In the House of the Dragon adaption, Lord Lyonel Strong said something interesting.
“King Jaehaerys ruled over half a century of peace while his children drove him to the edge
of madness ... his daughters, in particular.” One of those daughters was Alyssa Targaryen,
the mother of King Viserys and Prince Daemon Targaryen. In this video,
we are going to go over the full life of this awesome character. Alyssa Targaryen.
Good Queen Alysanne’s first child was named Daenerys Targaryen. When Daenerys died,
the Queen was very depressed. The moon had not turned twice since Princess Daenery’s death when
Her Grace learned that she was once again carrying a child. With winter holding the realm in its
icy grip, the queen once again chose caution and retired to Dragonstone. Late that year,
60 AC, she delivered her fifth child, a daughter she named Alyssa after her mother.
Winter broke not long after the queen gave birth, and Alyssa proved to be a lively, healthy
child. As a babe she was so like her late sister, Daenerys, that the queen oft wept to behold her,
remembering the child she had lost. The likeness faded as the princess grew older, however;
long-faced and skinny, Alyssa had little of her sister’s beauty. Her hair was a dirty blond tangle
with no hint of silver to evoke the dragonlords of old, and she had been born with mismatched eyes,
one violet, the other a startling green. Her ears were too big and her smile lopsided, and when she
was six playing in the yard a whack across the face from a wooden sword broke her nose. It healed
crooked, but Alyssa did not seem to care. By that age, her mother had come to realize that it
was not Daenerys that she took after, but Baelon. Just as Baelon had once followed Aemon everywhere,
Alyssa trailed after Baelon. “Like a puppy,” the Spring Prince complained.
Baelon was two years younger than Aemon, Alyssa nearly four years younger than him … “and a girl,”
which made it far worse in his eyes. The princess did not act like a girl, however. She wore boy’s
clothes when she could, shunned the company of other girls, and preferred riding and climbing and
dueling with wooden swords to sewing and reading and singing. And she refused to eat porridge.
Two years later, the gods blessed Jaehaerys and Alysanne with yet another child, a daughter
they named Maegelle. A gentle, selfless, and sweet-natured girl, and exceedingly bright,
she soon attached herself to her sister Alyssa in much the same way that Prince Baelon had
attached himself to Prince Aemon, though not entirely as happily. Now it was Alyssa’s turn
to bristle at having “the baby” clinging to her skirts. She evaded her as best she could,
and Baelon laughed at her fury. Alysanne went on to have her seventh,
eighth, ninth, and tenth children. In 68 AC, the king and queen announced the
betrothal of their firstborn son, Aemon, Prince of Dragonstone, to Jocelyn Baratheon of Storm’s End.
There had been some thought, after the tragic death of Princess Daenerys, that Aemon should
wed Princess Alyssa, the eldest of his remaining sisters, but Queen Alysanne firmly put the thought
aside. “Alyssa is for Baelon,” she declared. “She had been following him around since she
could walk. They are as close as you and I were at their age,” she said to Jaehaerys.
When Alyssa was thirteen, her younger brother Vaegon was ten and her younger sister Daella
was nine. 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. At thirteen years old, Alyssa was three years Vaegon’s elder,
so she poured 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.
“He spends too much time in the library,” Jaehaerys said. “Let me speak to Baelon. We will
get him out in the yard, put a sword in his hand and a shield on his arm, that will set him right.”
His Grace did indeed speak to Prince Baelon, who dutifully took his brother under his wing,
marched him out into the yard, put a sword into his hand and a shield upon
his arm. It did not set him right. Vaegon hated it. He was a miserable fighter,
and he had a gift for making everyone around him miserable as well, even Baelon the Brave.
Baelon persisted for a year, at the king’s insistence. “The more he drills,
the worse he looks,” the Spring Prince confessed. One day, mayhaps in an attempt to spur Vaegon
into making more of an effort, he brought his sister Alyssa to the yard, shining in man’s
mail. The princess had not forgotten the incident of the Arbor gold. Laughing and shouting mockery,
she danced around her little brother and humiliated him half a hundred times,
whilst Princess Daella looked down from a window. Shamed beyond endurance, Vaegon threw down his
sword and ran from the yard, never to return. In 75 AC, Princess Alyssa was married to her older
brother Baelon. The princess was fifteen, the groom eighteen. Unlike their father and mother,
Baelon and Alyssa did not wait to consummate their union; the bedding that followed their
wedding feast was the source of much ribald humor in the days that followed, for the young bridge’s
sounds of pleasure could be heard all the way to Duskendale, men said. A shyer maid might have
been abashed by that, but Alyssa Targaryen was as bawdy a wench as any barmaid in King’s Landing,
as she herself was fond of boasting. “I mounted him and took him for a ride,” she
declared the morning after the bedding, “and I mean to do the same tonight. I love to ride.”
