Mei

The marriage of the Princess to Lord Ormund Hightower was celebrated with all the pomp befitting the union of two great houses, though those with ears to hear noted that the bride smiled less than a maiden ought on her wedding day. Lord Ormund, for his part, comported himself with the dignity and restraint one would expect of a lord of his years and station, and it was widely remarked that he showed remarkable patience with a bride who had clearly been ill-prepared for the duties of wifehood by her mother's notoriously disordered household.

That the Lord of Oldtown was more than twice his bride's age occasioned little comment; such matches were common enough, and the princess was said to be of a meek and biddable disposition, Eustace notes with barely concealed satisfaction that Lord Ormund undertook the correction of these deficiencies with "patience and firmness befitting a father as much as a husband," and that within a moon of their wedding, the princess had shed the immodest Lyseni fashions of her maidenhood in favor of the woolens and silks proper to a Hightower lady. That she wept at the exchange is mentioned only in Mushroom's account, and Mushroom is not to be trusted in matters of women's tears.

What passed between them in the privacy of the Hightower is not recorded, though Eustace assures us that Lord Ormund was a man of "vigorous piety" who attended services at the Starry Sept each morning and kept a septon in his household for the spiritual edification of his young wife. Mushroom, predictably, takes the opposite view, devoting several lurid pages to the claim that the princess was so thoroughly subjected to her husband's "attentions" that she could scarcely walk on the mornings. The fool further alleges that Lord Ormund kept a collection of certain items—hair, ribbons, "tokens of affection"—which he would produce in the bedchamber to the princess's mingled shame and, Mushroom insinuates, secret pleasure. That Mushroom had never set foot in the Hightower seems not to have constrained his imagination in the slightest.

On the matter of the princess's behavior, the two sources are in rare agreement, though they differ in interpretation. Both record that she was seldom seen in public during the early year of her marriage, a circumstance Eustace attributes to her natural modesty and devotion to her household duties, while Mushroom—with a leer that is almost audible on the page—suggests she was kept close because Lord Ormund could not bear for other men to look upon what belonged to him. "He dressed her like a septa and locked her away like a jewel," Mushroom writes, "and she, poor simple creature, mistook his jealousy for love."

What is known is that the princess's famed dragon was seldom seen above Oldtown, and when it did appear, its cries were said to be so mournful that smallfolk made the sign of the Seven. Septon Eustace takes this as evidence that even the beast sensed the wickedness of its mistress, for dragons, as all men know, are creatures of sin and sorcery, bound to their riders by pacts that no godly man should contemplate. That Lord Ormund tolerated the creature's presence at all was counted as further proof of his extraordinary forbearance.

The servants' gossip, dutifully recorded by Mushroom with his customary indifference to decency, painted a picture of a household in which the lord was forever correcting his wife's deficiencies. She spoke too freely, it was said. She asked impertinent questions. She had been raised in the Targaryen fashion, which is to say without discipline, without modesty, and without any proper understanding of a wife's subordination to her husband. Lord Ormund, who had been blessed in his first marriage with a lady of impeccable breeding, was said to find his new bride's temperament trying in the extreme. Yet he never raised his hand to her in public, nor spoke a harsh word where others might hear—a restraint that Septon Eustace lauds as evidence of his sanctity, though Mushroom, with characteristic coarseness, suggests that whatever correction occurred happened behind closed doors and left no marks that could be seen when the lady was clothed.

That she bore him a child is indisputable, and Eustace takes care to note that she performed this duty without complaint, as befits a godly wife. Mushroom, ever eager to soil the cleanest linen, claims that Lord Ormund was so determined to see her with child that he kept her "occupied in the matter nightly" from the first week of their marriage, and that the princess, "young and tender as she was," learned to endure it and eventually to welcome it, for she knew no other existence.

When the war began in earnest, Lord Ormund—whether out of husbandly concern or a darker desire to keep his wife ignorant of her family's fortunes—took great pains to ensure that tidings from the east did not reach the princess's ears. Septon Eustace praises this as the act of a devoted husband protecting his delicate wife from matters too weighty for the female mind to bear, though even he admits that Lord Ormund's efforts went beyond ordinary solicitude. Letters from Dragonstone were said to have gone astray. Riders bearing news from King's Landing were turned away at the gates. The princess, by all accounts, knew nothing of her mother's mounting peril, of her brother Lucerys's death above Shipbreaker Bay, or of the gathering storm that would soon consume the realm.

Mushroom, inevitably, offers a third interpretation. The Lord of Oldtown, he claims, knew that if his wife learned of the war, she would fly at once to her mother's side on that wretched beast of hers, and he could not bear the thought of losing her—not to Rhaenyra, not to the blacks, not to anyone. "He kept her ignorant as a septa," the fool writes, "and just as cloistered, for he feared her dragon more than he feared the gods, and her mother's influence most of all." That Lord Ormund's motives were possessive rather than protective is a charge the greens have always denied, though it must be said that the princess's ignorance of such momentous events—occurring to her own blood, in her own name—required a degree of isolation that even the most devoted husband would find difficult to justify.

The revelation, when it came, was devastating, through a servant's careless remark, Mushroom claims, though Septon Eustace insists it was delivered gently by Lord Ormund himself, the princess, upon learning of her brother's fate, collapsed with a shriek that witnesses later described as inhuman. Septon Eustace, with his customary sympathy for the female condition, attributes her collapse to "the weakness of her sex, which cannot bear shocks that men must endure with fortitude." Mushroom attributes it to the fact that she had been deceived for weeks by the husband who had sworn to cherish her, and that her grief was as much for the lie as for the brother.

