he could and ease the passing of those he could not.

The other hero, to the astonishment of all, was the young king. To the horror of his Kingsguard, Aegon spent his days visiting the sick, and often sat with them for hours, sometimes holding their hands in his own, or soothing their fevered brows with cool, damp cloths. Though His Grace seldom spoke, he shared his silences with them, and listened as they told him stories of their lives, begged him for forgiveness, or boasted of conquests, kindnesses, and children. Most of those he visited died, but those who lived would afterward attribute their survival to the touch of the king’s “healing hands.”

Yet if indeed there is some magic in a king’s touch, as many smallfolk believe, it failed when it was needed most. The last bedside visited by Aegon III was that of Ser Tyland Lannister. Through the city’s darkest days, Ser Tyland had remained in the Tower of the Hand, striving day and night against the Stranger. Though blind and maimed, he suffered no more than exhaustion almost to the last…but as cruel fate would have it, when the worst was past and new cases of the Winter Fever had dropped away to almost nothing, a morning came when Ser Tyland commanded his serving man to close a window. “It is very cold in here,” he said…though the fire in the hearth was blazing, and the window was already closed.

The Hand declined quickly after that. The fever took his life in two days instead of the usual four. Septon Eustace was with him when he died, as was the boy king that he had served. Aegon took his hand as he breathed his last.

Ser Tyland Lannister had never been beloved. After the death of Queen Rhaenyra, he had urged Aegon II to put her son Aegon to death as well, and certain blacks hated him for that. Yet after the death of Aegon II, he had remained to serve Aegon III, and certain greens hated him for that. Coming second from his mother’s womb, a few heartbeats after his twin brother, Jason, had denied him the glory of lordship and the gold of Casterly Rock, leaving him to make his own place in the world. Ser Tyland never married nor fathered children, so there were few to mourn him when he was carried off. The veil he wore to conceal his disfigured face gave rise to the tale that the visage underneath was monstrous and evil. Some called him craven for keeping Westeros out of the Daughters’ War and doing so little to curb the Greyjoys in the west. By moving three-quarters of the Crown’s gold from King’s Landing whilst Aegon II’s master of coin, Tyland Lannister had sown the seeds of Queen Rhaenyra’s downfall, a stroke of cunning that would in the end cost him his eyes, ears, and health, and cost the queen her throne and her very life. Yet it must be said that he served Rhaenyra’s son well and faithfully as Hand.