For the Hand and council of regents, Baela Targaryen’s midnight flight across Blackwater Bay had confirmed all their doubts about her. “The girl is wild, willful, and wanton, as we feared,” Ser Willis Fell declared mournfully, “and now she has tied herself to Lord Corlys’s upjumped bastard. A snake for a sire, a mouse for a mother…is this to be our prince consort?” The regents were in agreement; Baela Targaryen could not be King Aegon’s heir. “It must be Lady Rhaena,” declared Mooton, “provided she is wed.”

This time, at Ser Tyland’s insistence, the girl herself was made a part of the discussions. Lady Rhaena proved to be as tractable as her sister had been willful. She would of course wed whomever the king and council wished, she allowed, though “it would please me if he was not so old he could not give me children, nor so fat that he would crush me when we are abed. So long as he is kind and gentle and noble, I know that I shall love him.” When the Hand asked if she had any favorites amongst the lords and knights who had paid her suit, she confessed that she was “especially fond” of Ser Corwyn Corbray, whom she had first met in the Vale whilst a ward of Lady Arryn.

Ser Corwyn was far from an ideal choice. A second son, he had two daughters from a previous marriage. At thirty-two, he was a man, not a green boy. Yet House Corbray was ancient and honorable, Ser Corwyn a knight of such repute that his late father had given him Lady Forlorn, the Valyrian steel blade of the Corbrays. His brother Leowyn was the Protector of the Realm. That alone would have made it difficult for the regents to raise objection. And so the match was made: a quick betrothal, followed by a hasty wedding a fortnight later. (The Hand would have preferred a longer betrothal, but the regents felt it prudent for Rhaena to wed quickly, in the event that her sister was already with child.)

The twins were not the only ladies of the realm to wed in 132 AC. Later that same year, Benjicot Blackwood, Lord of Raventree, led a retinue up the kingsroad to Winterfell, to stand witness at the marriage of his aunt Alysanne to Lord Cregan Stark. With the North already in the grip of winter, the journey took thrice as long as expected. Half the riders lost their horses as the column struggled through howling snowstorms, and thrice Lord Blackwood’s carts were attacked by bands of outlaws, who carried off much of the column’s food and all the wedding gifts. The wedding itself was said to be splendid, however; Black Aly and her wolf pledged their troth before the heart tree in Winterfell’s icy godswood. At the feast afterward, four-year-old Rickon, Lord Cregan’s son by his first wife, sang a song for his new stepmother.

Lady Elenda Baratheon, the widow of Storm’s End, also took a new husband that year. With Lord Borros dead and Olyvar an infant, Dornish incursions into the stormlands had grown more numerous, and the outlaws of the kingswood were proving troublesome. The widow felt the need of a man’s strong hand to keep the peace. She chose Ser Steffon Connington, second son of the Lord of Griffin’s Roost. Though twenty years younger than Lady Elenda, Connington had proved his valor during Lord Borros’s campaign against the Vulture King, and was said to be as fierce as he was handsome.

Elsewhere, men were more concerned with war than weddings. All along the Sunset Sea, the Red Kraken and his ironmen continued to raid and reave. Tyrosh, Myr, Lys, and the three-headed alliance of Braavos, Pentos, and Lorath battled one another across the Stepstones and the Disputed Lands, whilst the rogue kingdom of Racallio Ryndoon pinched shut the bottom of the narrow sea. In King’s Landing, Duskendale, Maidenpool, and Gulltown, trade withered. Merchants and traders came howling to the king…who either refused to see them, or was not allowed to, depending on whose chronicle we trust. The spectre of famine loomed in the North, as Cregan Stark and his lords bannermen watched their food stores dwindle, whilst the Night’s Watch turned back an ever-increasing number of wildling incursions from beyond the Wall.

Late that year, a dreadful contagion swept across the Three Sisters. The Winter Fever, as it was called, killed half the population of Sisterton. The surviving half, believing that the disease had come to their shores on a whaler from the Port of Ibben, rose up and butchered every Ibbenese sailor they could lay hands on, setting fire to their ships. It made no matter. When the disease crossed the Bite to White Harbor, the prayers of the septons and the potions of the maesters proved equally powerless against it. Thousands died, amongst them Lord Desmond Manderly. His splendid son Ser Medrick, the finest knight in the North, survived him by only four days before succumbing to the same affliction. As Ser Medrick had been childless, this had a further calamitous consequence, in that the lordship devolved upon his brother Ser Torrhen, who was thence forced to give up his place on the council of regents to take up the rule of White Harbor. That left four regents, where once there had been seven.

So many lords, both great and small, had perished during the Dance of the Dragons that the Citadel rightly names this time the Winter of the Widows. Never before or since in the history of the Seven Kingdoms have so many women wielded so much power, ruling in the place of their slain husbands, brothers, and fathers, for sons in swaddling clothes or still on the teat. Many of their stories have been collected in Archmaester Abelon’s mammoth When Women Ruled: Ladies of the Aftermath. Though Abelon treats hundreds of widows, we must needs confine ourselves to fewer. Four such women played crucial parts in the history of the realm in late 132 and early 133 AC, whether for good or ill.

Foremost of these was Lady Johanna, the widow of Casterly Rock, who ruled the domains of House Lannister for her young son, Lord Loreon. She had appealed time and time again to Aegon III’s Hand, her late lord husband’s twin, for aid against the reavers, but none had been forthcoming. Desperate to protect her people, Lady Johanna at last donned a man’s mail to lead the men of Lannisport and Casterly Rock against the foe. The songs tell of how she slew a dozen ironmen beneath the walls of Kayce, but those may be safely put aside as the work of drunken singers (Johanna carried a banner into battle, not a sword). Her courage did help inspire her westermen, however, for the raiders were soon routed and Kayce was saved. Amongst the dead was the Red Kraken’s favorite uncle.

Lady Sharis Footly, the widow of Tumbleton, achieved a different sort of fame by her efforts to restore that shattered town. Ruling in the name of her infant son (half a year after Second Tumbleton, she had given birth to a lusty dark-haired boy whom she proclaimed her late lord husband’s trueborn heir, though it was far more likely that the boy had been sired by Bold Jon Roxton), Lady Sharis pulled down the burned shells of shops and houses, rebuilt the town walls, buried the dead, planted wheat and barley and turnips in the fields where the camps had been, and even had the heads of the dragons Seasmoke and Vermithor cleaned and mounted and displayed in the town square, where travelers paid good coin to view them (a penny for a look, a star to touch them).

In Oldtown, relations between the High Septon and Lord Ormund’s widow, the Lady Sam, continued to worsen when she ignored His High Holiness’s command to remove herself from her stepson’s bed and take vows as a silent sister as penace for her sins. Righteous in his wroth, the High Septon condemned the Dowager Lady of Oldtown as a shameless fornicator and forbade her to set foot in the Starry Sept until she had repented and sought forgiveness. Instead Lady Samantha mounted a warhorse and burst into the sept as His High Holiness was leading a prayer. When he demanded to know her purpose, Lady Sam replied that whilst he had forbidden her to set foot in the sept, he had said naught about her horse’s hooves. Then she commanded her knights to bar the doors; if the sept was closed to her, it would be closed to all. Though he quaked and thundered and called down maledictions upon “this harlot on a horse,” in the end the High Septon had no choice but to relent.