When Lord Ormund departed for the war, the princess remained at the Hightower for some months—long enough for Septon Eustace to praise her dutiful attention to the household in her husband's absence, and long enough for Mushroom to invent half a dozen scandals that supposedly occurred the moment the lord's back was turned. That she eventually flew to King's Landing with her children is not disputed. The meaning of that flight, however, has been contested by every chronicler who set pen to the Dance. Septon Eustace declares it an act of wifely desertion, a betrayal made all the more damning by the fact that she left Lord Ormund's children from his first marriage behind, "abandoning her stepchildren as carelessly as she abandoned her vows." Mushroom, by contrast, claims she fled because she had received word that her husband had fallen—a false report, as it transpired, but one she was eager to believe, for it freed her from a marriage she had come to loathe.

The fool further alleges that the princess miscarried a child upon learning of Prince Jacaerys's death, and that Lord Ormund was responsible not only for concealing the news but for the babe's loss itself, for "her womb had been so battered by his ceaseless demands that it could no longer hold what was planted there." This is Mushroom at his most indefensible, fashioning tragedy into titillation, yet the rumor took hold in certain circles and has proven difficult to dislodge from the popular imagination.

What followed in the North has been the subject of more ink than any other chapter of the princess's life. That she entered into an irregular union with Lord Cregan Stark while her lawful husband yet lived is a fact that even her most ardent defenders cannot deny. Septon Eustace pronounces it bigamy and whoredom, declaring that the princess had "inherited her mother's talent for spreading her legs wherever advantage might be gained." That she bore Stark a son within the year is cited as proof that the union was consummated with an enthusiasm unbecoming a woman who still had a husband living, whatever reports she claimed to have received.

Mushroom, predictably, provides details. The princess and Lord Stark, he writes, were inseparable from the moment of her arrival, the Northman being "everything the Hightower was not: young, hale, and possessed of an appetite that matched her own newly awakened desires." The fool devotes an improbable number of pages to the coupling itself—pages that remain popular in certain disreputable establishments to this day—claiming that the princess, after years of what he terms "Oldtown discipline," discovered in Winterfell that the marital act could be something other than duty and penance. That she took to it with a fervor that shocked even the Northmen, a people not known for prudishness, is presented by Mushroom as a redemption of sorts, though Septon Eustace sees only confirmation of her inherent depravity.

What followed the war was a matter that threatened to plunge the ravaged realm into fresh conflict, for Lord Ormund Hightower, upon learning the full extent of his wife's second marriage, did not accept his cuckolding, he gathered his surviving forces—still some four thousand strong, hardened by the campaigns in the Reach—and began a march north with the stated intention of reclaiming his wife and children from the "savage seducer" who had stolen them. That Cregan Stark, for his part, began marshaling the northern levies in response is well documented, and for several tense months the realm stood on the brink of a private war that would have bled what little peace the Dance had left.

It was the young king, Aegon the Third, who prevented this catastrophe, though he was but a boy of ten and crushed by the griefs that would define his reign. His elder sister, the princess, had refused the throne in his favor—a decision Eustace calls humble and Mushroom calls foolish—and now she found herself in the impossible position of having two husbands, each of whom could claim her by law, and each of whom commanded armies that the crown could ill afford to oppose. That she loved one of these men and had borne him a son is indisputable; that she had also borne a son to the other, and had once loved him too, complicated matters beyond the solving of any maester's counsel.

The compromise that was eventually brokered—by the princess herself, if Mushroom is to be believed, though Eustace insists it was the work of the King's Hand—was as unorthodox as it was pragmatic. The princess would remain the wife of Cregan Stark in the North, where the old gods held sway and the Faith's proclamations carried little weight. But she would also return to Oldtown for a portion of each year, bringing with her the son she had borne Lord Ormund, the child Aelias, so that the boy might know his father and his Hightower kin. That she would, during these visits, resume her duties as Lady of Oldtown—all of her duties, as Mushroom takes pains to specify—was an unspoken term of the arrangement, one that the princess accepted with what Eustace calls "penitent grace" and "She had been broken to the saddle young," Mushroom writes with characteristic crudeness, "and learned to ride whichever mount was beneath her."

Lord Ormund, for his part, accepted the arrangement with the grim dignity of a man who had won the war but lost the peace. When she returned to Oldtown each spring with young Aelias, the servants noted that Lord Ormund seemed to shed ten years in a single day—and that on the mornings after her arrival, she was often seen walking with some difficulty, a detail that Mushroom, predictably, does not allow to pass without comment.

Mushroom, who claims to have witnessed the first reunion of Lord Ormund and the Stark at a royal wedding some years later, describes the encounter with relish: "The Wolf and the Beacon stood at opposite ends of the hall, each with the princess between them like a bone between two hounds, and the looks they exchanged could have curdled milk. Yet she went to each in turn—to Ormund first, as courtesy demanded, for he was the elder husband and the one most grievously wronged—and spoke to him softly, and touched his face, and he unbent enough to press his lips to her lips. Then she crossed to Stark, who had watched the exchange with the patience of a man who knew she would come to him eventually, and he put his arm around her with a possessiveness that made the Hightower man reach for his sword. It was, all agreed, the most uncomfortable wedding feast since King Viserys had made his family dine together during the last year of his reign."