Alysanne Targaryen and Saera Targaryen

Alysanne Targaryen and Saera Targaryen were mother and daughter whose relationship endured a long separation without finding a way back to reconciliation. Alysanne repeatedly argued that Saera should remain part of the family despite her offenses, and later tried to bring her home from across the Narrow Sea. Her efforts were checked first by Saera’s escape and Jaehaerys’s anger, and ultimately by Saera’s refusal—or inability—to answer the secret letters her mother sent. The story places a mother’s continuing attachment against the authority of the king and the distance created by exile.

A mother’s plea for forgiveness

After Saera’s misconduct at court, Jaehaerys turned away from his daughter and said that she was no longer his child. Alysanne resisted that judgment. She accepted that Saera must be punished, but argued that she was still young and that wrongdoing need not make forgiveness impossible. To persuade the king, Alysanne recalled his earlier reconciliations: with lords who had supported his uncle, with men who had followed Septon Moon, with the Faith, and with Rogar Baratheon after his attempt to divide the royal family and place Aerea on the throne. Her appeal was not simply that Saera should escape consequences; it was that the king should apply to his own daughter the capacity for reconciliation he had shown toward former opponents.

Septon Barth’s account presents Alysanne as persistent and influential in private counsel. Her gentle arguments moved Jaehaerys, and she could often bring him around to her point of view even when they began far apart. That change left open the possibility that she might eventually soften his response to Saera. But the opportunity was brief: Saera did not remain in her rooms as ordered. She disguised herself in a washerwoman’s clothes, took a horse from the stables, and tried to enter the Dragonpit on Rhaenys’s Hill. Dragonkeepers found her and returned her to the Red Keep. The failed escape hardened the king’s position. Alysanne wept, recognizing that the attempt had made her case for leniency seem hopeless, while Saera was confined in a tower cell under Jonquil Darke’s constant guard.

The attempt to bring Saera home

Years later, Alysanne’s concern had not faded into silence. Despite Jaehaerys’s prohibition, she secretly employed agents to keep watch on Saera across the Narrow Sea. Their reports placed Saera in Lys, where, at twenty, she continued to attract admirers while presenting herself as a novice of the Faith. The queen’s access to this information shows that the separation was not indifference: she maintained a discreet line of knowledge about a daughter whom the king considered lost to the family.

The death of Princess Viserra finally prompted Alysanne to raise Saera’s return again. She brought Septon Barth to speak to Jaehaerys about forgiveness and the healing that time might allow, then asked the king to bring their daughter home because, she said, she needed her. Jaehaerys refused. He treated Saera’s past conduct and attempted escape as reasons not to restore her, and warned that Alysanne’s own intervention in Lys could expose her to danger or force the crown into a larger confrontation. His response closed off the rescue Alysanne wanted, but it did not persuade her to stop caring.

Alysanne did not fly to Lys. The refusal, however, marked a lasting breach between the king and queen. They had planned a royal progress through the westerlands, but after their dispute Alysanne told Jaehaerys to go without her. She returned alone to Dragonstone to grieve for their dead daughters, while the king made the progress by himself. The separation from Saera thus shaped more than the queen’s relationship with her daughter: it also became a point of estrangement within Alysanne’s marriage.

Distance, letters, and grief

Alysanne’s attachment persisted after Saera left Lys for Volantis. She continued to send secret letters from time to time, but Saera did not answer them. The accounts do not explain why the letters went unanswered, so they cannot establish whether Saera rejected her mother, remained unable to respond, or simply chose another life. What they do show is the imbalance between Alysanne’s repeated attempts at contact and the silence that met them. Saera remained alive and, by the account, wealthy, yet emotionally and physically beyond the queen’s reach.

The later losses in Alysanne’s family made that absence more painful. After the death of Gael, Alysanne was said never to have recovered fully; Gael had been her companion in her declining years, while Saera remained distant and her letters unanswered. Jaehaerys treated Saera as dead to him, but Alysanne’s continued correspondence kept a different possibility alive: she still addressed her daughter as someone who might receive a message, even without evidence that reconciliation would follow.

The limits of reconciliation

The relationship’s course is defined by Alysanne’s repeated distinction between punishment and permanent rejection. She did not deny Saera’s wrongdoing, but resisted the idea that it should erase their bond. Her appeals drew on the king’s record of forgiving political adversaries, and her later efforts shifted from direct persuasion to covert observation and private letters. Each method preserved some connection, yet none overcame the forces separating mother and daughter: Jaehaerys’s refusal to receive Saera back, Saera’s departure from Westeros, and the unanswered correspondence.

The result is neither a recorded reconciliation nor a clean severance initiated by Alysanne. She did not bring Saera home, and the evidence offers no later reply or meeting between them. Instead, their relationship ends in unresolved distance: Alysanne continues to write, while Saera remains abroad and unreachable. The queen’s persistence gives the separation its emotional shape, making clear that royal judgment and exile could divide a family without extinguishing a mother’s attachment.