Tyanna of the Tower

Tyanna of the Tower rose from Pentoshi courtesan to one of the most influential women in Maegor Targaryen’s court. Her story turns on the unstable ground between intelligence and rumor: she was presented as a keeper of secrets, credited with uncovering a deception about royal heirs, and ultimately accused of poisoning pregnancies. Her influence depended on access to the king, but that access offered no protection when he turned against her.

Identity and Arrival

Tyanna was the natural daughter of a Pentoshi magister. Before reaching the Targaryen court, she had worked as a tavern dancer and risen to become a courtesan. Her origins and reputation accompanied her arrival: some called her Maegor’s concubine, others Alys Harroway’s paramour, and rumors cast her as a poisoner and sorceress. These accounts are presented as competing claims and circulating tales, rather than settled explanations of her private life or powers.

Tyanna came to Westeros with Alys Harroway, Maegor’s second wife, twenty-eight days after the Trial of Seven. Their ship carried six hundred sellswords as well as the two women, joining Tyanna’s arrival to a show of armed support. Queen Visenya dismissed Maegor’s maesters and septons and entrusted him to Tyanna’s care. The following morning, Maegor appeared on the Red Keep’s walls between Alys and Tyanna, and the city celebrated his return. His subsequent attack on the Warrior’s Sons began a prolonged war against the Faith Militant; the account places Tyanna beside him at this turning point, without establishing that she caused the campaign.

A Queen at the Center of Court

After Maegor’s victory at the Great Fork, he announced that he would marry Tyanna. Grand Maester Myros objected that Maegor’s true wife awaited him in the Hightower; Maegor killed him. Tyanna and Maegor were then married atop the Hill of Rhaenys, at the site where the Warrior’s Sons had died. The setting joined her elevation to the king with the violence that marked his rule. The ceremony proceeded only after Maegor had put several septons to death for refusing to perform it, and Wat the Hewer was kept alive to witness the wedding.

The court’s arrangements made Tyanna’s position unusually visible. Alys Harroway, Maegor’s second wife, presided over the bedding ceremony, while Queen Alyssa and other court ladies were required to attend. Tyanna was not merely a newcomer in the royal household: she was made Maegor’s third wife, and by 43 AC was counted among the three queens said to govern him. Alongside his mother, Queen Visenya, and Alys, she was portrayed as a source of influence beyond the formal offices of government. Maegor appointed Alys’s father, Lucas Harroway, as Hand, yet court whispers held that the king was ruled by the queens rather than by his Hand.

Tyanna’s reputation as an intelligence figure gathered force in the same period. She was called the “mistress of whispers” and the “king’s raven,” the latter name attributed to her black hair. Tales claimed that she spoke with rats and spiders and that the vermin carried her reports about anyone who spoke against Maegor. The account does not verify these supernatural stories. It does, however, describe a concrete political role: Tyanna warned Maegor that Storm’s End, the Eyrie, Winterfell, and Casterly Rock had been in secret communication with Queen Alyssa before deciding whether to support Prince Aegon. Her report made clear that the rebels’ potential backing remained uncertain and that Aegon needed a victory to persuade the great lords.

The Harroway Affair

Tyanna’s most consequential intervention came after Queen Alys lost a pregnancy. Maegor had expected a son, and the stillbirth left him furious and grief-stricken; he ordered the deaths of the midwife, the septas, and Grand Maester Desmond. Tyanna then told him that he had been deceived: according to her account, Alys had feared that she would be displaced if she failed to bear the king a son, and her father, Lucas Harroway, had arranged for other men to father her child while Maegor shared the beds of his other queens.

Maegor initially rejected Tyanna’s accusation, calling her jealous and barren. She answered by presenting a list of twenty men alleged to have slept with Alys. They ranged across the household and court, from knights and squires to servants and craftsmen; the account notes that their common feature was their known ability to father healthy children. Under torture, all but two confessed, and one man still possessed the gold he said Lucas Harroway had paid him. The king’s suspicions were pursued in secret until the Kingsguard seized Alys and her father. Lucas died, and numerous members of his family and men named in the accusations were executed. The episode shows how quickly Tyanna’s access to Maegor could turn private information into lethal royal action.

Alys was placed in Tyanna’s custody and died after prolonged torment. The chronicle declines to describe the details, but records that Maegor witnessed her suffering and that her remains were displayed at the city gates. Maegor then marched against Harrenhal and Lord Harroway’s Town, killing people he identified as having Harroway blood. Tyanna’s revelation thus preceded the destruction of a great house and the deaths of many beyond the queen herself. The narrative makes her a central agent in the exposure of the alleged scheme, while also showing how information at Maegor’s court became inseparable from punishment.

Confession, Death, and Aftermath

Years later, as Maegor tried to secure a son through further marriages, rumors blamed his childlessness on a divine curse. Maegor chose another explanation. He had Tyanna seized and taken to the dungeons, where she confessed that she had poisoned Alys Harroway’s child in the womb and had done the same to Jeyne Westerling’s child. She promised that Elinor Costayne’s pregnancy would end likewise. The timing and circumstances matter: her confession came under threat of torture, so the chronicle records both the accusation and the coercive conditions in which it was made.

Maegor killed Tyanna himself. Her warning about Elinor proved accurate: Elinor later delivered a malformed stillborn child. That outcome intensified the belief that Maegor was cursed and contributed to the erosion of the support he still commanded. The account’s sequence makes Tyanna’s final statement resonate beyond her death, but it does not settle how much of her confession should be accepted as fact apart from the events it predicts.

Tyanna’s name remained linked to Maegor’s rule even after his death. During the settlement under Jaehaerys, Maegor’s gaolers and confessors were judged to have abetted Tyanna in the torture and death of Prince Viserys, and they were executed. Ser Maladon Moore was also condemned; he had admitted to delivering Tyanna to Maegor and witnessing the king kill her, although he denied another charge against him. These later judgments show how the new reign assigned responsibility for abuses committed under Maegor, while leaving Tyanna herself defined by the conflicting roles preserved in the chronicle: royal wife, political informant, accuser, confessed poisoner, and victim of the king she had served.