Alysanne Targaryen

Alysanne was born in 36 AC, the fifth child of then-prince Aenys and Alyssa Velaryon. Family legend held that her elder sister slipped a dragon's egg into her cradle, and from that egg Silverwing eventually hatched. A year later, the death of her grandfather Aegon I made her father king.

Aenys's reign collapsed when the Faith rose up against the sibling marriages of the royal family. Still a child, Alysanne sheltered with her kin at Dragonstone while the realm slipped from her father's grasp; he fell ill and died in 42 AC after the siege of Stonehedge.

When her uncle Maegor seized the throne by force, her mother sent Alysanne and her brothers Viserys and Jaehaerys to safety at Driftmark before bringing them to King's Landing for the new king's wedding. Afterward, the widowed queen Visenya kept Alysanne, Jaehaerys and their mother at Dragonstone, prisoners in all but name, while Viserys remained in Maegor's hands in the capital.

Viserys was tortured to death in retaliation after Alysanne, Jaehaerys and their mother fled Dragonstone in 44 AC; their other brother, Aegon, had already fallen in battle against Maegor. Four years later, following Maegor's death, Alysanne flew with Jaehaerys to King's Landing to claim the Iron Throne for him.

With Jaehaerys now on the throne, Alysanne became one of his most trusted voices. It was she who urged him to spare the surviving knights of Maegor's old Kingsguard rather than execute them, letting them take the black at the Wall; four of the five accepted the offer.

Late that year she travelled with the court to Oldtown for her brother's coronation in the Starry Sept. The following year, when her mother Alyssa married Lord Rogar Baratheon, the new Hand of the King, Alysanne took charge of entertaining the noble ladies who came to King's Landing for the wedding.

Betrothed at thirteen to Ser Orryn Baratheon, the Hand's younger brother, Alysanne went to Jaehaerys as soon as she learned the date set for that wedding. That same night the Kingsguard spirited them away to Dragonstone, where a septon wed them at dawn in the castle yard; given the bride's age, there was no bedding.

Rogar and Alyssa arrived soon after meaning to part the young couple, but the Kingsguard stood before them and would not yield. Alysanne and Jaehaerys spent the rest of his minority on the island with the marriage unannounced, while the small council in King's Landing looked for a way to undo it.

When Jaehaerys came of age in 50 AC, he flew to claim the throne; Alysanne followed months later. A month after that, a second, public ceremony was held, this time followed by the bedding.

In 51 AC, heavy with child, Alysanne accompanied Jaehaerys on his first progress through the Crownlands. At Duskendale she began a habit she would keep for the rest of her life: meeting alone with women of every station to hear what they had to tell her.

At Maidenpool she wished to bathe in Jonquil's sacred pool; three women who believed its waters would be fouled by her presence attacked her with daggers inside the bathhouse. Her maids shielded her, and the knights of her guard killed two of the attackers; the third, questioned, gave up the others involved.

Back in King's Landing, Alysanne went into early labor in 52 AC, and the son she bore died three days later. Convinced the attack at the pool had caused the loss, she asked for a protector who could go with her where men were not allowed.

In 53 AC her daughter Daenerys was born, a strong child who gave her back some of the joy she had lost; Alysanne stepped away from the council for a time to devote herself to her. The following year, when the High Septon died, she flew with Jaehaerys to Oldtown to weigh in on the choice of successor, and on the way they arrived in time to bid farewell to her mother Alyssa, who died at Storm's End in childbed.

That same year she traveled to Dragonstone to try to comfort her sister, whose husband Androw Farman had poisoned several of her friends; she was turned away three times. When her niece Aerea begged her to take her off the island, Alysanne raised the matter without success. Months after the girl fled alone on dragonback, she returned gravely ill and died in King's Landing despite the care she received.

In 55 AC Alysanne joined Jaehaerys, Septon Barth, Grand Maester Benifer and Lord Albin Massey in the project of setting down and ordering the realm's laws, a task that would take decades. That same year her son Aemon was born; two years later she backed Barth's plan to bring clean water to the capital through wells and fountains, daring the king and his master of coin to drink the river's foul water until they approved the work. Soon after, another son, Baelon, was born just before spring.

In 58 AC Alysanne went ahead alone on the royal progress to the North so as not to offend Lord Alaric Stark, flying on Silverwing to White Harbor, where Lord Theomore Manderly gave over his hall for an audience attended by two hundred women. At Winterfell, Lord Stark's initial coldness melted before her, and Alysanne struck up a friendship with his daughter Alarra.

Without waiting for Jaehaerys, she flew on to the Wall, where she visited several castles and tried without success to cross it on her dragon, who refused three times to fly further north. She persuaded the Lord Commander to replace the ruinous Nightfort with a smaller stronghold, paid for with her own jewels and her crown, which would come to be called Deep Lake; the black brothers, grateful, renamed another castle Queensgate.

Back with Jaehaerys at Winterfell, she convinced him to double the lands granted to the Night's Watch despite Lord Stark's reluctance, a grant that would become known as the New Gift and that Maester Yandel would later link to a Lord Stark's vote at the Great Council of 101 AC. Once in King's Landing, with Septon Barth's help, she got the king and his council to abolish the lord's right of the first night.

Between 59 and 80 AC Alysanne had most of her thirteen children, a joy repeatedly cut short by illness and misfortune: Daenerys died in the Shivers plague in 60 AC; Gaemon, born early in 73 AC, did not reach three months; Valerion, born in 77 AC, died before his first year. Only the last, Gael, born in 80 AC in the depths of winter, survived a fragile infancy.

Grandchildren followed too: Rhaenys in 74 AC, daughter of her eldest son Aemon and Jocelyn Baratheon, and later Viserys, Daemon and Aegon, children of Baelon and Alyssa. In 92 AC, when Jaehaerys chose to set Rhaenys aside from the succession in favor of Baelon, Alysanne clashed with her husband, holding it unjust that a man be favored simply for being one; the rift kept the king and queen apart for two years, until their daughter, the septa Maegelle, brought them back together.

In 99 AC, Princess Gael, the most beloved of her children, took her own life by drowning in the Blackwater Rush after being left with child by a singer who had abandoned her. Alysanne never recovered from that loss.

She died in King's Landing in 100 AC, less than a year after her daughter, and several years before Jaehaerys, for whom her absence remained an unhealed wound. She was cremated and her ashes buried beneath the Red Keep; when her husband died some time later, his ashes were laid to rest beside hers.