Lord of the Tides. The third wife, whose children were the youngest (one still on her breast), would be sent down to Storm’s End, where Garon Baratheon and young Lord Boremund would see to their upbringing. None were ever again to call themselves Strong, the queen decreed; from this day they would bear the bastard names Rivers, Waters, and Storm. “For that gift, you may thank your father, that hollow knight.”
The shame that Lucamore the Lusty visited on the Kingsguard and the Crown was not the only difficulty Jaehaerys and Alysanne faced in 73 AC. Let us pause now for a moment, and consider the vexing question of their seventh- and eighthborn children, Prince Vaegon and Princess Daella.
Queen Alysanne took great pride in arranging marriages, and had put together hundreds of fruitful unions for lords and ladies from one end of the realm to another, but never had she faced so much difficulty as she did whilst searching for mates for her four younger children. The struggle would torment her for years, bring about no end of conflict between her and the children (her daughters in particular), drive her and the king apart, and in the end bring her so much grief and pain that for a time Her Grace contemplated renouncing her marriage to spend the rest of her life with the silent sisters.
The frustrations started with Vaegon and Daella. Only a year apart in age, the prince and princess seemed well matched as babes, and the king and queen assumed that the two of them would eventually marry. Their older siblings Baelon and Alyssa had become inseparable, and plans were already being made for them to wed. Why not Vaegon and Daella as well? “Be sweet to your little sister,” King Jaehaerys told the prince when he was five. “One day she will be your Alysanne.”
As the children grew, however, it became apparent that the two of them were not ideally suited. There was no warmth between them, as the queen saw plainly. Vaegon tolerated his sister’s presence, but never sought it out. Daella seemed frightened of her sour, bookish brother, who would sooner read than play. The prince thought the princess stupid; she thought him mean. “They are only children,” Jaehaerys said when Alysanne brought the problem to his attention. “They will warm to one another in time.” They never did. If anything, their mutual dislike only deepened.
The matter came to a head in 73 AC. Prince Vaegon was ten years old and Princess Daella nine when one of the queen’s companions, new to the Red Keep, teasingly asked the two of them when they would be married. Vaegon reacted as if he had been slapped. “I would never marry her,” the boy said, in front of half the court. “She can barely read. She should find some lord in need of stupid children, for that’s the only sort he will ever have of her.”
Princess Daella, as might be expected, burst into tears and fled the hall, with her mother, the queen, rushing after her. It fell to her sister Alyssa, at thirteen three years Vaegon’s elder, to pour a flagon of wine over his head. Even that did not make the prince repent. “You are wasting Arbor gold,” was all he said before stalking from the hall to change his clothing.
Plainly, the king and queen concluded afterward, some other bride must needs be found for Vaegon. Briefly, they considered their younger daughters. Princess Saera was six years old in 73 AC, Princess Viserra only two. “Vaegon has never looked twice at either one of them,” Alysanne told the king. “I am not sure he is aware that they exist. Perhaps if some maester wrote about them in a book…”
“I shall tell Grand Maester Elysar to commence tomorrow,” the king japed. Then he said, “He is only ten. He does not see girls, no more than they see him, but that will change soon. He is comely enough, and a prince of Westeros, third in line to the Iron Throne. In a few more years maidens will be fluttering around him like butterflies and blushing if he deigns to look their way.”
The queen was unconvinced. Comely was perhaps too generous a word for Prince Vaegon, who had the silver-gold hair and purple eyes of the Targaryens, but was long of face and round of shoulder even at ten, with a pinched sour cast to his mouth that made men suspect he had recently been sucking