Alys Rivers: Enchantress
A witch casting spells over a steaming cauldron. Engraving by H.S. Thomassin after Demaretz, late 17th-early 18th century. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
Trigger Warnings: Sexual violence and consent violation; PTSD and wartime trauma.
Naughty Picture Warning: Be prepared for 15th-16th century pictures of suggestively posed naked witches. Maybe don’t open this one on your work computer.
Thus begins Part 3 of my discussion of Alys Rivers, focusing on her depiction as a paramour and possible user of love magic. Although I explore real-world inspiration and cultural roots, I also delve much further into character development speculation here, exploring what might really be going on in Alys’s relationships with both Prince Aemond and Ser Criston Cole, and considering where I hope House of the Dragon might take all of these seductively witchy storytelling currents in the future. Enjoy!
As always, this post contains a storm of spoilers from Fire and Blood. If you are Unsullied by that particular tome and want to watch future seasons of House of the Dragon in a state of purity, this post will destroy your virtue. If you don’t care about sullying your mind with spoilers, read on, and if you need a refresher on the spectacularly witchy career of Alys Rivers, I suggest checking out History of Westeros’ excellent episode on the woman herself:, as well as theirs and Radio Westeros’ Dance of the Dragons episodes. For a very quick run-down, her Wiki of Ice and Fire entry ably summarizes the canon.
“...One by one, every man and boy with Strong blood in his veins was dragged forth and put to death, until the heap of their heads stood three feet tall. Thus did the flower of House Strong, an ancient line of noble warriors boasting descent from the First Men, come to an ignoble end in the ward at Harrenhal. No trueborn Strong was spared, nor any bastard either, save…oddly…Alys Rivers. Though the wet nurse was twice his age (thrice, if we put our trust in Mushroom), Prince Aemond had taken her into his bed as a prize of war soon after taking Harrenhal, seemingly preferring her to all the other women of the castle, including many pretty maids of his own years.” - Fire and Blood: The Dying of the Dragons - Rhaenyra Triumphant, Page 462
“...Mushroom suggests that the two men had become rivals for the affections of the wet nurse Alys Rivers, who had used love potions and philtres to inflame their passions. Septon Eustace echoes the dwarf in this part, but says it was Aemond alone who had become besotted with the Rivers woman, to such an extent that he could not bear the thought of leaving her.” - Fire and Blood: The Dying of the Dragons: Rhaenyra Triumphant, Page 465
“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” - Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), 1487, trans. Montague Summers
I set out to tell a witch story, and I found it’s ultimately more of a war story. Not that those genres need to be mutually exclusive, of course; Alys’s story in Fire and Blood could easily be subtitled as “a witch in a time of war.” At first glance, this may seem distant from this post’s ostensible topic: Alys Rivers as a magical seductress of men (and perhaps women, if we include Sabitha Frey as a possibility). However, love magic, sexual violence, and war are more closely entangled than it seems at first glance. All three ultimately wind back to the great theme of Martin’s novels: the uses and abuses of power in all its forms. Here, however, my focus is on sexual power, and as usual, Alys the stealer of prince’s souls turns out to have deep and unsettling real-world roots. In Fire and Blood, the roots also turn out to be thoroughly tangled and twisted, with far more possibilities lurking beneath the surface than initially meets the eye. In order to understand where the idea of the seductress-witch comes from, however, we need to tear down a few of our own culture’s common assumptions about the medieval world and women’s sexuality, and consider how our real-world views, both past and present, might stack up in comparison to those of Westeros.
Most of us enjoying these books and shows, as well as Martin himself and the creators of both TV shows, are coming from a post-Victorian sexual culture that is in the process of unpicking a strict but ultimately very modern set of ideas about who wants to have sex most. We continue to wrestle with the cultural expectation that dominated in the 19th century: women are frail, frigid creatures who are compelled to lie back and think of England while their naturally lustful husbands take their pleasure and then sneak off to take some more (discreetly, of course) with local sex workers. Within the context of European history, this is a startlingly new and short-lived cultural idea. If you raced through a few millennia and asked an ancient Athenian citizen, an early medieval monk, a late medieval knight schooled in chivalry, and an early modern religious reformer whether men or women desired sex more, they would all provide the same unequivocal answer: women are wildly, dangerously, irrevocably, unnaturally sexual and want to bang all the time. The job of the menfolk, whose desire is reasonable and natural and of course the divinely created default, is to ensure that all of that unruly sexuality is properly contained and controlled within rational bounds for the benefit of society.
