Alysanne Targaryen and Daenerys Targaryen

Alysanne Targaryen and Daenerys Targaryen shared a close mother-daughter bond in which the young princess became a source of joy and comfort to the queen. Daenerys’s death from the Shivers, despite the care lavished upon her, turned that intimacy into one of the defining griefs of Alysanne’s life and challenged a central belief about Targaryen exceptionalism.

A Young Daughter and Her Mother’s Solace

After Alysanne had lost her own mother, she found comfort in her daughter. Daenerys was not yet a year and a half old, but she was already talking, running, and displaying an energetic curiosity that delighted those around her. Alysanne was so captivated by the child that she sometimes set aside council sessions to spend her days playing with her and reading her the stories Alysanne’s own mother had once read to her. In Daenerys, maternal affection and the memory of an earlier generation met: the queen passed on stories that had been part of her own childhood while cherishing the daughter who had become her consolation.

The queen imagined a future for Daenerys as well as delighting in her present. She believed the child was exceptionally clever and predicted that she would become a great queen. That hope gave their bond a forward-looking quality: Daenerys was not only the lively little girl who drew Alysanne away from court business, but a daughter in whom the queen could picture a future ruler.

The Shivers and the Queen’s Care

When Daenerys was six, she woke Alysanne during the night to say that she was cold. The princess’s illness prompted an urgent effort to save her. Remedies, warmth, prayers, and medical attention were tried; a wet nurse was summoned because some believed a mother’s milk might help, and the king ordered a hundred new ratcatchers hired, offering a silver stag for every dead rat. At Daenerys’s request, her kitten was brought to her. The measures reflected how much care and hope surrounded the child, but none could turn the course of her illness.

Daenerys died a day and a half after waking her mother. Alysanne collapsed in grief, and those around her feared for her own health. The king had her taken to her chambers and given milk of the poppy to help her sleep. The loss was not only private: Daenerys had been beloved throughout the realm, and many other families also lost children to the epidemic. Yet for Alysanne, the death of the daughter who had brought her solace made the public disaster intimate and devastating.

Loss and Its Aftermath

Daenerys’s death struck at the belief that Targaryens were unlike other people in their vulnerability to disease. She was descended from the Targaryens on both sides, yet she had died of the Shivers. The loss therefore carried a meaning beyond the severing of the mother-daughter bond: it made Alysanne’s bereavement a painful challenge to the conviction that the blood of the dragon could protect its own.

Less than two months after Daenerys died, Alysanne learned that she was pregnant again. In the winter of 60 AC, she gave birth on Dragonstone to a daughter named Alyssa, after Alysanne’s own mother. The newborn was so like Daenerys that Alysanne often wept when she looked at her, remembering the child she had lost. The resemblance faded as Alyssa grew, but its early presence shows how Daenerys remained part of the queen’s experience of motherhood: a new daughter brought life and hope, while also recalling the absence left by the first.