Saddest of all was the loss of Princess Gael, the Winter Child, born in 80 AC when Queen Alysanne was forty-four and thought to be well past her childbearing years. A sweet-natured girl, but frail and somewhat simpleminded, she remained with the queen long after her other children had grown and gone, but in 99 AC she vanished from court, and soon afterward it was announced that she had died of a summer fever. Only after both her parents were gone did the true tale come out. Seduced and abandoned by a traveling singer, the princess had given birth to a stillborn son, then, overwhelmed by grief, walked into the waters of Blackwater Bay and drowned.

Some say that Alysanne never recovered from that loss, for her Winter Child alone had been a true companion during her declining years. Saera still lived, somewhere in Volantis (she had departed Lys some years before, an infamous woman but a wealthy one), but she was dead to Jaehaerys, and the letters Alysanne sent her secretly from time to time all went unanswered. Vaegon was an archmaester at the Citadel. A cold and distant son, he had grown to be a cold and distant man. He wrote, as a son ought. His words were dutiful, but there was no warmth to them, and it had been years since Alysanne had last seen his face.

Only Baelon the Brave remained near her till the end. Her Spring Prince visited her as often as he could and always won a smile from her, but Baelon was the Prince of Dragonstone, Hand of the King, forever coming and going, sitting at his father’s side at council, treating with the lords. “You will be a great king, even greater than your father,” Alysanne told him the last time they were together. She did not know. How could she know?

After the death of Princess Gael, King’s Landing and the Red Keep became unbearable to Alysanne. She could no longer serve as she once had, as a partner to the king in his labors, and the court was full of strangers whose names Alysanne could not quite recall. Seeking peace, she returned once more to Dragonstone, where she had spent the happiest days of her life with Jaehaerys, between their first and second marriages. The Old King would join her there when he could. “How is it that I am the Old King now, but you are still the Good Queen?” he asked her once. Alysanne laughed. “I am old as well, but I am still younger than you.”

Alysanne Targaryen died on Dragonstone on the first day of the seventh moon in 100 AC, a full century after Aegon’s Conquest. She was sixty-four years old.

The seeds of war are oft planted during times of peace. So has it been in Westeros. The bloody struggle for the Iron Throne known as the Dance of the Dragons, fought from 129–131 AC, had its roots half a century earlier, during the longest and most peaceful reign that any of the Conqueror’s descendants ever enjoyed, that of Jaehaerys I Targaryen, the Conciliator.

The Old King and Good Queen Alysanne ruled together until her death in 100 AC (aside from two periods of estrangement, known as the First and Second Quarrels), and produced thirteen children. Four of them—two sons and two daughters—grew to maturity, married, and produced children of their own. Never before or since had the Seven Kingdoms been blessed (or cursed, in the view of some) with so many Targaryen princelings. From the loins of the Old King and his beloved queen sprang such a confusion of claims and claimants than many maesters believe that the Dance of the Dragons, or some similar struggle, was inevitable.

This was not apparent in the early years of Jaehaerys’s reign, for in Prince Aemon and Prince Baelon His Grace had the proverbial “heir and a spare,” and seldom has the realm been blessed with two more able princes. In 62 AC, at the age of seven, Aemon was formally anointed Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne. Knighted at seventeen, a tourney champion at twenty, he became his father’s justiciar and master of laws at six-and-twenty. Though he never served his father as Hand of the King, that was only because that office was occupied by Septon Barth, the Old King’s most trusted friend and “companion of my labors.” Nor was Baelon Targaryen any less accomplished. The younger prince earned his knighthood at sixteen, and was wed at eighteen. Though he and Aemon enjoyed a healthy rivalry, no man doubted the love that bound them. The succession appeared solid as stone.