In this understanding, which I’m going to broadly refer to as pre-modern since it encompasses every century before 1800 or so, women’s presumed extreme sexuality was viewed as a female weakness that justified male control: irrational women just couldn’t help themselves, wanting to have sex all over the place, so men had to step in and make sure they behaved themselves by sleeping only with their husbands, and (at least in the view of the medieval Church) ideally only for purposes of making more people. Unfortunately, however, all this insatiable female lust and lack of self-control was also wont to inspire the use of magic in order to satisfy women’s overbearing carnality. For most of the medieval period, this assumption did not lead to witch-hunting, as the problem wasn’t seen as especially worrisome: girls will be girls, men need to be on their guard, and churchmen occasionally need to step in and shut down the use of love spells. As the medieval shifted into the early modern, however, the topic of witchcraft began to excite more anxiety, and the dangers of women’s and witches’ sexuality was now viewed as a public menace to be met with extreme violence. The Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous prototype of witch-hunting manuals quoted at the opening of this post, contains a wild array of misogynistic diatribes and alarmist folktales about the alleged sexual crimes of witches. There’s a particularly ribald tale of witches stealing illusory penises and hiding them up a tree in a bird’s nest, causing erectile dysfunction and general distress amongst the affected menfolk; one young man attempts to replace his lost member with a larger one from the nest, only to be informed the dick in question belongs to the local priest. I have a lurking suspicion that the Malleus’ author(s) misunderstood a joke as a serious cautionary tale, and even amongst witch-hunting manuals, a genre that it helped to birth, the Malleus is a weird book. But while it was not well-respected at the time of writing in the late 1400s, its ideas about the sexual danger posed by witches gained strength over time and intertwined with another dominant sexual stereotype: the hyper-sexual older woman.
The “lusty widow,” as she was then described, was presumed to be a sexually experienced woman of a certain age, usually past her childbearing years and a survivor of one or more husbands. She personified the insatiable sexuality assumed of women in general, but with an appetite whetted by experience and likely relieved of the burdens of childbearing, and therefore ready and able to have a good time without fear of the consequences. In general, maidenly sexual inexperience was idealized, while both married women and widows were viewed as sexually dangerous to men precisely because they were experienced. Widows, however, lacked a husband to properly govern their lusts. Chaucer’s ever-popular Wife of Bath, worldly-wise and five times married, is probably the best-known personification of this type, but she survives with ease into our own time in the “cougar” stereotype of an older woman preying on younger men. It’s worth noting here that the Wife of Bath is named Alison, a diminutive of Alice, and is referred to as “Dame Alys” is Chaucer’s text; she is also rumored to have an interest in potions, and scholars continue to debate whether the potions in question are philtres, poisons, or abortifacients (Westerosi “moon tea”). Alison of Bath’s real-life contemporaries were unlikely to face witchcraft accusations, even if they were older, sexy potion-makers, because this wasn’t yet a common problem in the late 1300s. Once we enter the era of witch-hunting, from (very roughly) the late 1400s into the early 1700s, the idea that witches were often (though not always) older and hyper-sexual emerges in both witchcraft accusations and popular artwork, as seen here.
Hans Baldung Grien, New Year’s Greeting with Three Witches, 1514. Albertsons Museum, Vienna.
Albrecht Dürer, Witch Riding Backward on a Goat, 1500-02. Art Institute of Chicago.
