Sharis Footly

Sharis Footly is remembered as the widowed Lady of Tumbleton who undertook the town’s recovery after the Dance of the Dragons. Ruling for her infant son, she rebuilt its defenses and daily life amid the ruins, then entered the postwar contest to become Aegon III’s queen by putting herself forward as a candidate.

Widow and Regent

Sharis ruled in the name of her infant son. Six months after the Second Battle of Tumbleton, she gave birth to a dark-haired boy and proclaimed him the trueborn heir of her late husband. The account judges it far more likely that Bold Jon Roxton had fathered the child, leaving the boy’s declared legitimacy and probable paternity in tension. Sharis’s position as a widow thus carried both a practical responsibility to govern for her son and a contested question of inheritance.

Rebuilding Tumbleton

Her response to the town’s devastation was practical and comprehensive. Sharis had the burned shells of shops and houses pulled down, the town walls rebuilt, and the dead buried. She also returned the land to cultivation, planting wheat, barley, and turnips in fields that had served as military camps. These acts joined reconstruction to the necessities of survival: clearing the ruins, restoring defenses, tending the dead, and bringing food production back to the scarred ground.

She made the remains of the war part of the rebuilt town’s public life. The heads of Seasmoke and Vermithor were cleaned, mounted, and displayed in the town square. Travelers paid a penny to look and a star to touch them. The display turned the dragons’ remains into a source of income, while keeping the violence that had shattered Tumbleton visibly present in its central gathering place.

A Candidate for the Crown

In the aftermath of the war, many women proposed brides for Aegon III. Sharis made the unusual choice of nominating herself, rather than recommending a daughter or another relative. The surviving account gives no explanation for her decision, so it cannot establish what she hoped to gain. It does show that, while governing a damaged town for her young son, she also presented herself as a possible participant in the royal marriage settlement.

Character and Significance

Sharis’s recorded actions connect local recovery with the wider politics of the realm. She claimed an heir, exercised authority as his widowed mother, and directed the physical rebuilding of Tumbleton; later, she entered a royal bride-selection contest in her own name. The account preserves her not through private thoughts or an extended personal history, but through consequential acts—reconstruction, public commemoration, and self-nomination—that place a woman ruling in the aftermath of war at the center of both town and court.