Meanwhile, a very different story was playing out to the east, where Jacaerys Velaryon descended upon the Eyrie on his young dragon, Vermax, to win the Vale of Arryn for his mother. The Maiden of the Vale, Lady Jeyne Arryn, was five-and-thirty, twenty years his senior. Never wed, Lady Jeyne had reigned over the Vale since the death of her father and elder brothers at the hands of the Stone Crows of the hills when she was three.

   Mushroom tells us that this famous maiden was in truth a highborn harlot with a voracious appetite for men, and gives us a salacious tale of how she offered Prince Jacaerys the allegiance of the Vale only if he could bring her to her climax with his tongue. Septon Eustace repeats the widespread rumor that Jeyne Arryn preferred the intimate companionship of other women, then goes on to say it was not true. In this instance, we must be grateful for Grand Maester Munkun’s True Telling, for he alone confines himself to the High Hall of the Eyrie, rather than its bedchambers.

“Thrice have mine own kin sought to replace me,” Lady Jeyne told Prince Jacaerys. “My cousin Ser Arnold is wont to say that women are too soft to rule. I have him in one of my sky cells, if you would like to ask him. Your Prince Daemon used his first wife most cruelly, it is true…but notwithstanding your mother’s poor taste in consorts, she remains our rightful queen, and mine own blood besides, an Arryn on her mother’s side. In this world of men, we women must band together. The Vale and its knights shall stand with her…if Her Grace will grant me one request.” When the prince asked what that might be, she answered, “Dragons. I have no fear of armies. Many and more have broken themselves against my Bloody Gate, and the Eyrie is known to be impregnable. But you have descended on us from the sky, as Queen Visenya once did during the Conquest, and I was powerless to halt you. I mislike feeling powerless. Send me dragonriders.”

And so the prince agreed, and Lady Jeyne knelt before him, and bade her warriors to kneel, and all swore him their swords.

Then on Jacaerys soared, north across the Fingers and the waters of the Bite. He lighted briefly at Sisterton, where Lord Borrell and Lord Sunderland did obeisance to him and pledged him the support of the Three Sisters, then flew on to White Harbor, where Lord Desmond Manderly met with him in his Merman’s Court.

Here the prince faced a shrewder bargainer. “White Harbor is not unsympathetic to your mother’s plight,” Manderly declared. “Mine own forebears were despoiled of their birthright when our enemies drove us into exile on these cold northern shores. When the Old King visited us so long ago, he spoke of the wrong that had been done to us and promised to make redress. In pledge of that, His Grace offered the hand of his daughter Princess Viserra to my great-grandsire, that our two houses might be made as one, but the girl died and the promise was forgotten.”

   Prince Jacaerys knew what was being asked of him. Before he left White Harbor a compact was drawn up and signed, by the terms of which Lord Manderly’s youngest daughter would be wed to the prince’s brother Joffrey once the war was over.

Finally Vermax carried Jacaerys Velaryon to Winterfell, to treat with its formidable young lord, Cregan Stark.

In the fullness of time, Cregan Stark would become known as the Old Man of the North, but the Lord of Winterfell was but one-and-twenty when Prince Jacaerys came to him in 129 AC. Cregan had come into his lordship at thirteen upon the death of his father, Lord Rickon, in 121 AC. During his minority, his uncle Bennard had ruled the North as regent, but in 124 AC Cregan turned sixteen, only to find his uncle slow to surrender his power. Relations between the two grew strained, as the young lord chafed under the limits imposed upon him by his father’s brother. Finally, in 126 AC, Cregan Stark rose up, imprisoned Bennard and his three sons, and took the rule of the North into his own hands. Soon after he wed Lady Arra Norrey, a beloved companion since childhood, only to have her die in 128 AC whilst giving birth to a son and heir, whom Cregan named Rickon after his father.

Autumn was well advanced when the Prince of Dragonstone came to Winterfell. The snows lay deep upon the ground, a cold wind was howling from the north, and Lord Stark was in the midst of his preparations for the coming winter, yet he gave Jacaerys a warm welcome. Snow and ice and cold made Vermax ill-tempered, it is said, so the prince did not linger long amongst the northmen, but many a curious tale came out of that short sojourn.

Munkun’s True Telling says that Cregan and Jacaerys took a liking to each other, for the boy prince reminded the Lord of Winterfell of his own younger brother, who had died ten years before. They drank together, hunted together, trained together, and swore an oath of brotherhood, sealed in blood. This seems more credible than Septon Eustace’s version, wherein the prince spends most of his visit attempting to persuade Lord Cregan to give up his false gods and accept the worship of the Seven.

   But we turn to Mushroom to find the tales other chronicles omit, nor does he fail us now. His account introduces a young maiden, or “wolf girl” as he dubs her, with the name of Sara Snow. So smitten was Prince Jacaerys with this creature, a bastard daughter of the late Lord Rickon Stark, that he lay with her of a night. On learning that his guest had claimed the maidenhead of his bastard sister, Lord Cregan became most wroth, and only softened when Sara Snow told him that the prince had taken her for his wife. They had spoken their vows in Winterfell’s own godswood before a heart tree, and only then had she given herself to him, wrapped in furs amidst the snows as the old gods looked on.

This makes for a charming story, to be sure, but as with many of Mushroom’s fables, it seems to partake more of a fool’s fevered imaginings than of historical truth. Jacaerys Velaryon had been betrothed to his cousin Baela since he was four and she was two, and from all we know of his character, it seems most unlikely that he would break such a solemn agreement to protect the uncertain virtue of some half-wild, unwashed northern bastard. If indeed there ever lived a Sara Snow, and if indeed the Prince of Dragonstone perchanced to dally with her, that is no more than other princes have done in the past, and will do on the morrow, but to talk of marriage is preposterous.

(Mushroom also claims that Vermax left a clutch of dragon’s eggs at Winterfell, which is equally absurd. Whilst it is true that determining the sex of a living dragon is a nigh on impossible task, no other source mentions Vermax producing so much as a single egg, so it must be assumed that he was male. Septon Barth’s speculation that the dragons change sex at need, being “as mutable as flame,” is too ludicrous to consider.)

This we do know: Cregan Stark and Jacaerys Velaryon reached an accord, and signed and sealed the agreement that Grand Maester Munkun calls “the Pact of Ice and Fire” in his True Telling. Like many such pacts, it was to be sealed with a marriage. Lord Cregan’s son, Rickon, was a year old. Prince Jacaerys was as yet unmarried and childless, but it was assumed that he would sire children of his own once his mother sat the Iron Throne. Under the terms of the pact, the prince’s firstborn daughter would be sent north at the age of seven, to be fostered at Winterfell until such time as she was old enough to marry Lord Cregan’s heir.