One of the best-known examples of an accused witch implied to prey on young men is a woman near to my own heart, as she lived and died in my town: Bridget Playfer Wasselbee Oliver Bishop, the thrice-married woman who was the first person executed during Salem’s witch-hunt in 1692. Born in England, Bridget Bishop had survived two of her own children (she had one surviving daughter) and an abusive marriage as well as previous witchcraft accusations. When she was once again accused in the early fervor of the witch-hunt, several young men came forward and related tales of her nocturnal visits to their beds, saying she attempted to suffocate them. These alleged encounters took place after disturbing daytime interactions involving cursing or arguing, and had taken place years before, when the men were in their late teens or early twenties, and Bridget was likely in her late thirties or early forties. Some were still able to describe her clothes in vivid detail, suggesting that she made a strong impression on their imaginations. “Hag riding” shows up in folk beliefs as well as other witchcraft accusations, and may have been an explanation for sleep paralysis as well as erotic nightmares. It ties together common medieval and early modern tropes about women’s sexuality with the concept of witches as night-riding predators, an idea that stretches back into much older mythologies and folk beliefs in Northern Europe. When combined with the practice of witch-hunting, this set of beliefs could prove incredibly dangerous: although I walk past the site of Bridget Bishop’s house almost daily, her bones lie in an unmarked grave a mile away, the exact location unknown, because those young men’s accusations helped send her to the gallows.
Alys Rivers comes across as a stew of these medieval/early modern tropes of the dangerously lustful older woman with magical powers preying on vulnerable men. Her multiple pregnancies suggest plenty of sexual experience, though she hasn’t left behind the potential for childbearing quite yet. Perhaps tellingly, neither of the men who she is allegedly seducing here seem particularly experienced with women. HotD made some interesting choices in setting up the sexual histories of both Criston Cole, whose relationship with Rhaenyra and subsequent loss of honor are a source of extreme, unreconciled shame, and Aemond, who appears to have undergone an inappropriately early sexual initiation at the hands of a much-older sex worker. It’s easy to imagine that Alys, who doesn’t appear to hide or contain her sexuality much at all, would make Criston Cole wildly uncomfortable, especially if he finds himself attracted to her even while the prince he has trained from boyhood is too - and as he sees a relationship developing that recalls his own (albeit brief) experience as the paramour of a Targaryen. Aemond, meanwhile, might be primed to fall into a relationship that is somehow reminiscent of his earliest sexual experience, even if it was a traumatic one. It also bears mentioning that Alys’s apparent age, hair color, and even her name bear some resemblance to Aemond’s own mother, who Ser Criston also serves closely; she could be viewed as Alicent’s dark avatar, adding to her unsettling allure. These are all real-life emotional vulnerabilities that are combustible enough on their own, even before other emotional factors and outright magic are factored in. Leaving aside the psychological profiles of her prospective victims, however, there’s an additional element of titillation provided by the question of Alys’s age.
The idea that Alys looks much younger than she actually is suggests a combination of the greater knowledge and power (sexual, magical, and otherwise) that comes with age, combined with the more conventional allure of a younger woman. This ties back into certain medieval ideas about women’s biology as well as another medieval trope: the loathly lady. The loathly lady archetype appears in a number of medieval tales and romances from Irish, Welsh, and Arthurian sources, but the best-known is - yet again - the tale told by the inimitable Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. All involve an apparently repulsive older woman who is able to transform into a beautiful young woman when the hero has proven himself worthy in some way. This archetype lurks behind many of the sorceresses in A Song of Ice and Fire: Melisandre of Asshai, who is shown to be a glamoured, centuries-old crone in GoT, Aegon IV’s mistress Sereni of Lys, and (by implication) daughter Shiera Seastar and future mistress of Harrenhal Danelle Lothston, as well as Alys Rivers herself. In a late medieval/early modern context, both the loathly lady archetype and the stereotypes of the lustful widow and witch played into the humoral theory that was used to explain sex differences: women were generally associated with cold and moisture, while men were associated with heat and dryness. Maidens naturally trended hotter and dryer than older women, who were thought to be excessively cold and damp, and thus associated with death, decay, and disordered sexuality. This set of ideas brings us squarely back to witches, flying in with sex and death riding on each shoulder, intertwining life force and mortality in one personage. Although it’s probably unintentional on Martin’s part, the