Jacaerys and Jeyne Arryn's Alliance

Jacaerys and Jeyne Arryn's Alliance brought the Vale into support of Rhaenyra through an agreement between two young rulers confronting the power of dragons and the limits placed on women in a male-dominated realm. Jacaerys won Lady Jeyne Arryn’s allegiance by recognizing her claim and accepting her demand for dragonriders; she and her warriors then swore their swords to his mother’s cause.

The Mission to the Vale

Jacaerys came to the Eyrie on his young dragon Vermax to win the Vale for Rhaenyra. Lady Jeyne, thirty-five years old and twenty years his senior, had ruled since the deaths of her father and elder brothers when she was three. Their meeting was therefore both a diplomatic negotiation and an encounter between two people whose positions depended on contested dynastic claims.

The Bargain

Jeyne explained that three times her own kin had sought to replace her, and that her cousin Ser Arnold, who argued women were too soft to rule, was confined in one of her sky cells. She acknowledged the concerns about Rhaenyra’s choice of consort but insisted that Rhaenyra remained the rightful queen and was Jeyne’s kinswoman through her mother’s Arryn blood. Jeyne framed their interests as shared: in a world governed by men, women had reason to stand together.

Her support came with a specific condition. Jeyne did not fear armies: the Bloody Gate had turned back many, and the Eyrie was considered impregnable. But Jacaerys had arrived from the sky, an approach she compared to Queen Visenya’s during the Conquest, and she admitted that she had been powerless to stop him. She asked Rhaenyra to send dragonriders to the Vale. Jacaerys agreed, making protection against dragons—not conventional armies—the central term of the alliance.

Oath and Significance

After Jacaerys accepted her request, Jeyne knelt before him and instructed her warriors to kneel as well. They swore him their swords, committing the Vale to Rhaenyra’s cause. The alliance thus joined a formal military pledge to a practical guarantee of dragon protection, while Jeyne’s own experience of challenges to her rule shaped the political solidarity on which the agreement rested.