Saera Targaryen

Saera Targaryen was the ninth child of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne, a quick-witted and forceful princess whose hunger for affection, praise, and freedom repeatedly collided with the expectations imposed on a royal daughter. Her defiance brought public disgrace and exile from Westeros, but it did not extinguish her claim to the dynasty: in 101 AC, her sons appeared among the competitors for the Iron Throne, while Saera herself chose to remain in Volantis.

Identity and Early Character

Born in 67 AC, three years after her sister Daella, Saera made herself heard from infancy. Her first word was no, and she said it often; she screamed when her mother dismissed a wet nurse, resisted weaning until she was past four, and demanded milk, food, and affection with equal insistence. Queen Alysanne saw an unsettling resemblance to the wild and willful Aerea. Grand Maester Elysar, writing when Saera was two, feared that her insistence on getting what she wanted would only intensify as she grew.

At twelve, Saera understood the privileges her position gave her: servants answered her needs, lords and knights treated her with courtesy, and girls of her age competed to be her friends. Septon Barth saw a girl who took this attention as her due but resented being ninth in line among her siblings. Aemon was destined to be king; Baelon seemed likely to become his Hand; Alyssa was admired for her promise; Vaegon surpassed Saera in learning; Maegelle in holiness; and Daella continually drew the family’s care. Barth suspected that Saera, whom others thought too fierce to need comfort, was being overlooked precisely because she rarely showed vulnerability.

Her mischief ranged from pranks on Daella, who feared cats, to acts of escalating defiance. Saera put cats in her sister’s bedchamber and once filled her chamberpot with bees. At seven she learned to steal cakes and pies from the kitchens; before eleven she had moved on to wine and ale, and by twelve she might arrive drunk when called to prayer. At ten she slipped into White Sword Tower, stole the white cloaks she could find, and dyed them pink. Yet she was not defined by misbehavior alone: her maesters considered her very clever, and she was strong, quick, spirited, and capable of irresistible charm. Jaehaerys was often amused by her tricks and granted her gifts ranging from a kitten and a hound to a pony, a hawk, and a horse, though he refused her request for an elephant. Alysanne was less easily won over, and Saera’s sisters disliked her to varying degrees.

Friends, Suitors, and the Need for Attention

As a young woman, Saera displayed an ease with men that Daella had never possessed. At fourteen she told her father she might marry the Prince of Dorne or the King Beyond the Wall and become a queen like her mother. She also entertained the possibility of marrying a trader from the Summer Islands who visited court. These ambitions gave way to more immediate possibilities when, at fifteen, she found herself surrounded by young men eager to attend her.

Three became her favorites: Jonah Mooton, heir to Maidenpool in the Riverlands; Red Roy Connington, the fifteen-year-old Lord of Griffin’s Roost; and Braxton Beesbury, called Stinger, a nineteen-year-old knight renowned as the finest lance in the Reach and heir to Honeyholt. Saera’s closest female companions were Perianne Moore and Alys Turnberry, whom she called Pretty Peri and Sweetberry. For more than a year the three young women and three young lords were nearly inseparable at feasts and balls. They hunted and hawked together, sailed across Blackwater Bay to Dragonstone, and gathered to watch the young men ride at rings or cross swords.

Jaehaerys took the group as a convenient answer to the question of Saera’s marriage: there seemed to be promising matches already at hand. Alysanne was unconvinced. She regarded Saera as clever but not wise, thought Perianne and Alys empty-headed, and considered Connington and Mooton immature. She also distrusted Braxton, having heard that he had fathered children out of wedlock in the Reach and in King’s Landing. Her suspicion foreshadowed the conflict between the court’s effort to arrange Saera’s future and Saera’s determination to define it for herself.

Scandal and Punishment

The scandal reached the Iron Throne after Saera had urged others to make a spectacle of Tom Turnip dancing with prostitutes at the Blue Pearl. Jaehaerys had the guards question squires, grooms, and maids; some were sent to the dungeons with their masters. When Saera was brought before her father, she showed no apparent shame about the incident. She dismissed Tom as a fool who enjoyed being laughed at, treating the humiliation as a joke rather than reckoning with its consequences for him.

When Jaehaerys demanded the truth about her sexual relationships, Saera answered that she had slept with all three of her favored suitors, each of whom believed he had been her first. Her response turned the confrontation into more than a dispute about disobedience: she spoke with open contempt for the young men’s assumptions and refused to accept that her actions could be reduced to a single man’s claim over her. She expected marriage to follow, but did not see why she should have only one husband. She pointed to the Conqueror’s two wives and Maegor’s many marriages as precedent. Her parents, however, treated her conduct as a grave transgression requiring control and punishment.

At not quite seventeen, Saera was sent from King’s Landing to Oldtown, where her sister Septa Maegelle was to oversee her instruction. The announced destination was service as a novice among the silent sisters. Septon Barth later maintained that the sentence was intended as a lesson, not a sincere expectation that Saera would become a septa or a silent sister. Her parents believed that prayer, discipline, and contemplation might lead her toward redemption. The regimen was severe: Saera endured silence, cold baths, rough woolen clothes, meatless meals, a shaved head, scrubbing with horsehair brushes, and the cane when she disobeyed.

Flight and Life in Essos

Saera submitted to the discipline for a year and a half, then seized her chance to escape in 85 AC. She fled the motherhouse at night and made for the docks. When an older sister discovered her, Saera knocked the woman down a flight of steps and leapt past her to the door. The flight was a decisive break: rather than return to her parents’ authority or complete the religious life chosen for her, she left the institution that had been meant to reform her.

Her destination remained uncertain for a year. Lord Hightower’s men searched Oldtown, and the court also considered whether she might return to the Red Keep to seek her father’s pardon. Jonah Mooton and his wife, Perianne, were instructed to watch for her at Maidenpool in the Riverlands. Instead, Saera was seen in a Lysene pleasure garden, still dressed as a novice. Alysanne wept at the news, while Jaehaerys answered with a bitter judgment. The contrast between the queen’s grief and the king’s condemnation marks how completely Saera’s escape had ruptured the family’s relationship with her.

Saera eventually left Lys for Volantis. By the time of the Great Council of Harrenhal in 101 AC, she was thirty-four, alive, infamous, and wealthy. Three rival claimants descended from her, each fathered by a different man. One was said to resemble Jaehaerys in his youth; another, born to a triarch of Old Volantis, arrived with bags of gold and a dwarf elephant, gifts that helped his cause among poorer lords. Saera’s own claim was considered superior to those of her sons, but she did not press it. When asked whether she would return to Westeros, she said she had her own kingdom in Volantis.

Family Rupture and Dynastic Legacy

Saera’s departure left a lasting mark on Jaehaerys and Alysanne. After she had disgraced and abandoned him, Jaehaerys was said never to be the same: he grew thinner and grayer, and people began calling him the Old King rather than the Conciliator. Alysanne, already burdened by the loss of several children, withdrew increasingly from the work of governing. The account presents Saera’s exile not as an isolated punishment but as one of the family’s enduring wounds.

The estrangement persisted. Saera was living in Volantis when Alysanne’s daughter Gael died, and secret letters the queen sent her from time to time went unanswered. Yet Saera’s line remained consequential. At the Great Council, her sons’ presence made her absence politically conspicuous: the descendants of the exiled princess could advance claims even though she herself chose not to return or contest the throne. Saera’s story thus joins private rebellion to dynastic calculation. The daughter whom her parents tried to discipline into silence ultimately established a life beyond their reach, while her descendants carried her royal blood back into the succession debate.