gendered humoral theory fittingly recalls the ice-and-fire alignments of Alys, a daughter of the First Men who is literally surnamed Rivers and lives next to a huge lake, and Aemond, an especially draconic and fiery Targaryen. The mysteriousness of Alys’s true age, “whether this was simple happenstance, or achieved through the practice of the dark arts,” to quote Fire and Blood, makes her potentially more deceptive, dangerous, and sensational, which is no doubt one reason Mushroom spreads this narrative. Being simultaneously old and young turns Alys into the ultimate have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too paramour, seemingly young and sexy but brimming with ancient knowledge. On a literary level, I’m a bit suspicious of this characterization for that exact reason, as it risks turning the character into the personification of a male fantasy. Given the cultural baggage surrounding witches that we have all inherited, I think it’s often incredibly difficult for male authors to effectively escape or subvert tropes and fantasies when writing about sorceresses. George R. R. Martin does better than most at needling witch-tropes, and does make sure that we’re suspicious of witchcraft rumors about powerful women by pointedly repeating the same yarns (she bathes in blood to maintain her beauty, she murdered her husbands, etc.) about a wide variety of female characters, not just those who are known to be sorceresses. That being said, I think it’s important to remain critical of authorial intent, both from Martin himself and from in-world narrators like Mushroom. There’s a lurking implication in the statement that Alys looks younger than her actual years, which is that nineteen-year-old Aemond couldn’t possibly be attracted to someone who - wait for it - actually looks forty. This also suggests that an older Alys can only remain attractive through the use of magic. As we all know, sexual relationships with substantial age differences between partners are not unimaginably unusual. The in-world voices behind Fire and Blood seem to have a hard time accepting that a young prince of the realm could be attracted to a lowborn woman some years his senior without her literally bewitching him in some way, but that may be just as likely to reflect their own cultural prejudices as any reality of Alys’ and Aemond’s actual relationship.
One of the most powerful cultural prejudices at play here is the issue of sex and social class. There's a vivid real-world historical example of medieval Europeans blaming a royal paramour’s influence on alleged witchcraft: the case of Alice Perrers. Alice Perrers rose to notoriety as Edward III of England’s mistress late in that king’s life; she was decades his junior and came to prominence as his wife, the beloved Queen Philippa, whom Alice served at court, was dying. There’s some debate over Alice Perrers’ exact background - she was the widow of a city craftsman - but she became the most influential person at the English court as the aging king first mourned his wife and then began to decline himself, both mentally and physically. Edward showered Alice with favors, including (allegedly) some of his late wife’s jewels. She was the mother of Edward’s only acknowledged bastard, and exploited her position for material gain in a manner that can only be described as entrepreneurial (she acquired a considerable fortune in land and engaged in financial exploitation), making both powerful enemies and allies. “No one - contemporarily or historically - has a good word to say about Alice,” declares Edward’s biographer Ian Mortimer, who argues for some empathy towards the maligned mistress, dependent for her entire position upon the favor of an increasingly debilitated monarch. “A shameless, impudent harlot…she was not attractive or beautiful, but compensated for these defects with her seductive voice,” declared the monk and chronicler Thomas Walsingham, who unabashedly loathed Alice.
Some historians feel that Walsingham’s physical derision arose in part from Alice’s low birth, as he emphasized that she had once been a servant who carried buckets of water with her own hands, an origin story that may or may not be true. Many contemporaries were horrified by her influence over the king and struggled to understand the fascination; sorcery must be in play, it was rumored, and some said that Alice’s physician, a Dominican friar, provided philtres with which she dosed the king. Unfortunately for Alice, the entire situation came apart when she was prosecuted for corruption and revealed to be secretly married; this led to her banishment from the king’s presence, though she eventually returned and remained by Edward’s side until his death. Literary historians speculate that Alice Perrers inspired both the character of the greedy Lady Mede in Langland’s poem Piers Plowman as well as (more speculatively) the Wife of Bath, as Chaucer would have known her through his service at court. What is more certain is that Alice Perrers was, at least for a time, the most successful and most loathed royal concubine in medieval England, and she rose to her position despite middling or lower birth. Given her name and her history, in particular the accusations that she made use of love magic, she also seems like a key real-world inspiration behind Alys Rivers.
