Queen Alysanne did not attend the duel. She told the king she could not bear the thought that he might die. Princess Saera watched from the window of her cell. Jonquil Darke, her gaoler, made certain that she did not turn away.

A fortnight later, Jaehaerys and Alysanne gave another of their daughters over to the Faith. Princess Saera, who was not quite seventeen, departed King’s Landing for Oldtown, where her sister Septa Maegelle was to take charge of her instruction. She would be a novice, it was announced, with the silent sisters.

Septon Barth, who knew the king’s mind better than most, would later maintain the sentence was meant to be a lesson. No one could mistake Saera for her sister Maegelle, least of all her father. She would never be a septa, much less a silent sister, but she required punishment, and it was thought that a few years of silent prayer, harsh discipline, and contemplation would be good for her, that it would set her on the path to redemption.

That was not a path that Saera Targaryen cared to walk, however. The princess endured the silence, the cold baths, the scratchy roughspun robes, the meatless meals. She submitted to having her head shaved and being scrubbed with horsehair brushes, and when she was disobedient, she submitted to the cane as well. All this she suffered, for a year and a half…but when her chance came, in 85 AC, she seized it, fleeing from the motherhouse in the dead of night and making her way down to the docks. When an older sister came upon her during her escape, she knocked the woman down a flight of steps and leapt over her to the door.

   When word of her flight reached King’s Landing, it was assumed that Saera would be hiding somewhere in Oldtown, but Lord Hightower’s men combed the city door to door, and no trace was found of her. It was then thought that mayhaps she would make her way back to the Red Keep, to beg pardon from her father. When she did not appear there either, the king wondered if she might not flee to her former friends, so Jonah Mooton and his wife, Perianne, were told to keep watch for her at Maidenpool. The truth did not come out until a year later, when the former princess was seen in a Lysene pleasure garden, still clad as a novice. Queen Alysanne wept to hear it. “They have made our daughter into a whore,” she said. “She always was,” the king replied.

Jaehaerys Targaryen celebrated his fiftieth nameday in 84 AC. The years had taken their toll on him, and those who knew him well said that he was never the same after his daughter Saera had disgraced and then abandoned him. He had grown thinner, almost gaunt, and there was more grey than gold in his beard now, and in his hair. For the first time men were calling him “the Old King” rather than “the Conciliator.” Alysanne, shaken by all the losses they had suffered, withdrew more and more from the governance of the realm, and seldom came to council meetings any longer, but Jaehaerys still had his faithful Septon Barth, and his sons. “If there is another war,” he told the two of them, “it will be for you to fight it. I have my roads to finish.”

“He was better with roads than with daughters,” Grand Maester Elysar would write later, in his customary waspish style.

In 86 AC, Queen Alysanne announced the betrothal of her daughter Viserra, fifteen years of age, to Theomore Manderly, the fierce old Lord of White Harbor. The marriage would do much and more to tie the realm together by uniting one of the great houses of the North to the Iron Throne, the king declared. Lord Theomore had won great renown as a warrior in his youth, and had proved himself a canny lord under whose rule White Harbor had prospered greatly. Queen Alysanne was very fond of him as well, remembering the warm welcome he had given her during her first visit to the North.

   His lordship had outlived four wives, however, and whilst still a doughty fighter, he had grown very stout, which did little to recommend him to Princess Viserra. She had a different man in mind. Even as a little girl, Viserra had been the most beautiful of the queen’s daughters. Great lords, famous knights, and callow boys had danced attendance on her all her life, feeding her vanity until it became a raging fire. Her great delight in life was playing one boy off against the other, goading them into foolish quests and contests. To win her favor for a joust, she made admiring squires swim the Blackwater Rush, climb the Tower of the Hand, or set free all the ravens in the rookery. Once she took six boys to the Dragonpit and told them she would give her maidenhead to whoever put his head in a dragon’s mouth, but the gods were good that day and the Dragonkeepers put an end to that.

No squire was ever going to win Viserra, Queen Alysanne knew; not her heart, and certainly not her maidenhead. She was far too sly a child to go down the same path as her sister Saera. “She has no interest in kissing games, nor boys,” the queen told Jaehaerys. “She plays with them as she used to play with her puppies, but she would no more lie with one than with a dog. She aims much higher, our Viserra. I have seen the way she preens and prances around Baelon. That is the husband she desires, and not for love of him. She wants to be the queen.”

Prince Baelon was fourteen years older than Viserra, twenty-nine to her fifteen, but older lords had married younger maids, as she well knew. It had been two years since Princess Alyssa had died, yet Baelon had shown no interest in any other woman. “He married one sister, why not another?” Viserra told her closest friend, the empty-headed Beatrice Butterwell. “I am much prettier than Alyssa ever was, you saw her. She had a broken nose.”

If the princess was intent on marrying her brother, the queen was equally determined to prevent it. Her answer was Lord Manderly and White Harbor. “Theomore is a good man,” Alysanne told her daughter, “a wise man, with a kind heart and a good head on his shoulders. His people love him.”

The princess was not persuaded. “If you like him so much, Mother, you should marry him,” she said, before running to her father to complain. Jaehaerys offered her no solace. “It is a good match,” he told her, before explaining the importance of drawing the North closer to the Iron Throne. Marriages were the queen’s domain in any case, he said; he never interfered in such matters.

   Frustrated, Viserra next turned to her brother Baelon in hopes of rescue, if court gossip can be believed. Slipping past his guards into his bedchamber one night, she disrobed and waited for him, making free with the prince’s wine whilst she lingered. When Prince Baelon finally appeared, he found her drunk and naked in his bed and sent her on her way. The princess was so unsteady that she required the help of two maids and a knight of the Kingsguard to get her safely back to her own apartments.

How the battle of wills between Queen Alysanne and her headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter might finally have resolved will never be known. Not long after the incident in Baelon’s bedchamber, as the queen was making arrangements for Viserra’s departure from King’s Landing, the princess traded clothes with one of her maids to escape the guards who had been assigned to keep her out of mischief, and slipped from the Red Keep for what she termed “one last night of laughter before I go and freeze.”

Her companions were all men, two minor lordlings and four young knights, all green as spring grass and eager for Viserra’s favor. One of them had offered to show the princess parts of the city that she had never seen: the pot shops and rat pits of Flea Bottom, the inns along Eel Alley and River Row where the serving wenches danced on tables, the brothels on the Street of Silk. Ale, mead, and wine all featured in the evening’s frolics, and Viserra partook eagerly.