Her brave prince was not the only mount the princess was to claim that year. Like her
brothers before her, Alyssa Targaryen meant to be a dragonrider, and sooner rather than later.
Aemond had flown at seventeen, Baelon at sixteen. Alyssa meant to do it at fifteen. According to the
tales set down by the Dragonkeepers, it was all that they could do to persuade her not to claim
Balerion. “He is old and slow, Princess,” they had to tell her. “Surely you want a swifter mount.”
In the end they prevailed, and Princess Alyssa ascended into the sky upon Meleys, a splendid
scarlet she-dragon, never before ridden. “Red maidens, the two of us,” the princess boasted,
laughing, “but now we’ve both been mounted.’ The princess was seldom long away from the
Dragonpit after that day. Flying was the second sweetest thing in the world, she would oft say,
and the very sweetest thing could not be mentioned in the company of ladies. The
Dragonkeepers had not been wrong; Meleys was as swift a dragon as Westeros had ever seen,
easily outpacing Caraxes and Vhagar when she and her brothers flew together.
Prince Baelon had not ceased smiling since his marriage. When not aloft, Baelon and Alyssa
spent every hour together, most oft in their bedchamber. Prince Baelon was a lusty lad,
for those same shrieks of pleasure that had echoed through the halls of the Red Keep on
the night of their bedding were heard many another night in the years that followed. And soon enough,
the much-hoped-for result appeared, and Alyssa Targaryen grew great with child. In 77 AC she
gave her brave prince a son they named Viserys. Septon Barth described the boy as a “plump and
pleasant lad, who laughed more than any babe I’ve ever known, and nursed so lustily he drank
his wet nurse dry.” Against all advice, his mother clapped the boy in swaddling clothes,
strapped him to her chest, and took him aloft on Meleys when he was just nine days old. Afterward
she claimed Viserys had giggled the whole time. In 81 AC, Prince Aemon reached his twenty-sixth
nameday. He had proved himself more than able in both war and peace. As the heir apparent to the
Iron Throne, it was felt desirable that he take a greater role in the governance of the realm
as a member of the king’s council. Accordingly, King Jaehaerys named the prince his justiciar
and master of laws in place of Rodrik Arryn. “I will leave the making of law to you, brother,”
Prince Baelon declared, whilst drinking to Prince Aemon’s appointment. “I would sooner make sons.”
And that was just what he did, for later that same year Princess Alyssa bore her Spring Prince
a second son, who was given the name Daemon. His mother, irrepressible as ever, took the babe into
the sky on Meleys within a fortnight of his birth, just as she had done with his brother, Viserys.
The 83rd year after Aegon’s Conquest is remembered as the year of the Fourth Dornish War … better
known amongst the smallfolk as Prince Morion’s Madness, or the War of the Hundred Candles.
King Jaehaerys and his sons Aemon and Baelon were dragonriders. Vermithor, Caraxes, and Vhagar fell
on Morion’s fleet as it beat its way across the Sea of Dorne. Shouts rang out, and the Dornish
filled the air with scorpion bolts, but firing at a dragon is one thing, and killing it quite
another. A few bolts glanced off the scales of the dragons, and one punched through Vhagar’s wing,
but none of them found any vulnerable spots as the dragons swooped and banked and loosed great blasts
of fire. One by one the ships went up in gouts of flame. They were still burning when the sun
went down, “like a hundred candles floating on the sea.” That is why the Fourth Dornish War is
also known as the War of the Hundred Candles. The Fourth Dornish War was fought and won in
a single day. Back in King’s Landing, King Jaehaerys and his sons received a
riotous welcome. Even Aegon the Conqueror had never won a war without losing a man.
Prince Baelon had another cause for celebration as well. His wife, Alyssa,
was again with child. This time, he told his brother Aemon, he was praying for a girl.
Princess Alyssa was brought to bed again in 84 AC. After a long and difficult labor,
she gave Prince Baelon a third son, a boy they named Aegon, after the Conqueror.
“They call me Baelon the Brave,” the prince told his wife at her bedside, “but you are far braver
than me. I would sooner fight a dozen battles than do what you’ve just done.” Alyssa laughed
at him. “You were made for battles. I was made for this. Viserys and Daemon and Aegon, that’s three.
As soon as I am well, let’s make another. I want to give you twenty sons. An Army of your own!”
Unfortunately, it was not to be. Alyssa Targaryen had a warrior’s heart in a woman’s body,
and her strength failed her. She never fully recovered from Aegon’s birth,
and died within the year at only four-and-twenty. Nor did Prince Aegon long survive her. He
perished half a year later, still shy of his first nameday. Though shattered by his loss,
Baelon took solace in the two strong sons that she had left him, Viserys and Daemon,
and never ceased to honor the memory of his sweet lady with the broken nose and mismatched eyes.