The scandal and exile of Saera Targaryen transformed a courtly prank into a rupture between the princess and her parents, King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne. An inquiry into a humiliating incident at the Blue Pearl exposed Saera’s relationships with three young lords and revealed that her friend Alys Turnberry was pregnant. Saera’s defiance, a failed escape to the Dragonpit, and a later flight from religious instruction carried the affair beyond the Red Keep: she ultimately disappeared from Westeros and was found in Lys, still dressed as a novice.

The Blue Pearl and the inquiry

In the spring of 84 AC, shouts from the Blue Pearl drew two City Watch officers to the brothel. Tom Turnip was at the center of a prank involving half a dozen women, while the patrons laughed. Among them were Jonah Mooton, Red Roy Connington, and Braxton Beesbury. They had participated in bringing Turnip there, and Jonah identified the prank as Saera’s idea. The watchmen returned Turnip to the Red Keep and brought the three lords before their commander, Robert Redwyne, who then delivered them to the king despite threats and an attempted bribe.

Before the king could learn what lay behind the incident, the three lords denied having anything to say about Saera. Queen Alysanne, aware of the close ties between the young men and Lady Perianne Moore and Alys Turnberry, proposed speaking to the women herself. She found Perianne and Alys sharing a bed in Perianne’s chambers. With the three lords in the dungeons, the queen told them they too might be imprisoned if they withheld the truth. Both began to confess and plead for forgiveness.

Their account traced the girls’ intimacy to playful imitation and kissing, which Saera encouraged and then extended to the young men. Alys described how the girls dared one another to kiss real boys; Saera, in turn, chose to go further with a grown knight. Perianne added that Braxton had fathered two children outside marriage, including one whose mother lived on the Street of Silk. Alys was pregnant, adding an immediate consequence to what had begun as private play among the young people of the court.

Saera before her parents

After Alysanne reported what she had learned, Jaehaerys ordered a wider inquiry. Squires, grooms, and maids were questioned, and some were sent to the dungeons. The questioning continued until dawn; only then did the king and queen summon Saera. The audience was held in the great hall, with Grand Maester Elysar and Septon Barth present as witnesses. The king’s choice to receive her from the Iron Throne made the encounter a formal reckoning, even though the hall was otherwise nearly empty.

Saera initially treated the Blue Pearl prank lightly and defended it as a joke at Turnip’s expense. Alysanne redirected the conversation to Alys’s pregnancy and to what the girls had disclosed. At first Saera appeared surprised that Alys was with child; then, under her parents’ questioning, she abandoned denial and began offering a succession of changing explanations. Septon Barth’s later account describes her moving through denial, excuses, contrition, accusation, and defiance, with laughter and tears along the way. When Jaehaerys asked whether she had been intimate with one of the young men, Saera admitted that she had been involved with all three, while mocking their competing assumptions about who had come first.

Saera proposed marriage as a solution, but not a conventional one: she considered marrying one of the young lords, or even all three, and invoked the Conqueror’s two wives and Maegor’s multiple marriages as precedents. Jaehaerys took this comparison as a further affront. He ordered her back to her bedchamber, and when she ran toward him, Gyles Morrigen and the guards removed her from the hall. The king’s anger was sharpened by what he regarded as shame and by Saera’s defiance; Alysanne, by contrast, continued to regard her as their daughter and argued that punishment need not foreclose redemption.

Confinement and the first escape

The day after the interrogation, Jaehaerys and Alysanne met with Barth and Elysar to consider what should be done with Saera and the others. According to Barth, the princess might still have regained favor if she had obeyed and remained in her rooms. Instead, she slipped away while going to the privy, changed into a washerwoman’s clothes, and stole a horse from the stables. She made it as far as the Hill of Rhaenys and tried to enter the Dragonpit, but Dragonkeepers found her and returned her to the Red Keep.