Memorial brasses of Alice Perrers' daughter Joan and her husband, All Saints' Church, Kingston-upon-Thames. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. No contemporary images survive of Alice herself.
The concept of a lowborn paramour rising to such dizzying heights would no doubt horrify Westerosi observers just as much as it did medieval Englishmen; Tywin Lannister’s treatment of his father’s paramour comes to mind. Likewise, Alys Rivers’s rise as Aemond’s bedmate is bound to make chroniclers uncomfortable on the basis of social class alone, and her later assertion that they had in fact married probably crosses into the realm of the insupportable for many chroniclers. But as horrifying as the class dynamics of Alys and Aemond’s story may be to Westerosi observers, they are potentially satisfying to us as readers because passion across social classes is acceptable in a tale, and is key to many of our most popular fairy and folk tales across cultures. Alys and Aemond can be viewed as a desperately fractured fairy tale, in which Cinderella is a middle-aged witch with ambitions and a cupboard of potions, someone more resembling the Wicked Queen than Snow White, and her prince is the one-eyed rider of a terrifying monster rather than a heroic dragon-slayer. In other words, the villains are the romantic leads, and of course, there’s no happy ending in sight. It’s deliciously messed up and very, very Martin, upending multiple storytelling conventions at once. This tweaking of folk themes spills into chivalric romance in Alys’ and Aemond’s final scene together, with Aemond helping Alice down off Vhagar’s back and then kissing her before he flies off for the last time to battle Daemon. This scene reads like an Old Hollywood adaptation of Sir Walter Scott, in which both male characters are somehow played by Errol Flynn at different stages in his career; it gives Aemond a chivalric dash that contrasts (intentionally, I suspect) with his wartime brutality. However, chivalry is free of neither sexism nor classism; the author of the Middle Ages’ greatest manual on courtly love advocated the rape of lower-class women if a knight was so unfortunate as to find himself attracted to one. Social class is only one of the power dynamics at play here; the power of conquering, occupying armies is equally important when considering whether Alys may be using sex magic to manipulate Prince Aemond and Ser Criston.
“Though the wet nurse was twice his age (thrice, if we put our trust in Mushroom), Prince Aemond had taken her into his bed as a prize of war soon after taking Harrenhal, seemingly preferring her to all the other women of the castle, including many pretty maids of his own years.”
The reference to Alys as a “prize of war” recalls an epic war story that most medieval Europeans knew well, though it was the Renaissance that returned its most enduring interpretation to prominence in the West: a poem whose action hinges on the seizure of a woman as a war prize. Homer’s Iliad, preeminent among war stories for almost 3,000 years, famously begins with the rage of a young, fair-haired, renownedly lethal demigod- warrior-prince:
Rage - Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds…
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, Book I: The Rage of Achilles, Lines 1-5
The source of Achilles’ rage, the crux of the Iliad’s action, is the commander Agamnenon’s seizure of Achilles’ “war prize,” the beautiful queen Briseis of Lyrnessos, whom Achilles has made both a widow and his own bedmate after sacking her city and killing all the male members of her family. Homer presents contradictory narratives of Achilles’ and Briseis’ relationship: Achilles bewails Agamenon’s seizure of Briseis, claiming that she is his wife, that “I loved that woman with all my heart/ though I won her like a trophy with my spear,” but he later says that he wishes Artemis had destroyed Briseis rather than letting her come between himself and his commander. Briseis herself offers another version of events when she mourns over Patroclus’ body: “No, and again and again you vowed/ you’d make me godlike Achilles’ lawful, wedded wife…” It’s extremely unclear whether Briseis is truly a wife or concubine, or whether she and Achilles even have a mutual understanding of what their relationship is; perhaps his slaughter of her family got in the way of clear communication. Briseis is listed at one point alongside gold, stallions, bronze cauldrons, and several “flawless” craftswomen who are being traded back to Achilles. This murkiness and the use of women as prize commodities are a blunt reminder of what it really means to be a “war prize,” a situation that is as old and enduring as war itself. To quote the even blunter words of Pat Barker’s modern re-imagining of Briseis in her novel The Silence of the Girls, “I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
