Alys Rivers

A bastard of Harrenhal: wet nurse, herb-witch, brewer of draughts and reader of storms — older, the smallfolk swear, than she looks by some decades. Harrenhal's ghosts answer to her.

The fuller tale

A bastard of Harrenhal by birth — hence the surname Rivers, given to baseborn children of the riverlands — Alys occupies a role at the castle that is part wet nurse, part herb-witch, part something the smallfolk are considerably less comfortable naming directly: a brewer of draughts, a reader of storms, and, by local reputation, considerably older than her appearance would suggest by some decades no one can quite account for.

Harrenhal's long history of curses and ill luck seems to answer to her specifically in a way it answers to no one else who has ever held the castle — its ghosts, whatever they actually are, are treated by both tellings as somehow known to her, familiar rather than frightening, in a manner that unsettles everyone else who spends any real time within the castle's walls.

When Daemon Targaryen takes Harrenhal for the black cause and finds himself garrisoning it with too few men through a season with too little fighting, Alys becomes his primary companion in the isolation that follows — and later, when Aemond occupies the same castle, hers as well, a continuity that suggests her attachment is to the place itself rather than to whichever prince currently commands it.

The page and the screen

Alys Rivers is one of the show's more heavily developed inventions relative to her modest presence in Fire & Blood, where she appears mainly as a name associated with Harrenhal's household rather than a figure given extended narrative attention — the series has built out her mystery and her role in both Daemon's and Aemond's respective stays at the castle well beyond what the book's terse mentions provide.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Daemon holds a ghost-ridden Harrenhal, dosed by Alys Rivers's draughts, dreaming of everything he broke. (S2·E4)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.