But the stone began to crack in 92 AC, when Aemon, Prince of Dragonstone, was slain on Tarth by a Myrish crossbow bolt loosed at the man beside him. The king and queen mourned his loss, and the realm with them, but no man was more bereft than Prince Baelon, who went at once to Tarth and avenged his brother by driving the Myrmen into the sea. On his return to King’s Landing, Baelon was hailed as a hero by cheering throngs, and embraced by his father the king, who named him Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne. It was a popular decree. The smallfolk loved Baelon the Brave, and the lords of the realm saw him as his brother’s obvious successor.

But Prince Aemon had a child: his daughter, Rhaenys, born in 74 AC, had grown into a clever, capable, and beautiful young woman. In 90 AC, at the age of sixteen, she had wed the king’s admiral and master of ships, Corlys of House Velaryon, Lord of the Tides, known as the Sea Snake after the most famous of his many ships. Moreover, Princess Rhaenys was with child when her father died. By granting Dragonstone to Prince Baelon, King Jaehaerys was not only passing over Rhaenys, but also (possibly) her unborn son.

The king’s decision was in accord with well-established practice. Aegon the Conqueror had been the first Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, not his sister Visenya, two years his elder. Jaehaerys himself had followed his usurping uncle Maegor on the Iron Throne, though had the order of birth alone ruled, his sister Rhaena had a better claim. Jaehaerys did not make his decision lightly; he is known to have discussed the matter with his small council. Undoubtedly he consulted Septon Barth, as he did on all important matters, and the views of Grand Maester Elysar were given much weight. All were in accord. Baelon, a seasoned knight of thirty-five, was better suited for rule than the eighteen-year-old Princess Rhaenys or her unborn babe (who might or might not be a boy, whereas Prince Baelon had already sired two healthy sons, Viserys and Daemon). The love of the commons for Baelon the Brave was also cited.

Some dissented. Rhaenys herself was the first to raise objection. “You would rob my son of his birthright,” she told the king, with a hand upon her swollen belly. Her husband, Corlys Velaryon, was so wroth that he gave up his admiralty and his place on the small council and took his wife back to Driftmark. Lady Jocelyn of House Baratheon, Rhaenys’s mother, was also angered, as was her formidable brother, Boremund, Lord of Storm’s End.

The most prominent dissenter was Good Queen Alysanne, who had helped her husband rule the Seven Kingdoms for many years, and now saw her son’s daughter being passed over because of her sex. “A ruler needs a good head and a true heart,” she famously told the king. “A cock is not essential. If Your Grace truly believes that women lack the wit to rule, plainly you have no further need of me.” And thus Queen Alysanne departed King’s Landing and flew to Dragonstone on her dragon Silverwing. She and King Jaehaerys remained apart for two years, the period of estrangement recorded in the histories as the Second Quarrel.

The Old King and the Good Queen were again reconciled in 94 AC by the good offices of their daughter, Septa Maegelle, but never reached accord on the succession. The queen died of a wasting illness in 100 AC, at the age of four-and-sixty, still insisting that her granddaughter Rhaenys and her children had been unfairly cheated of their rights. “The boy in the belly,” the unborn child who had been the subject of so much debate, proved to be a girl when born in 93 AC. Her mother named her Laena. The next year, Rhaenys gave her a brother, Laenor. Prince Baelon was firmly ensconced as heir apparent by then, yet House Velaryon and House Baratheon clung to the belief that young Laenor had a better claim to the Iron Throne, and some few even argued for the rights of his elder sister, Laena, and their mother, Rhaenys.

In the last years of her life, the gods dealt Queen Alysanne many cruel blows, as has previously been recounted. Her Grace knew joys as well as sorrows during the same years, however, chief amongst them her grandchildren. There were weddings as well. In 93 AC she attended the wedding of Prince Baelon’s eldest son, Viserys, to Lady Aemma of House Arryn, the eleven-year-old child of the late Princess Daella (their marriage was not consummated until the bride had flowered, two years later). In 97, the Good Queen saw Baelon’s second son, Daemon, take to wife Lady Rhea of House Royce, heir to the ancient castle of Runestone in the Vale.