Briseis writing to Achilles, illumination of Ovid’s Héroïdes, translated by d'Octavien de Saint-Gelais, 1505-1510, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Viewed in this context, Aemond taking Alys as a bedmate isn’t as odd as Gyldayn makes it sound, and it requires no sorcery on her part. Despite the age difference and her illegitimate status, she is presumably the last remaining blood of the house whose male line he has just extinguished, perhaps the sister of the current lord, and her fertility has been abundantly proven. In this sense, bedding Alys is a power move, an exertion of dominance over the last of the Strongs (a family Aemond notoriously hates), and further extinguishes their line by ensuring that any remaining Strong descendants will be Aemond’s offspring. This is, in fact, exactly what happens. This may not be a well-though-out plan on his part, nor do I necessarily think it’s his primary motivation for sleeping with Alys, but I find it hard to believe that someone as ambitious and warlike as Aemond doesn’t entirely understand these dynamics, no matter how he may justify his behavior to himself or what other feelings may be involved (I’m guessing there are a few). It’s also possible Alys herself leverages this dynamic in order to better manipulate Aemond. To be extremely clear, I very much hope that this is not all there is to Alys and Aemond’s relationship in either the book (insofar as we can make out from the text) or the show. I certainly do not want House of the Dragon to provide us with a Sansa and Ramsey redux, and not only because we’ve all had enough of that. A greyer, messier, more complicated relationship that truly conflicts our loyalties and theirs will serve the tale better than the simple repetition of a rape story as old as time. There are other, probably better, options for retelling that particular story (staging Euripides’ The Trojan Women is never a bad option), and telling new and different stories about vexing relationship dynamics are well worth our time. The setup of Aemond’s character in Season One of HotD certainly suggests there will be complexity in his portrayal throughout, and the show’s reluctance to focus on sexual violence has been refreshing - but as the war of the Dance of the Dragons progresses, the show will have to confront this topic, because it is a reality of war throughout the ages. In order to even consider a more complicated outcome for these two characters, we need to acknowledge that there is a consent issue at the heart of Alys’ and Aemond’s relationship. It is not possible for a person of any social rank, but especially a servant, a demographic already acutely vulnerable to assault, to give completely free sexual consent to a ruler who has taken over their home with 4,000 armed troops and executed most of their living relatives - regardless of her feelings about the relatives themselves. This is the unvarnished truth.
This does not mean that Alys abandons all her agency at Aemond’s feet in the ward at Harrenhal; given her ultimate track record, the reverse seems likely. And so the questions begin: does Alys immediately agree to sleep with Aemond, and what kind of pressure is being applied in this case? Is she, say, called to his rooms and knows she has to go or else, or presented with a quid pro quo arrangement of gifts or position? Or does she seduce him, perhaps thinking that this is her best chance to secure hers or others’ safety while Harrenhal is occupied, or to ascend the ladder to control Harrenhal itself? Is she manipulating or colluding in the slaughter of the Strongs, and using Aemond in order to exact some kind of revenge on her family, and as the unfortunate Falia Flowers does with Euron Greyjoy in the main series? Did she foresee any of this in visions or dreams, and how might that shape her actions? Is she attracted to him and choosing to manipulate him anyway, suffering internal conflict between some combination of self-preservation, desire, love, ambition, and hate?
