The wind made her hair fly wildly around her face as she looked beyond the line that separated the sky from the Narrow Sea.
She hadn't stepped foot in Westeros since 85 AC.
She hadn't seen her daughter since her father and stepmother came and took her home.
Saera Targaryen was returning to Westeros. Specifically, she was journeying to Dragonstone, where her baby girl lived.
Alysanne needed to know her brothers, her mother and her heritage-the secrets surrounding her childhood and birth, why Otto Hightower had kept her mother a secret, and he told her that his wife was her mother.
It all happened in 94 AC, just nine years after Princess Saera Targaryen, the fifth daughter of King Jaehaerys the First, left Westeros after the scandal that cost her a lover and her closest ones. Because of a foolish comment comparing herself and her marrying her lovers to that of Maegor the Cruel, Saera had woken a dragon in her father and left when she had enough of him.
Otto Hightower had been married to Elinor Redwyne for a while, with her having birthed sons, he knew he should be in Oldtown, raising their myriad of sons, but Otto wished to do something he would never have done before.
As a younger boy, he had hoped to marry Princess Saera Targaryen after she batted her snowy lashes at him and flirted with him, but she had also been intimate with three men, and Otto loathed those men.
When Otto Hightower had travelled to Volantis to oversee a trade between Volantis and Oldtown, his host had taken him to a brothel where he had drunkenly slept with a whore who looked alarmingly similar to Princess Saera, the lustful dragon. He had bedded her, unaware that not only did he sleep with the notorious Saera Targaryen but had fathered a bastard conceived in a brothel.
A few moons after encountering the whore resembling Saera, he received a visitor from Volantis, who said that their uncrowned Empress, Saera Targaryen, had fallen pregnant with a Westerosi man's child.
His child.
Elinor, who had been initially angry that Otto had been unfaithful after all the sons she gave birth to, had calmed and made a plan.
She and Otto would sail to Essos on a second honeymoon from Lys to Volantis, where they would 'extend their honeymoon', stay with the pregnant Saera until she had given birth, and take the baby to Westeros to raise as their own. That way, the couple had a plausible explanation for why their newest baby wasn't born in Westeros.
It did not help that Elinor had once considered Saera a friend and sister, and knowing that Saera was growing Otto's baby in her belly stung, Elinor held the grace that only a Queen would have and soldiered on.
So, the couple ventured to Lys, then Volantis and stayed for three moons with a heavily pregnant Saera.
Then, one evening in the year 95 AC, Saera screamed as she pushed Otto Hightower's child into the Essosi hot air.
The maester praised their uncrowned Empress as the baby fell out of her body and into the maester's hands, crying and wriggling around as it breathed its first breath in the Known World.
"It's a healthy little girl, Your Majesty!" A Pentoshi wetnurse grinned happily.
"Alysanne." That was all Saera said before she fell unconscious, but what this mother didn't know was that when the maesters handed the baby to Otto and Elinor Hightower after being cleaned of the blood and fluids, it emerged.
The couple stole the baby, boarded a ship with their possessions and arranged for a tongueless wetnurse to feed the baby girl.
"We need to change her name. We can't present her to the courts calling her Alysanne, especially if she has taken after Saera."
YOU ARE READING
The Green Flame
FanfictionViserys Targaryen has a dilemma. He must take a second wife to have sons. And his brother refuses to bed his wife. When Otto Hightower and Corlys Velaryon set their daughters to be the new Queen, Viserys sees the solution to his problems. But hi...
