Elissa Farman

Elissa Farman’s defining ambition was to sail beyond the Sunset Sea, and she pursued it with a resolve that outlasted family opposition, royal anger, and the loss of her home. A skilled mariner who became a confidante of Rhaena Targaryen, she ultimately stole three dragon eggs to finance the ship she had dreamed of building. She sailed west aboard the Sun Chaser and was never seen again, though a later report offers a tantalizing possibility about her fate.

Identity and Early Life

The daughter of Lord Farman and sister to Androw Farman, Elissa shared her brother’s blue eyes and long flaxen hair but little else. Sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, she loved horses, dogs, and hawks, sang well, and was a skilled archer. Her central passion, however, was the sea. The Farman words, “The Wind Our Steed,” suited a family said to have sailed the western seas since the Dawn Age, and Elissa embodied that inheritance from childhood: she spent more time at sea than on land and was remembered climbing the rigging of her father’s ships like a monkey.

Elissa’s experience grew early and steadily. At fourteen she sailed her own boat around Fair Isle; by twenty, she had voyaged as far north as Bear Island and as far south as the Arbor. Her ambitions reached beyond familiar waters. She spoke, to the dismay of her parents, of sailing past the western horizon to discover what might lie on the other side of the Sunset Sea. Twice betrothed, at twelve and sixteen, she frightened away both prospective husbands. The chronicle presents her not as someone waiting for a voyage to begin, but as a sailor whose life on the water had already made the distant west an increasingly compelling destination.

Fair Isle and Rhaena Targaryen

Elissa found a close companion in Rhaena Targaryen, who had taken refuge on Fair Isle after the Battle Beneath the Gods Eye. Rhaena’s uncle, King Maegor, demanded her capture, while the Poor Fellows denounced the queen and her daughters as sinners and abominations. Lord Farman sheltered her in those dangerous circumstances. Some accounts suggest that Rhaena later married Androw partly to repay his father’s kindness; Maester Smike proposed a different interpretation, writing that the queen’s true love on Fair Isle was Elissa, not Androw. The account leaves that suggestion as an interpretation, not a confirmed relationship.

Elissa and Rhaena became close enough to form, with Alayne Royce and Samantha Stokeworth, a near-inseparable circle known as the Four-Headed Beast. Androw was occasionally included, but was not treated as a fifth member. Rhaena often flew with Elissa and the other women on Dreamfyre, while Androw was not part of those adventures; the chronicle allows that he may simply have declined invitations. Their companionship was therefore expressed not only in confidence but in shared activity, including the flights that set the queen’s adventurous friends apart from her husband.

Fair Isle was no lasting idyll. The continued presence of Rhaena and Dreamfyre troubled some islanders, particularly as the dragon grew larger and hungrier. After Dreamfyre laid a clutch of eggs, religious hostility sharpened: a begging brother preached that the island would soon be overrun by dragons. When Rhaena’s brother-in-law Franklyn Farman challenged her, the queen left for Casterly Rock that night on Dreamfyre, directing her husband and companions to follow by ship. Elissa went with them. At the docks, Franklyn tried to prevent his sister from leaving and declared she must stay to be wed. Elissa defied him, and the dockside crowd—sailors, shipwrights, fisherfolk, porters, and others who had known her since childhood—overwhelmed his small force. Franklyn was thrown into a hold of fresh-caught cod; Elissa and the others boarded the Maiden’s Fancy and sailed for Lannisport.

A Broken Friendship and the Dragon Eggs

At Casterly Rock, Lyman Lannister welcomed Rhaena and her party, giving them refuge and a lavish feast. Elissa’s next chapter began on Dragonstone, where her brother’s refusal to grant her any share of Fair Isle’s income left her dependent on Rhaena for the money to build a large, fast ship. She wanted it for a voyage across the Sunset Sea. Rhaena refused. The queen said she could not bear for Elissa to leave, but Elissa heard only the refusal. The difference between what Rhaena meant and what Elissa received marks the point at which their closeness began to give way to separation.

Elissa eventually told Rhaena that she could endure island life no longer and that the sea was calling her. Rhaena answered that she would not beg her to stay. Their farewell also exposed how deeply the departure affected Rhaena’s daughter, Aerea: the princess wept, clung to Elissa, and begged either to remain with her or to sail away together. Elissa gently pushed her away and told her that her place was at home. The next morning Elissa left for Driftmark, then sailed across the narrow sea to Pentos. Rhaena believed she had gone no farther than Driftmark; the queen and the princess did not know Elissa’s final destination.

A fortnight after Elissa’s departure, three dragon eggs were discovered missing from the dragon yard. Ser Merrell Bullock, the garrison commander, became convinced that Elissa had taken them. Rhaena responded with fury: she ordered more questioning, dismissed Bullock, and expelled him, his son Ser Alyn, and other men she suspected. She also confronted Androw, demanding to know whether he had helped his sister. His denials escalated the argument into shouting heard through Dragonstone’s halls. Rhaena sent men to Driftmark and then Pentos, but the trail ended there. Only afterwards did she fly to the Red Keep and tell the king what had happened. On Westeros, the theft became common knowledge despite the king’s warning that it should remain secret; searches and paid reports produced no useful trace of the eggs.

Alys Westhill and the Sun Chaser

Elissa had in fact reached Braavos after Pentos, adopting the invented bastard name Alys Westhill. She secured an audience with the Sealord, whose celebrated menagerie gave him reason to buy the eggs. Elissa placed the gold in the Iron Bank of Braavos and used it to finance the Sun Chaser, the vessel she had wanted for years. The theft thus supplied not a fortune for its own sake but the means to turn an old ambition into a voyage.

Recruiting a crew proved difficult. Some men laughed at Elissa, called her mad, or cursed her; one rival captain warned that she might end in a sea beast’s belly. But the money from the eggs enabled her to offer three times the wages other captains could pay, and sailors gradually signed on. When Donnel Hightower sent his grandsons Eustace and Norman to question her—and, if they thought it prudent, to arrest her—the two experienced mariners instead joined the expedition, pledging their ships and crews. Their decision drew further sailors to the undertaking.

The Sun Chaser departed Oldtown on the twenty-third day of the third moon of 56 AC, sailing down Whispering Sound with Eustace Hightower’s Lady Meredith and Norman Hightower’s Autumn Moon. By then, King Jaehaerys had recognized Alys Westhill as Elissa and ordered Donnel Hightower to take her into custody. The command arrived too late. Donnel sent ships after her, but they returned defeated; none could match the Sun Chaser’s speed when the wind filled her sails.

Disappearance and Legacy

The expedition’s surviving account records how Lady Meredith eventually reached Tall Trees Town with help from Summer Islanders, after sickness left scarcely half the crew fit to work. Its teller’s tale ends there. Elissa’s own fate remains unknown: the Sun Chaser vanished into the west while still seeking lands beyond the Sunset Sea and was never seen again.

The chronicle adds an uncertain coda through Corlys Velaryon. On a later voyage, after sailing to Asshai-by-the-Shadow, he said he saw in its harbor an old, much-weathered ship that he would always swear was the Sun Chaser. The sighting does not establish that Elissa survived or explain how the ship could have reached Asshai. It leaves her story suspended between disappearance and possible return, preserving the mystery that her voyage set out to cross.