The power dynamics here indicate that Alys may have good reason to use magic to manipulate Aemond and, perhaps, Ser Criston Cole as well. From ancient times through the early modern, women were assumed to be drawn to sorcery not only thanks to their insatiable lust, but due to their disempowered status. The type of love magic in which women were said to indulge reflected this: the ancient Greeks divided love magic into eros, practiced by men and sex workers in order to inflame female lust, and philia (from which philtron and ultimately philtre are derived), practiced by women to remain attractive and retain male desire. To some extent, this sort of distinction can be seen into the early modern period, where recorded love spells also appear to be gendered. Most surviving early modern love spells fall into the realm of ceremonial magic, and were designed by men to captivate women against their will; surviving folk charms focus on re-enchanting husbands and protecting against sexual assault, implying they were the focus of women. If Alys is bewitching Aemond or Ser Criston in the literal sense, she may be using magic that combines these traditions, perhaps with multiple goals in mind. She might also be using herbal aphrodisiacs, which could easily be misunderstood as magical. There’s a chance that the use of aphrodisiacs could be consensual or at least not harmful, especially if the goal is to lower inhibitions, but aphrodisiacs as well as love charms could easily be administered secretly or with incomplete information provided. It’s possible Alys justifies this behavior as necessary in order to control the commanders of the army occupying her home: manipulating them both, magically or otherwise, is a strong “divide and conquer” strategy. As long as Aemond is lurking in Harrenhal obsessed with Alys and arguing with Criston Cole, he’s not out harassing the Riverlands and neither is the Hand. Of course, Alys may or may not care much about her homeland as a whole, but managing the most powerful men in the castle ensures that she is the most powerful woman within its walls, with at least a few more options at her disposal. However justified Alys may believe herself to be, can the audience condone the use of drugs - magical or otherwise - to influence or control her potentially dangerous male companions? The question can be argued both ways, and the possible use of potions and magic by someone in Alys’s position places her character in an ethical gray area worthy of debate.
The effects of an aphrodisiac potion illuminated alongside cures for urinary tract and menstrual issues; the real and legendary properties of the mandrake, widely used as an aphrodisiac herb. Tractatus de Herbis, c. 1440. Courtesy of the British Library via the Public Domain Review.
It can also be argued that there’s a fine line between a love potion and a poison, and there may be a constant possibility that Alys could poison either commander if she chose. It’s interesting that she doesn’t; perhaps the danger of discovery or their troops’ response is simply too great. Perhaps she has better uses for them alive, at least for a time, or perhaps she develops feelings for Aemond and doesn’t want to kill him. There can also, however, be a fine line between aphrodisiacs and medicine, and medicinal potions could wrongly be assumed to be draughts of another kind as well. It’s unclear how much medical knowledge Alys has, but the trifecta of woodswitch, potion-brewer, and wet nurse suggests that she has at least some. This knowledge could prove useful if, as I think the text of Fire and Blood suggests, Aemond is suffering from battle-related trauma by the time he meets Alys. There is certainly justifiable debate among historians about applying modern PTSD diagnoses to soldiers in historical contexts; pre-modern and modern warfare don’t always involve the same stress factors (such as inescapable bombardment), and soldiers from cultures that are already extremely tolerant of violence are likely to feel differently about killing than we do. For obvious reasons, this debate can apply to Westeros as well. However, trauma could explain a lot of Aemond’s particularly extreme and irrational behavior: his sudden outbursts of uncontrolled violence, his obsession with not appearing “craven,” and his eventual focus on raining fire and blood down on the riverlands to little strategic purpose. It may also be the reason he quarrels with Ser Criston and eventually splits off on his own: a lone soldier on dragonback doesn’t have to work with others and doesn’t have to worry about concealing his symptoms from the troops under his command or controlling his behavior in public. Aemond’s worst behavior from the taking of Harrenhal onwards sounds increasingly like the phenomenon of “berserking” described by psychologist Jonathan Shay in his well-known study Achilles in Vietnam, which famously posits that the rage of Achilles is an ancient example of this hyper-aware, trauma-induced rage, in which a soldier believes himself invincible and is driven to kill as many of the enemy as possible. I have to wonder if Martin, himself a member of the Vietnam generation with strong views on that conflict, was inspired by Shay’s writing when developing his characterization of Aemond in Fire and Blood. In this context, it’s possible that there is more to Alys’s potions than simply seizing power; perhaps she’s trying to treat or manage Aemond’s symptoms, for his own sake or that of those around him. Some modern studies of male veterans suffering from PTSD have reported extremely high rates of sexual dysfunction (80% in one study, 85% in another), which suggests another possible reason for the use of aphrodisiac potions or philtres. A person who is suffering in this way might need a caretaker figure, and is also ripe for manipulation, especially by someone who seems to offer desire and acceptance. Likewise, such a person can also be potentially attractive or moving, even if difficult to live with, specifically because they need help and care. If Alys becomes, in effect, Aemond’s caretaker over the course of their relationship, she may be doing so for reasons of her own survival, or out of desire and affection, or in order to make use of him for magical ends. Her motivations could ultimately be a blend of all three. After all, isn’t the only thing worth writing about the human heart in conflict with itself?
