"Fire and Blood" by George R.R. Martin, List 3

Some did so reluctantly, fearing that Jaehaerys might prove to be as weak and feckless a king as his father...but as Maegor had left no heirs of the body, there was no plausible rival around whom opposition might gather.

Though neither dared desert Moon whilst he lived, the alacrity with which the two lords abandoned his cause after his death suggests that their grievance had been with Maegor, not with House Targaryen...and, indeed, both men would soon return to Oldtown, penitent and obedient, to bend the knee before Prince Jaehaerys at his coronation.

The 49th year after Aegon’s Conquest gave the people of Westeros a welcome respite from the chaos and conflict that had gone before.

Prentys Tully, Lord of Riverrun, was summoned to court to serve as master of laws; with him came his redoubtable wife, the Lady Lucinda, far famed for her piety.

The wedding guests came ostensibly to celebrate the union of Rogar Baratheon and the Dowager Queen, but they had other reasons for attendance, it should not be doubted.

Eschewing the great hall and the majesty of the Iron Throne, the young king entertained the lords in the intimacy of his solar, attended only by Ser Gyles, a maester, and a few servants.

After the wedding, when the tourney began, Lord Rogar was present for every tilt and every melee, surrounded by a lively and oft drunken coterie of great lords and famous knights.

Only one was the scion of a lordly house; Ser Lorence Roxton, from the Reach.

Therefore it was incumbent upon King Jaehaerys to marry and beget a son as soon as possible.

A great whale of a man, as famed for his corpulence as for the magnificence of his robes, Mattheus claimed descent from the Gardener kings of old, who had once ruled the Reach from their seat at Highgarden.

The present occupant of that holy office, whom Septon Moon had derided as the High Lickspittle, was cautious and complaisant, so there was little to no danger of any marriage being denounced from Oldtown so long as he continued to speak for the Seven from his seat in the Starry Sept.

Later a maester would have taught her to read and write and do sums, and a septa would have instructed her in piety, deportment, and the mysteries of the Faith.

Her sister Rhaena’s penchant for showering an unseemly amount of affection and attention on a succession of favorites, some of whom were considered less than suitable, had been the source of much whispering at court, and the queen did not want Alysanne to be the subject of similar rumors.

And here the tale grows even more tangled, for the identity of the man at the inn is a matter of some dispute, even amongst those who accept A Caution for Young Girls to contain a modicum of truth.

In the case of A Caution for Young Girls, such “improvements” largely consisted of adding ever more episodes of depravity and changing the existing episodes to make them even more disturbing and lascivious.

He also resented her friendship with his sister, Elissa; instead of encouraging her in what he regarded as her wild, willful ways, Ser Franklyn thought the queen should be enjoining her to do her duty to her house by making an appropriate marriage and producing children.

To refill his coffers Maegor's master of coin had raised existing taxes and imposed new ones, but these measures brought in less gold than anticipated and only served to deepen the anathema with which the lords of the realm regarded the king.

The new levies did, however, serve to make Lord Celtigar loathed throughout the city. Lord Rogar and Queen Alyssa received their share of opprobrium as well.

It would be pleasant to report that Rogar Baratheon, once back at Storm's End, reflected on the error of his ways, repented his mistakes, and became a chastened man.

“The Faith will look askance at any king who thinks to rule without a septon by his side,” he announced.

The goodness of the little queen, the silence of the Starry Sept, and the exhortations of the Seven Speakers had won over most of the Faithful for Jaehaerys and his Alysanne...but there are always some who will not be moved, and amongst the sisters who tended Jonquil's Pool were three such women, whose hearts were hard with hate.

Where no bonds of affection existed, upon the man's own death his heirs could and did expel the widow from the home, reducing her to penury; in the case of lords, the heirs might simply strip away the widow's prerogatives, incomes, and servants, reducing her to little more than a boarder.

To rectify these ills, King Jaehaerys in 52 AC promulgated the Widow's Law, reaffirming the right of the eldest son (or eldest daughter, where there was no son) to inherit, but requiring said heirs to maintain surviving widows in the same condition they had enjoyed before their husband's death.

He was said to be corrupt, taking the king's gold to fatten his own purse, a charge Lord Rego treated with derision. “Why should I steal from the king? I am twice as rich as he is.”

With the hindsight of history to guide us, we can look back and see that all the portents were there, ominous signs of difficult days ahead, but even the archmaesters of the Conclave saw none of that as they reflected on the year about to end.

He was dead before he reached the bottom. All across the realm, bells in every sept sang a dolorous song.

His High Holiness had been a leal servant to the gods and a staunch friend to the Iron Throne, it was only right that they be there to see him laid to rest.

Another day she spent with the septas who cared for the city's sick and destitute.

Some have suggested that rivalry with Lord Manfryd Redwyne, who had replaced him as lord admiral, played a part in Lord Daemon's decision, but this seems a petty aspersion to cast at a man who served so ably and so long.

Trade increased tenfold, despite the vicissitudes of wind, weather, and wars and the disruptions they caused from time to time.

Some were third- or fourth-hand, others with such paucity of detail that they amounted to little more than “I may have seen a dragon. Or something big, with wings.”

I thought that was the most hideous thing that I should ever see, but I was quickly disabused of the notion, for a worse horror was awaiting me.

If we discount the tales of certain sorcerers and mountebanks (as we should), he is mayhaps the only living creature in the world that knew Valyria before the Doom.

The peace talks dragged on far longer than anticipated, for the acrimony between the two Free Cities ran deeper than Jaehaerys had known.

The callow boy that the High Septon had crowned that day was long gone; his place had been taken by a man of four-and-twenty who was every inch a king.

It was on Prince Vaegon's fifteenth nameday in 78 AC, a year short of his manhood, that Jaehaerys and Alysanne broached the obvious solution to the Grand Maester. “Do you think mayhaps Vaegon might have the makings of a maester?”

Not only did Jaehaerys have spies in Morion’s own court, and friends amongst the shrewder Dornish lords, but the pirates of the Stepstones, the sellsails of Myr, and the corsairs of the Pepper Coast are none of them famed for their discretion. A few coins changing hands was all it took.

Aerea Targaryen had once been thought to be wild and willful, given to acts of disobedience, but Princess Saera's girlhood made Aerea seem a model of decorum by comparison.

“She went from denial to dismissal to quibbling to contrition to accusation to justification to defiance in the space of an hour, with stops at giggling and weeping along the way,” Septon Barth would write.

By that time, the queen's absence had been noticed, and His Grace would oft find himself seated next to some lissome maid or handsome widow at feasts, or riding beside them when hawking or hunting, but he took no notice of any of them.