did not choose these companions for herself; they were selected for her by her mother, Queen Alyssa, and they came and went with some frequency, to ascertain that the princess did not grow too fond of any of them. 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.
All this changed when King Aenys died on Dragonstone and his brother, Maegor, returned from across the narrow sea to seize the Iron Throne. The new king had little love and less trust for any of his brother’s children, and he had his mother, the Dowager Queen Visenya, to enforce his will. Queen Alyssa’s household knights and servants were dismissed, together with the servants and companions of her children, and Jaehaerys and Alysanne were made wards of their great-aunt, the fearsome Visenya. Hostages in all but name, they spent their uncle’s reign being shuttled between Driftmark, Dragonstone, and King’s Landing at the will of others, until Visenya’s death in 44 AC offered Queen Alyssa an opportunity to escape, a chance she seized with alacrity, fleeing Dragonstone with Jaehaerys, Alysanne, and the blade Dark Sister.
No reliable accounts of Princess Alysanne’s life after the escape survive to this day. She does not appear again in the annals of the realm until the final days of Maegor’s bloody reign, when her mother and Lord Rogar rode forth from Storm’s End at the head of an army, whilst Alysanne, Jaehaerys, and their sister, Rhaena, descended on King’s Landing with their dragons.
Undoubtedly Princess Alysanne had handmaids and companions in the days that followed Maegor’s death. Their names and particulars have not come down to us, unfortunately. We do know that none of them came with the princess when she and Jaehaerys fled the Red Keep on their dragons. Aside from the seven knights of the Kingsguard and the castle garrison, cooks, stablehands, and other servants, the king and his bride were unattended on Dragonstone.
That was hardly proper for a princess, let alone for a queen. Alysanne must have her household, and in that her mother, Alyssa, saw an opportunity to undermine, and mayhaps undo, her marriage. The Queen Regent resolved to dispatch to Dragonstone a carefully selected company of companions and servants to see to the young queen’s needs. The plan, Grand Maester Benifer assures us, was Queen Alyssa’s … but it was one that Lord Rogar assented to gladly, for he saw at once a way to twist it to his own ends.
The aged Septon Oswyck, who had performed the wedding rites for Jaehaerys and Alysanne, kept the sept on Dragonstone, but a young lady of royal birth required one of her own sex to see to her religious instruction. Queen Alyssa sent three; the formidable Septa Ysabel, and two well-born novices of Alysanne’s own age, Lyra and Edyth. To take charge of the serving girls and maids of Alysanne’s household, she dispatched Lady Lucinda Tully, the wife of the Lord of Riverrun, whose fierce piety was renowned through all the land. With her came her younger sister, Ella of House Broome, a modest maid whose name had briefly been offered as a match for Jaehaerys. Lord Celtigar’s daughters, so recently scorned by the Hand as being chinless, breastless, and witless, were included as well. (“We had as well get some use of them,” Lord Rogar supposedly told their father.) Three other girls of noble birth made up the remainder of the company, one each from the Vale, the stormlands, and the Reach: Jennis of House Templeton, Coryanne of House Wylde, and Rosamund of House Ball.
Queen Alyssa wanted her daughter attended by suitable companions of her own age and station, no doubt, but that was not her sole motivation in sending these ladies to Dragonstone. Septa Ysabel, the novices Edyth and Lyra, and the deeply pious Lady Lucinda and her sister had a further charge. It was the hope of the Queen Regent that these fiercely righteous women might impress upon Alysanne, and mayhaps even Jaehaerys, that for brother to lie with sister was an abomination in the eyes of the Faith. “The children” (as Alyssa persisted in calling the king and queen) were not evil, only young and willful; suitably instructed, they might see the error of their ways and repent their marriage before it tore the realm apart. Or so she prayed.
Lord Rogar’s motives were baser. Unable to rely on the loyalty of the castle garrison or the knights of the Kingsguard, the Hand needed eyes and ears on Dragonstone. All that Jaehaerys and Alysanne said and did was to be reported back to him, he made clear to Lady Lucinda and the others. He was especially anxious to learn if and when the king and queen intended on consummating their marriage. That, he stressed, must be prevented.
And mayhaps there was more.
And now unfortunately we must give some consideration to a certain distasteful book that first appeared in the Seven Kingdoms some forty years after the events presently being discussed. Copies of this book still pass from hand to hand in the low places of Westeros, and may oft be found in certain brothels (those catering to patrons able to read) and the libraries of men of low morals, where they are best kept under lock and key, hidden from the eyes of maidens, goodwives, children, and the chaste and pious.
The book in question is known under various titles, amongst them Sins of the Flesh, The High and the Low, A Wanton’s Tale, and The Wickedness of Men, but all versions bear the subtitle A Caution for Young Girls. It purports to be the testimony of a young maid of noble birth who surrendered her virtue to a groom in her lord father’s castle, gave birth to a child out of wedlock, and thereafter found herself partaking of every sort of wickedness imaginable during a long life of sin, suffering, and slavery.
If the author’s tale is true (parts of it strain credulity), during the course of her life she found herself a handmaid to a queen, the paramour of a young knight, a camp follower in the Disputed Lands of Essos, a serving wench in Myr, a mummer in Tyrosh, the plaything of a corsair queen in the Basilisk Isles, a slave in Old Volantis (where she was tattooed, pierced, and ringed), the handmaid of a Qartheen warlock, and finally the mistress of a pleasure house in Lys … before ultimately returning to Oldtown and the Faith. Purportedly she ended her life as a septa in the Starry Sept, where she set down this story of her life to warn other young maids not to do as she had done.
The lascivious details of the author’s erotic adventures need not concern us here. Our only interest is in the early part of her sordid tale, the story of her youth … for the alleged author of A Caution for Young Girls is none other than Coryanne Wylde, one of the girls sent to Dragonstone as a companion to the little queen.
We have no way to ascertain the veracity of her story, nor even whether she was in truth the author of this infamous book (some argue plausibly that the text is the product of several hands, for the style of the prose varies greatly from episode to episode). Lady Coryanne’s early history, however, is confirmed in the accounts of the maester who served at the Rain House during her youth. At the age of thirteen, he records, Lord Wylde’s younger daughter was indeed seduced and deflowered by a “surly lad” from the stables. In A Caution for Young Girls, this lad is described as a handsome boy her own age, but the maester’s account differs, painting the seducer as a pox-scarred varlet of thirty years distinguished only by a “male member as stout as a stallion’s.”
Whatever the truth, the “surly lad” was gelded and sent to the Wall as soon as his deed was known, whilst Lady Coryanne was confined to her chambers to give birth to his baseborn son. The boy was sent away soon after birth, to Storm’s End, where he would be fostered by one of the castle stewards and his barren wife.
The bastard boy was born in 48 AC, according to the maester’s journals. Lady Coryanne was carefully watched afterward, but few beyond the walls of the Rain House knew of her shame. When the raven came to summon her to King’s Landing, her lady mother told her sternly that she was never to speak of her child or her sin. “In the Red Keep, they will take you for a maiden.” But as the girl made her way to the city, escorted by her father and a brother, they stopped for the night at an inn on the south bank of the Blackwater Rush, beside the ferry landing. There she found a certain great lord awaiting her arrival.
And
