Born in 113 AC, a daughter of the Lord of Raventree Hall and aunt to the boy lord Benjicot Blackwood, Black Aly was a tall, thin, fearless woman with a mane of black curls and a bawdy tongue, famed as a hunter, horse-breaker, and archer. She was sixteen when House Blackwood declared for the blacks in the Dance of the Dragons in 129 AC. At the Battle of the Burning Mill her brother, Lord Samwell Blackwood, was cut down in single combat by Ser Amos Bracken; the Blackwoods held that the weirwood arrow which took Amos through the eye-slit a moment later was loosed by Aly, avenging her brother. She commanded three hundred riverland archers at the Battle of the Kingsroad in 131 AC, and was among the few captains on either side to fight the war from its first battle to its last.
When Cregan Stark came south after the war and held King's Landing through the Hour of the Wolf, Aly went to him to plead for the life of Lord Corlys Velaryon, whom Aegon III had pardoned. She asked it as a personal boon in exchange for whatever he might choose; Cregan asked for her hand, and she gladly agreed. They wed in the godswood of Winterfell in 132 AC, and she bore him four daughters: Sarra, Alys, Raya, and Myriah. She died at some unrecorded point during Cregan's long rule, and because Cregan's heir Rickon left only daughters who married sons of his later wife Lynara, the main line of the Starks does not descend from Black Aly.