Androw Farman was located at last in the Chamber of the Painted Table, a longsword clutched in his grasp. He made no attempt to deny the poisonings. Instead he boasted. “I brought them cups of wine, and they drank. They thanked me, and they drank. Why not? A cupbearer, a serving man, that’s how they saw me. Androw the sweet. Androw the jape. What could I do, but fall off the dragon? Well, I could have done a lot of things. I could have been a lord. I could have made laws and been wise and given you counsel. I could have killed your enemies, as easily as I killed your friends. I could have given you children.”

Rhaena Targaryen did not deign to reply to him. Instead she spoke to her guards, saying, “Take him and geld him, but staunch the wound. I want his cock and balls fried up and fed to him. Do not let him die until he has eaten every bite.”

“No,” Androw Farman said, as they moved around the Painted Table to grasp him. “My wife can fly, and so can I.” And so saying, he slashed ineffectually at the nearest man, backed to the window behind him, and leapt out. His flight was a short one: downward, to his death. Afterward Rhaena Targaryen had his body hacked to pieces and fed to her dragons.

His was the last notable death of 54 AC, but there was still more ill to come in that terrible Year of the Stranger. Just as a stone thrown into a pond will send out ripples in all directions, the evil that Androw Farman had wrought would spread across the land, touching and twisting the lives of others long after the dragons were done feasting on his blackened, smoking remains.

The first ripple was felt in the king’s own small council, when Lord Daemon Velaryon announced his desire to step down as Hand of the King. Queen Alyssa, it will be recalled, had been Lord Daemon’s sister, and his young niece Lianna had been amongst the women poisoned on Dragonstone. Some have suggested that rivalry with Lord Manfryd Redwyne, who had replaced him as lord admiral, played a part in Lord Daemon’s decision, but this seems a petty aspersion to cast at a man who served so ably and so long. Let us rather take his lordship at his word and accept that his advancing age and a desire to spend his remaining days with his children and grandchildren on Driftmark were the cause of his departure.

   Jaehaerys’s first thought was to look to the other members of his council for Lord Daemon’s successor. Albin Massey, Rego Draz, and Septon Barth had all shown themselves to be men of great ability, earning the king’s trust and gratitude. None, however, seemed wholly suitable. Septon Barth was suspected of having greater loyalty to the Starry Sept than to the Iron Throne. Moreover, he was of very low birth; the great lords of the realm would never allow the son of a blacksmith to speak with the king’s voice. Lord Rego was a godless Pentoshi and an upjumped spicemonger, and his birth was, if anything, even lower than Septon Barth’s. Lord Albin, with his limp and twisted back, would strike the ignorant as somehow sinister. “They look at me and see a villain,” Massey himself told the king. “I can serve you better from the shadows.”

There could be no question of bringing back Rogar Baratheon nor any of King Maegor’s surviving Hands. Lord Tully’s term upon the council during the regency had been undistinguished. Rodrik Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale, was a boy of ten, having come untimely into his lordship after the deaths of his uncle Lord Darnold and his sire Ser Rymond at the hands of the wildling raiders they had unwisely pursued into the Mountains of the Moon. Jaehaerys had but recently reached an understanding with Donnel Hightower, but still did not entirely trust the man, no more than he did Lyman Lannister. Bertrand Tyrell, the Lord of Highgarden, was known to be a drunkard, whose unruly bastard sons would bring disgrace down on the Crown if turned loose upon King’s Landing. Alaric Stark was best left in Winterfell; a stubborn man by all reports, stern and hard-handed and unforgiving, he would make for an uncomfortable presence at the council table. It would be unthinkable to bring an ironman to King’s Landing, of course.

With none of the great lords of the realm being found suitable, Jaehaerys next turned to their lords bannermen. It was thought desirable that the Hand be an older man, whose experience would balance the king’s youth. As the council included several learned men of bookish inclination, a warrior was wanted as well, a man blooded and tested in battle whose martial reputation would dishearten the Crown’s enemies. After a dozen names had been put forward and bandied about, the choice finally fell to Ser Myles Smallwood, Lord of Acorn Hall in the riverlands, who had fought for the king’s brother, Aegon, beneath the Gods Eye, battled Wat the Hewer at Stonebridge, and ridden with the late Lord Stokeworth to bring Harren the Red to justice during the reign of King Aenys.

   Justly famed for his courage, Lord Myles wore the scars of a dozen savage fights upon his face and body. Ser Willam the Wasp of the Kingsguard, who had served at Acorn Hall, swore there was no finer, fiercer, or more leal lord in all the Seven Kingdoms, and Prentys Tully and the redoubtable Lady Lucinda, his liege lords, had naught but praise for Smallwood as well. Thus persuaded, Jaehaerys gave his assent, a raven took wing, and within the fortnight, Lord Myles was on his way to King’s Landing.

Queen Alysanne played no part in the selection of the King’s Hand. Whilst the king and council were deliberating, Her Grace was absent from King’s Landing, having flown Silverwing to Dragonstone to be with her sister and comfort her in her grief.

Rhaena Targaryen was not a woman easily comforted, however. The loss of so many of her dear friends and companions had plunged her into a black melancholy, and even the mention of Androw Farman’s name provoked her to fits of rage. Far from welcoming her sister and whatever solace she might bring, Rhaena thrice tried to send her away, even going so far as to scream at Her Grace in view of half the castle. When the queen refused to go, Rhaena retreated to her own chambers and barred the doors, emerging only to eat…and that less and less often.

Left to her own devices, Alysanne Targaryen set about restoring a modicum of order to Dragonstone. A new maester was sent for and installed, a new captain appointed to take charge of the castle garrison. The queen’s own beloved Septa Edyth arrived to assume the place of Rhaena’s much lamented Septa Maryam.

Shunned by her sister, Alysanne turned to her niece, but there too she encountered rage and rejection. “Why should I care if they’re all dead? She’ll find new ones; she always does,” Princess Aerea told the queen. When Alysanne tried to share stories of her own girlhood, and told of how Rhaena had put a dragon’s egg into her cradle and cuddled and cared for her “as if she were my mother,” Aerea said, “She never gave me an egg, she just gave me away and flew off to Fair Isle.” Alysanne’s love for her own daughter provoked the princess to anger as well. “Why should she be queen? I should be queen, not her.” It was then that Aerea broke down into tears at last, pleading with Alysanne to take her back with her to King’s Landing. “Lady Elissa said that she would take me, but she went away and forgot me. I want to come back to court, with the singers and the fools and all the lords and knights. Please take me with you.”