Alicent Hightower

Daughter of Ser Otto Hightower, Alicent was raised between Oldtown and the Red Keep, and became Queen of the Seven Kingdoms when she wed Viserys I after Queen Aemma's death. She gave the king four children — Aegon, Helaena, Aemond and Daeron — and watched, with growing certainty, that her husband's devotion to Rhaenyra would one day cost them all their lives.

The court split along the seam of her fear. Her faction took the colour of the Hightower beacon — green, the signal Oldtown lights when it calls the banners of the Reach to war — while Rhaenyra's followers became the blacks. Alicent pressed Aegon's case through two decades of quarrel, and when Viserys died in 129 AC it was her planning that crowned him before the realm could answer.

The Green cause won its early victories and lost everything else. Alicent survived the fall of King's Landing — Rhaenyra spared her life 'for the sake of our father' — and returned to Oldtown to outlive her children. She died of the winter fever in 133 AC, the last of the war's architects, having spent her final year confined to her rooms with an aversion to the colour green.