The Failed Assassination of Alysanne at Maidenpool

The Failed Assassination of Alysanne at Maidenpool was a carefully concealed attack on Queen Alysanne during the first royal progress of Jaehaerys Targaryen and his queen. Three women serving at Jonquil’s Pool tried to kill her within the bathhouse, but her companions put themselves between the queen and the attackers. Alysanne survived; Rosamund Ball later died of her wounds. The episode disrupted the royal journey, exposed other participants in the conspiracy, and led Alysanne to ask for a woman sworn specifically to protect her.

Background and Setting

Jaehaerys had planned a deliberately modest progress, limiting the royal party to no more than one hundred people. A smaller retinue allowed the king and queen to visit lesser lords whose castles had not been able to host Aegon, while shorter stays were intended to keep the royal household from becoming an unwelcome burden. Alysanne accompanied her husband despite being pregnant, although Jaehaerys had been concerned that travel might prove too taxing.

The journey began at Stokeworth and Rosby, continued north along the coast to Duskendale, and then brought the royal couple to Maidenpool in the Riverlands. They were to stay with Lord and Lady Mooton for a fortnight before sailing across the Bay of Crabs toward Wickenden, Gulltown, and the Vale. At Duskendale, Alysanne had held the first of the women’s courts that would become a regular feature of royal progresses, inviting women and girls of every rank to share their fears, concerns, and hopes. The incident at Maidenpool thus interrupted a journey intended not only to display royal authority but also to give the queen direct access to her subjects.

The immediate setting was Jonquil’s Pool, a sweetwater pool associated in legend with Florian the Fool and Jonquil in the Age of Heroes. Its reputed healing properties drew women to bathe there, and a great stone bathhouse had been built around it centuries earlier. The building belonged to an order of holy sisters, and men were forbidden to enter. That separation shaped the circumstances of the attack: the queen entered with her ladies, maids, and septas, while her male guards remained outside.

The Attack and Its Failure

Three of the sisters who tended the pool hated the queen and believed that allowing her to bathe while pregnant would pollute the holy waters. As Alysanne was preparing to enter the pool, the women attacked with daggers concealed beneath their robes. The assault came from within a place of religious care, in a space where the queen’s ordinary male protectors could not accompany her.

The queen’s companions intervened before the attackers could reach her. The Wise Women did not hesitate to place themselves between their lady and the blades. Septa Edyth and Prudence Celtigar were wounded, and Rosamund Ball was stabbed; although she survived the immediate struggle, her wound proved fatal three days later. None of the attackers’ blades touched Alysanne. Their intervention turned a secluded bathing place into the scene of a close defense, with the queen’s safety depending on the women already at her side.

The cries from inside brought the guards running. Ser Joffrey Doggett and Ser Gyles Morrigen had been watching the bathhouse entrance, not expecting danger to come from within. The Kingsguard quickly subdued the attackers: two were killed, while a third was kept alive for questioning. Her answers revealed that half a dozen more women from the order had helped plan the attempt, though they had lacked the courage to wield weapons themselves. The attack was therefore not the work of only the three women caught at the pool, but part of a broader conspiracy.

Investigation and Immediate Consequences

Lord Mooton hanged those found guilty. The danger of punishment extending beyond the guilty became apparent when he seemed prepared to execute innocent members of the order as well. Alysanne intervened and prevented that wider reprisal. Her response placed a limit on the lord’s anger even after the plot against her had been exposed, distinguishing the pursuit of the conspirators from indiscriminate punishment of their community.

Jaehaerys was furious, and the planned journey to the Vale was abandoned. The royal couple returned instead to the security of Maegor’s Holdfast. Alysanne remained inside until her child was born; the attack had shaken her and changed how she thought about her personal safety. The progress that had been designed to bring the royal family closer to the realm was cut short by violence within a place from which the queen’s male guards had been excluded.

Alysanne’s Sworn Shield

Alysanne told Jaehaerys that she needed a protector of her own. His Kingsguard were loyal and valiant, she acknowledged, but they were men, and there were places where men could not go. The failed assassination had made that limitation concrete: the queen had been protected by the courage of the women accompanying her, while the knights tasked with guarding her had been stationed outside.

Jaehaerys agreed. That very night, a raven was sent to Duskendale commanding the new Lord Darklyn to send his bastard half-sister, Jonquil Darke, to court. Jonquil had already distinguished herself during the War for the White Cloaks as the mystery knight called the Serpent in Scarlet. Still wearing scarlet when she arrived in King’s Landing a few days later, she accepted appointment as Alysanne’s sworn shield. In time, she became known throughout the realm as the Scarlet Shadow, a name associated with the closeness of her protection.

Significance

The attack exposed a vulnerability in royal security that a larger escort alone could not solve. The bathhouse’s rules kept men out, and the conspirators used that boundary to strike at the queen in a space the Kingsguard could not enter. Alysanne’s answer was not to abandon the places reserved for women, but to secure a woman’s protection within them. Jonquil Darke’s appointment made that need part of the queen’s continuing household.

The incident also complicates the image of the royal progress as an uncomplicated encounter between monarch and people. Alysanne had created audiences where women could speak openly to her, but at Maidenpool she confronted hostility from women who rejected her presence on religious grounds. The same all-female setting that enabled access and companionship also placed immediate responsibility for her defense on the women present. The failed attack therefore changed both the course of the progress and the practical arrangements by which the queen would travel and receive others.