Saera Targaryen

Saera was born in 67 AC, the fifth daughter and ninth child of Jaehaerys and Alysanne. Eight older siblings came before her, and she refused to be weaned until well past her fourth year. She grew up mischievous and hungry for attention: she hid cats in her sister Daella's room, knowing full well how much they frightened her, and by seven she'd learned to slip into the kitchens for sweets. At ten she raided the Tower of the White Sword and dyed every Kingsguard cloak she could find pink. Before eleven she'd taken up wine; by twelve she often showed up drunk at septon services. The court jester Tom Nabo bore the worst of her cruelty, and by thirteen she'd gone through half a dozen septas and as many handmaids.

In 73 AC, once her parents ruled out marrying Vaegon to Daella, Saera was briefly considered as a bride for him instead; nothing came of it, and Vaegon left for the Citadel.

At fourteen she told her father she wanted to rule as her mother did, wed to the Prince of Dorne or the King-Beyond-the-Wall; soon after, meeting a merchant from the Summer Isles, she decided she wanted him too. A year later her ambitions had shifted closer to home: at court she could have as many squires, knights and lords as she pleased. Three stood above the rest in her favor — Jonah Mooton, heir to Maidenpool; Lord Roy Connington of Griffin's Roost; and Ser Braxton Beesbury, heir to Honeyholt — while Perianne Moore became one of her closest friends.

Jaehaerys thought well of the three suitors; Alysanne mistrusted them, Beesbury most of all, but the king waved off her concern, certain his daughter was never left alone with any of them.

In 84 AC the city watch pulled the jester Tom Nabo out of a brothel called the Blue Pearl, where Saera's three favorites happened to be as well. Connington claimed they'd only meant it as a joke on Tom; Mooton let slip whose idea it had really been. None of the three would give up Saera's name, so all three ended up in the black cells. Alysanne then summoned Perianne Moore and another of Saera's friends, who confessed under pressure: the three girls had practiced kissing each other, clothed at first and later not; dared to kiss a real boy, Saera swore she'd go further. By their account it had been Beesbury who'd practiced with all of them, and the servants had been told to wait outside — those who knew anything, Beesbury had forced into silence.

Jaehaerys had squires, stableboys and maids questioned first, and only then summoned Saera before the throne. He scolded her over the Tom Nabo affair; Alysanne told her Alys Turnberry was carrying a child. Learning her three favorites were in chains, Saera's mood turned within the hour from denial to mockery, then to self-justification and finally defiance. Asked outright whether she'd given herself to any of the three, she said all three believed themselves first. She declared she meant to marry, though she couldn't say which one — and when she proposed marrying all three at once, she compared herself to Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor the Cruel. That comparison finished the king's patience, and he had her dragged off to her rooms.

For the whole of the next day, king and queen argued with Septon Barth and Grand Maester Elysar over what to do with Saera, her friends and her three favorites. Jaehaerys, humiliated, said more than once that she was no daughter of his; Alysanne agreed she must be punished, but reminded him that he'd made peace with lords who'd once taken up arms against him, and could surely make peace with his own child too.

That same night Saera slipped her confinement and fled the Red Keep, only to be caught by the Dragonkeepers trying to enter the Dragonpit — an attempt to steal a dragon that angered Jaehaerys more than anything before it. He locked her in a tower cell under constant watch, while Ser Braxton Beesbury demanded to face the king himself and died for it beneath her window. Fifteen days later Saera was handed over to the Faith in Oldtown, bound for the Silent Sisters under the tutelage of her elder sister, the septa Maegelle. She lasted a year and a half there before vanishing from the mother house one night in 85 AC; Lord Hightower's men searched every house in Oldtown without finding her, and when she failed to turn up at the Red Keep either, Jaehaerys set her old favorites to watch for her.

Rather than hide within the Seven Kingdoms, Saera had bought passage from Oldtown to Lys, where, still dressed as a novice, she took service in a pleasure garden. Word didn't reach the court until half a year after her disappearance. When Alysanne wept that the Lysene had made a whore of her daughter, Jaehaerys answered that she'd always been one; he was said never to be quite the same man again.

He forbade Alysanne from writing to Saera, and the queen defied him, paying men to watch over her daughter from afar. When three of her daughters — Alyssa, Daella and Viserra — died within five years of one another, Alysanne begged Jaehaerys to bring Saera home. He refused, said he never wanted to hear her name again, and forbade the queen from flying to Lys herself. Alysanne wrote to Saera anyway; no reply ever came.

By 99 AC Saera had moved on from Lys to Volantis, where she'd built both a fortune and a reputation, if not the respectable kind. When the king called a Great Council in 101 AC to settle his succession, three of her bastard sons, each by a different father, arrived in King's Landing to press claims of their own; one had the very face of young Jaehaerys, another had been fathered by a Volantene triarch. Saera herself never came — she already had, she said, a kingdom of her own.

On his deathbed in 103 AC, Jaehaerys sometimes mistook his caretaker, Lady Alicent Hightower, for one of his daughters. Near the end he became convinced Alicent was Saera, come home at last from across the sea.