Cassandra Baratheon

Lord Borros struck a bargain with Alicent Hightower, then dowager queen: Cassandra would marry King Aegon II Targaryen and become his queen. At the same time, her sister Floris was betrothed to Larys Strong, sealing two alliances at once.

The bargain never came to pass. Aegon II died soon after, taking with him the crown Cassandra had already come to expect; accounts say she wept bitterly on learning she would not be queen.

After Lord Borros's death and the birth of a younger brother, in 131 AC Lady Elenda sent Cassandra and her sisters Floris and Ellyn to King's Landing, escorted by their grandfather Lord Royce Caron. The purpose was to pay homage to the new king, the boy Aegon III, and attend his coronation.

Travelling with them was Princess Jaehaera Targaryen, who had spent the war at Storm's End. Once in the capital, the sisters witnessed the wedding of Jaehaera and the young king.

Queen Jaehaera died in King's Landing in 133 AC. As soon as the news spread, the Hand of the King pushed his own daughter forward as her replacement, a move much of the nobility did not welcome, and other candidates soon began to emerge.

Lady Elenda argued that Cassandra and her sister Ellyn were more than worthy options, pointing out that Cassandra had already once been betrothed to a king. But the race for the throne also brought slander: among the rumors swirling around several ladies, the old suspicion resurfaced that it was she who had pushed the queen onto the spikes.

In time Cassandra entered the service of Queen Daenaera Velaryon, Aegon III's second wife, as one of her ladies-in-waiting. In 135 AC she was one of three young women implicated in a plot to poison the king and queen; questioned, she admitted to sleeping with a knight on several occasions and, at his urging, with a sellsword named Tessario the Tiger as well.

The regents, Lord Torrhen Manderly among them, judged that the three women's part in the conspiracy had been minor and chose not to punish them harshly. At her mother's urging, Cassandra was married off to a minor knight, Ser Walter Brownhill; Lady Elenda reasoned that raising his children, and her own by him, would keep her daughter away from further intrigue.