voice was thin and tremulous, no part of the ceremony was neglected. The seven knights of the Kingsguard stood witness to the union, their white cloaks snapping in the wind. The castle’s garrison and servants looked on as well, together with a good part of the smallfolk of the fishing village that huddled below Dragonstone’s mighty curtain walls.
A modest feast followed the ceremony, and many toasts were drunk to the health of the boy king and his new queen. Afterward Jaehaerys and Alysanne retired to the bedchamber where Aegon the Conqueror had once slept beside his sister Rhaenys, but in view of the bride’s youth there was no bedding ceremony, and the marriage was not consummated.
That omission would prove to be of great importance when Lord Rogar and Queen Alyssa arrived belatedly from King’s Landing in a war galley, accompanied by a dozen knights, forty men-at-arms, Septon Mattheus, and Grand Maester Benifer, whose letters give us the most complete accounting of what transpired.
Jaehaerys and Alysanne met them inside the castle gates, holding hands. It is said that Queen Alyssa wept when she saw them. “You foolish children,” she said. “You know not what you’ve done.”
Then up spoke Septon Mattheus, his voice thunderous as he berated the king and queen and prophesized that this abomination would once more plunge all of Westeros into war. “They shall curse your incest from the Dornish Marches to the Wall, and every pious son of the Mother and the Father shall denounce you as the sinners you are.” The septon’s face grew red and swollen as he raved, Benifer tells us, and spittle sprayed from his lips.
Jaehaerys the Conciliator is rightly honored in the annals of the Seven Kingdoms for his calm demeanor and even temper, but let no man think that the fire of the Targaryens did not burn in his veins. He showed it then. When Septon Mattheus finally paused for a breath, the king said, “I will accept chastisement from Her Grace my mother, but not from you. Hold your tongue, fat man. If another word passes your lips, I will have them sewn shut.”
Septon Mattheus spoke no more.
Lord Rogar was not so easily cowed. Blunt and to the point, he asked only if the marriage had been consummated. “Tell me true, Your Grace. Was there a bedding? Did you claim her maidenhead?”
“No,” the king replied. “She is too young.”
At that Lord Rogar smiled. “Good. You are not wed.” He turned to the knights who had accompanied him from King’s Landing. “Separate these children, gently if you please. Escort the princess to Sea Dragon Tower and keep her there. His Grace shall accompany us back to the Red Keep.”
But as his men moved forward, the seven knights of Jaehaerys’s Kingsguard stepped up and drew their swords. “Come no closer,” warned Ser Gyles Morrigen. “Any man who lays a hand upon our king and queen shall die today.”
Lord Rogar was dismayed. “Sheath your steel and move aside,” he commanded. “Have you forgotten? I am the King’s Hand.”
“Aye,” old Sour Sam answered, “but we’re the Kingsguard, not the Hand’s guard, and it’s the lad who sits the chair, not you.”
Rogar Baratheon bristled at Ser Samgood’s words, and answered, “You are seven. I have half a hundred swords behind me. A word from me and they will cut you to pieces.”
“They might kill us,” replied young Pate the Woodcock, brandishing his spear, “but you will be the first to die, m’lord, you have my word upon that.”
What might have happened next no man can say, had not Queen Alyssa chosen that moment to speak. “I have seen enough death,” she said. “So have we all. Put up your swords, sers. What is done is done, and now we all must needs live with it. May the gods have mercy on the realm.” She turned to her children. “We shall go in peace. Let no man speak of what happened here today.”
“As you command, Mother.” King Jaehaerys pulled his sister closer and put his arm around her. “But do not think that you shall unmake this marriage. We are one now, and neither gods nor men shall part us.”
“Never,” his bride affirmed. “Send me to the ends of the earth and wed me to the King of Mossovy or the Lord of the Grey Waste, Silverwing will always bring me back to Jaehaerys.” And with that she raised herself onto her toes and lifted her face to the king, and he kissed her full upon the lips whilst all looked on.[1]
When the Hand and the Queen Regent had made their departure, the king and his young bride closed the castle gates and returned to their chambers. Dragonstone would remain their refuge and their residence for the remainder of Jaehaerys’s minority. It is written that the young king and queen were seldom apart during that time, sharing every meal, talking late into the night of the green days of their childhood and the challenges ahead, fishing and hawking together, mingling with the island’s smallfolk in dockside inns, reading to one another from dusty leatherbound tomes they found in the castle library, taking lessons together from Dragonstone’s maesters (“for we still have much to learn,” Alysanne is said to have reminded her husband), praying beside Septon Oswyck. They flew together as well, all around the Dragonmont and oft as far as Driftmark.
If servants’ tales may be believed, the king and his new queen slept naked and shared many long and lingering kisses, abed and at table and at many other times throughout the day, yet never consummated their union. Another year and a half would pass before Jaehaerys and Alysanne would finally join as man and woman.
Whenever lords and council members traveled to Dragonstone to consult with the young king, as they did from time to time, Jaehaerys received them in the Chamber of the Painted Table where his grandsire had once planned his conquest of Westeros, with Alysanne ever by his side. “Aegon had no secrets from Rhaenys and Visenya, and I have none from Alysanne,” he said.
Though it might well have been that there were no secrets between them during these bright days in the morning of the marriage, their union itself remained a secret to most of Westeros. Upon their return to King’s Landing, Lord Rogar instructed all those who had accompanied them to Dragonstone to speak no word of what had transpired there, if they wished to keep their tongues. Nor was any announcement made to the realm at large. When Septon Mattheus attempted to send word of the match to the High Septon and Most Devout in Oldtown, Grand Maester Benifer burned his letter rather than dispatch a raven, on orders from the Hand.
The Lord of Storm’s End wanted time. Angry at the disrespect he felt the king had shown him and unaccustomed to defeat, Rogar Baratheon remained determined to find a way to part Jaehaerys and Alysanne. So long as their marriage remained unconsummated, he believed, a chance remained. Best then to keep the wedding secret, so it might be undone without anyone being the wiser.
Queen Alyssa wanted time as well, though for a different reason. What is done is done, she had said at the gates of Dragonstone, and so she believed … but memories of the bloodshed and chaos that had greeted the marriage of her other son and daughter still haunted her nights, and the Queen Regent was desperate to find some way to ascertain that history would not be repeated.
Meanwhile, she and her lord husband still had a realm to rule for the best part of a year, until Jaehaerys attained his sixteenth nameday and took the power into his own hands.
And so matters stood in Westeros as the Year of the Three Brides drew to an end, and gave way to a new year, the 50th since Aegon’s Conquest.