The failed escape changed her conditions of confinement. Alysanne wept, recognizing that the incident had hardened Jaehaerys’s position. Saera was placed in a tower cell rather than allowed to return to her own chambers, with Jonquil Darke assigned to guard her day and night, even when she used the privy. The king feared that Saera’s purpose in reaching the Dragonpit had been to claim a dragon. His concern made the attempted flight more than an act of disobedience: in the royal household, access to a dragon carried political and personal consequences that her parents could not ignore.

Oldtown and flight to Lys

A fortnight later, Saera left King’s Landing for Oldtown, where her sister Maegelle Targaryen was to oversee her instruction. The announced plan was for Saera to become a novice among the silent sisters. Barth later described the sentence as intended to teach discipline and direct her toward redemption, not as a sincere expectation that she would follow Maegelle’s vocation permanently. The punishment nevertheless imposed a rigorous religious routine: Saera endured silence, cold baths, rough clothing, meatless meals, shaving, and discipline for disobedience.

After a year and a half, in 85 AC, Saera seized an opportunity to flee the motherhouse at night and make her way to the docks. When an older sister encountered her during the escape, Saera forced her way past and continued out. Her disappearance triggered searches and guesses about where she had gone. Lord Hightower’s men searched Oldtown door to door without finding her. The king considered whether she might return to the Red Keep to ask forgiveness, and Jonah Mooton and his wife Perianne were told to watch for her at Maidenpool. Neither possibility proved correct.

The truth emerged a year later, when Saera was seen in a Lysene pleasure garden, still wearing a novice’s clothes. Her path had therefore led from royal confinement to a religious house and then out of Westeros, without reconciliation with her father. The discovery distressed Alysanne. Jaehaerys responded with hostility rather than welcome, confirming how far the breach between parent and child had widened.

The other young people and the family’s aftermath

The scandal also redirected the lives of Saera’s companions. Perianne, who was not pregnant, married Jonah Mooton. Jaehaerys presented the marriage as a way for Jonah to share responsibility for the events that had contributed to Saera’s downfall. The match succeeded, and Perianne and Jonah later became lord and lady of Maidenpool. Their outcome contrasted with Saera’s: one of her closest friends was absorbed into a recognized noble household, while the princess left the realm.

Alys’s situation was more difficult because she was pregnant and Red Roy Connington refused to marry her or recognize the child as his heir. She was sent to the Vale to give birth to a red-haired girl at a motherhouse on an island in Gulltown harbor, where lords sent their natural daughters to be raised. Alys later married Dunstan Pryor, Lord of Pebble. These arrangements attempted to contain the scandal through marriage and religious institutions, but they could not restore the original circle or undo the consequences of the pregnancy.

The event also marked a change in the royal household. Jaehaerys celebrated his fiftieth nameday in 84 AC, and those who knew him later said he was never quite the same after Saera had disgraced and abandoned him. He grew thinner and greyer, and people increasingly called him the Old King rather than the Conciliator. Alysanne, already shaken by losses, withdrew more often from the governance of the realm and seldom attended council. The scandal thus joined a private family rupture to a visible change in the public lives of the king and queen.

Significance

The episode sets Alysanne’s approach to punishment against Jaehaerys’s anger. She urged him to remember that he had reconciled with former enemies and opponents, and believed that Saera too might be punished without being abandoned. For a time, he was moved by her appeal. Saera’s escape interrupted that possibility: each attempt to leave, first for the Dragonpit and later from the motherhouse, made restoration harder and turned an intended lesson into lasting separation.

The accounts preserve the scandal through several kinds of testimony: the young people’s disclosures, Barth’s record of Saera’s shifting responses, and later reports of the family’s decline and her discovery in Lys. Across those accounts, the central reversal is clear. A prank meant to amuse a group of companions exposed a larger pattern of secrecy, pregnancy, and unequal consequences; the royal response sought to discipline Saera and arrange the futures of the other participants, but Saera ultimately escaped the path her parents had chosen. Her exile remained unresolved in the evidence of the episode, while its effects on her parents and companions endured.