It does make a certain degree of sense that a woman who is a professional caretaker finds herself in a relationship with a very young man, scarcely more than a boy, who is troubled and unhappy even without the specter of war-induced trauma. This is especially so if Alys has indeed lost multiple children; even if Alys is on the younger end of the suggested estimate, Aemond is easily young enough to be her son. Depending on the realities of Aemond’s relationship with Helaena and the impact of Blood and Cheese, child loss might also be a form of grief that these two characters share. So too may be the experience of childhood bullying, as Alys may or may not have been treated well by her natal family at Harrenhal. It may be this lurking sense of injustice and dislocation that births in each of these characters their greatest shared trait: thirst for power. Even if they have different ends in mind, for both of them, political power is inherently intertwined with magic. The Targaryens owe their position to dragons and prophecy; Alys’s greatest weapons against her own vulnerability are her magic, her body, and her will, and these eventually enable her to seize Harrenhal. I do suspect that Aemond is actively interested in the prophetic and magical aspects of Alys’s persona, and ignores the aspects of this that might endanger his own person. One has to wonder if, between his prophetess-entomologist sister, sorceress paramour/wife, and ancient, grouchy, magical battleax of a female dragon, Aemond really just can’t resist witches; in the show, he comes across as something of a lost Goth boy, struggling to overcome middle-school-age bullying and secret crushes with extreme workouts, philosophy, and deliberately unsettling jewelry choices. But this attraction isn’t terribly surprising, because witches are personifications of power, and that seems to be exactly what Aemond wants most. Even though she’s a lowborn bastard working as a servant, Alys’s combination of sexual allure, demonstrable fertility, and magical/prophetic abilities essentially make her power incarnate, so it should come as no surprise that Aemond falls for her so madly: she’s a living, breathing embodiment of his deepest desire, which is constantly escaping him. However, the allure of power runs in both directions. Alys is an outsider to the Westerosi power system in almost every way that counts: she’s lowborn, female, and a bastard; she works in service; she practices magic, which is tolerated but maligned by many; and she may not be a follower of the majority religion in her region. Her only apparent social advantage is her blood tie to a great house, a relationship that might have made her feel even more of an outsider in certain ways. For someone who has lived her entire life this way, even someone confident in her own identity, watching one of the most powerful men in the realm fall at her feet is likely to prove intoxicating. Even if Alys starts out using her own powers for purposes of basic survival in a terrifying situation, or for immediate revenge, her desires and ambitions may change as she spends more time in proximity to royal power. Can anyone ride a dragon, even as a guest of a dragonrider, and remain the same?
Here we have a philtre likely to be more powerful than any purely magical brew would be on its own: a heady blend of mutual needs that boil down to the strongest and most elemental human desires. Hunger for control, adulation, and acceptance; to assuage loneliness and anguish; to exact revenge; to find pleasure and purpose in a world turning swiftly to ashes: this is the stuff that love spells and madness are made of. Bear in mind, if you will, that love spells are traditionally expected to impact the perpetrator too: they don’t come free, and are often said to ensnare the caster and cause disquieting side effects. Sorcery is a sword without a hilt; there is no safe way to grasp it, and this is at least as true of eros as any other form of magic.