Tanselle, called Tanselle Too-Tall for her great height—she stood but half a head shorter than Ser Duncan the Tall himself—was a Dornish puppeteer who plied her craft during the reign of King Daeron II Targaryen. In the year 209 AC she came north with a troupe of her countrymen to the tourney at Ashford Meadow, where her uncle carved the puppets and she painted them, and together they staged the old tales of Florian and Jonquil, of Nymeria and her ten thousand ships, of Symeon Star-Eyes, and of a brave knight slaying a dragon. It was this last that drew the wrath of Prince Aerion Targaryen, who named the players traitors for letting the dragon die, set his men-at-arms to wreck their stall, and cruelly broke Tanselle's fingers with his own hands. Ser Duncan the Tall, summoned by the boy Egg, fell upon the prince in her defence, and from that fray sprang the Trial of Seven, the first such combat in more than a hundred years. Tanselle, who had earlier agreed to paint Dunk's shield with a shooting star above an elm tree at sunset, fled with her people for Dorne before the trial was done, and though Dunk and Egg later sought her through a hundred puppet shows across the south, the chronicles do not record whether she was ever found again.
