ice, all to no avail. She died in Rhaena Targaryen’s arms, convulsing as the queen wept bitter tears.
“You weep for her,” Androw Farman said when he saw the tears on his wife’s face, “but would you weep for me?” His words woke a fury in the queen. Lashing him across the face, Rhaena commanded him to leave her, declaring that she wanted to be alone. “You shall be,” Androw said. “She was the last of them.”
Even then, so lost was the queen in her grief that she did not realize what had happened. It was Rego Draz, the king’s Pentoshi master of coin, who first gave voice to suspicion when Jaehaerys assembled his small council to discuss the deaths on Dragonstone. Reading over Maester Anselm’s accounts, Lord Rego furrowed his brow and said, “Sickness? This is no sickness. A weasel in the guts, dead in a day…this is the tears of Lys.”
“Poison?” King Jaehaerys said in shock.
“We know more of such things in the Free Cities,” Draz assured him. “It is the tears, never doubt it. The old maester would have seen it soon enough, so he had to die first. That is how I would do it. Not that I would. Poison is…dishonorable.”
“Only women were struck down,” objected Lord Velaryon.
“Only women got the poison, then,” said Rego Draz.
When Septon Barth and Grand Maester Benifer concurred with Lord Rego’s words, the king dispatched a raven to Dragonstone. Once Rhaena Targaryen read his words, she had no doubt. Summoning the captain of her guards, she commanded that her husband be found and brought to her.
Androw Farman was not to be found in his bedchamber nor the queen’s, nor the great hall, nor the stables, nor the sept, nor Aegon’s Garden. In Sea Dragon Tower, in the maester’s chambers under the rookery, they discovered Maester Anselm dead, with a dagger between his shoulder blades. With the gates closed and barred, there was no way to leave the castle save by dragon. “My worm of a husband does not have the courage for that,” Rhaena declared.
Androw Farman was located at last in the Chamber of the Painted Table, a longsword clutched in his grasp. He made no attempt to deny the poisonings. Instead he boasted. “I brought them cups of wine, and they drank. They thanked me, and they drank. Why not? A cupbearer, a serving man, that’s how they saw me. Androw the sweet. Androw the jape. What could I do, but fall off the dragon? Well, I could have done a lot of things. I could have been a lord. I could have made laws and been wise and given you counsel. I could have killed your enemies, as easily as I killed your friends. I could have given you children.”
Rhaena Targaryen did not deign to reply to him. Instead she spoke to her guards, saying, “Take him and geld him, but staunch the wound. I want his cock and balls fried up and fed to him. Do not let him die until he has eaten every bite.”
“No,” Androw Farman said, as they moved around the Painted Table to grasp him. “My wife can fly, and so can I.” And so saying, he slashed ineffectually at the nearest man, backed to the window behind him, and leapt out. His flight was a short one: downward, to his death. Afterward Rhaena Targaryen had his body hacked to pieces and fed to her dragons.
His was the last notable death of 54 AC, but there was still more ill to come in that terrible Year of the Stranger. Just as a stone thrown into a pond will send out ripples in all directions, the evil that Androw Farman had wrought would spread across the land, touching and twisting the lives of others long after the dragons were done feasting on his blackened, smoking remains.
The first ripple was felt in the king’s own small council, when Lord Daemon Velaryon announced his desire to step down as Hand of the King. Queen Alyssa, it will be recalled, had been Lord Daemon’s sister, and his young niece Lianna had been amongst the women poisoned on Dragonstone. 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. Let us rather take his lordship at his word and accept that his advancing age and a desire to