Nymeria

Nymeria ruled Ny Sar, one of the Rhoynar cities built along the river, when Prince Garin of Chroyane began weaving an alliance of every city against Valyria's growing power. She was the only ruler who refused: no army on foot, she said, could beat the masters of dragons.

No one listened. Not even her own warriors, eager to join Garin's cause, and Nymeria ended up lending her troops to the alliance against her own judgment. When the Valyrians answered with a cloud of dragons and shattered Garin's army, taking him prisoner, Nymeria learned in Ny Sar that her own city faced the same fate. Before the slavers could arrive, she gathered every boat still afloat on the river and loaded them with women, children, and the few men left alive.

Legend speaks of ten thousand ships, though the maesters who later studied the crossing suspect the true number was far smaller, and that barely one vessel in ten was fit for open sea. Whatever the count, Nymeria led that fleet down the river, past ruined towns and fields of dead, and diverted through an old channel near the site of long-vanished Sarhoy to avoid the Dragon Lords of Volantis.

The open sea proved worse than the river: a storm sank more than a hundred ships at the first encounter, and those who deserted out of fear and turned back were enslaved by the Volantenes. In the Basilisk Isles, pirate kings offered them land on the Isle of Toads in exchange for their ships and yearly tribute of virgins; Nymeria refused and put back out to sea.

She sought refuge in Sothoryos, where her people settled Zamettar and Yeen, but jungle, disease, and slavers wore both attempts away. For three years the fleet wandered homeless: sickness drove them from Naath, and in the Summer Isles they were allowed only a barren islet where hunger and plague kept claiming lives. Some abandoned Nymeria to return to the Rhoyne behind a priestess, only to be enslaved or killed.

Those who remained turned toward Westeros. The weakest ships settled on the Stepstones or were blown to Tyrosh, where they surrendered to slavers rather than die at sea. The rest, with Nymeria still at their head, finally made landfall on the Dornish coast near the mouth of the Greenblood.

Dorne was a poor land then, split among some twenty lords and petty kings who fought over wells and rivers, and most saw the newcomers as invaders to be driven back into the sea. Lord Mors Martell, lord of Sandship, thought otherwise: he married Nymeria, and hundreds of his knights took Rhoynar wives alongside him. Mors's fighting strength grew tenfold, and with it came the wealth and craft of a people whose smiths and artisans outmatched their new neighbours.

To seal the union, and so that no one could dream of returning to sea, Nymeria burned her own fleet. She named Mors 'Prince of Dorne' and claimed the whole region for him, a title that had to be won by the sword: years of war followed against one petty king after another, and no fewer than six kings ended up taking the black at the Wall on her order.

Only Yorick V Yronwood, greatest of the Dornish kings, held out. The war against him lasted nine years; during it, Mors fell to his sword at the third battle fought by the Boneway, and Nymeria took sole command of her house's armies. Two more years of campaigning were enough to bring Yorick V to his knees before her. From then on she ruled from Sunspear, the new seat built up around Sandship.

Nymeria reigned unchallenged for nearly twenty-seven years. She kept the Rhoynar style of prince and princess rather than crown herself queen, and Dorne was founded as a principality rather than a kingdom. She married twice more, to Lord Uller of Hellholt and Ser Davos Dayne of Starfall, but neither ruled beside her: they were consort and counsellor, nothing more.

Over that reign she survived a dozen attempts on her life, put down two rebellions, and turned back three invasions, two by the Storm King and one by King Greydon Gardener. As the years passed, it was her heirs who began commanding the armies in her name.

When she died, she was succeeded not by her only son, born of Ser Davos, but by her eldest daughter, the one she had with Mors Martell: Dorne already followed Rhoynar customs of inheritance. Her life gave rise to two books that still circulate in Westeros, and centuries later a girl named Arya Stark would name a direwolf pup after her, in memory of the princess who crossed half the world.