Two years have passed since Aegon III Targaryen sat down in his own council chamber and told his regents, quietly, that they were sitting in his chair. He was eighteen then. He is twenty now, and the realm is his — though what that means, no one yet knows for certain.
The Dance of the Dragons ended a decade ago, but its wounds have not closed. Half the great houses of Westeros bear scars that do not show on a map: fortunes spent, heirs buried, loyalties poisoned at the root. The dragons are not what they were. Those that survived the war have dwindled, and the eggs that hatch now more often than not yield something wrong — twisted, sickly, unviable. Morning, the pale she-dragon of Princess Rhaena, still lives, but she is an exception in a world that seems to be forgetting what dragons are. The Targaryens still sit the Iron Throne, but the fires that made their name a thing men feared are guttering. What remains of that legacy, and what it is worth, remains to be seen.
In King's Landing, the city has steadied. The Winter Fever has broken, the long cold has retreated, and merchants have returned to the docks along the Blackwater Rush. The gold cloaks walk their rounds. Atop Visenya's Hill the Grand Sept built in the time of Aegon the Conqueror stands as it always has, and the bells of its towers mark the hours for half the city. On Rhaenys's Hill the ruined Dragonpit crouches against the sky, its dome collapsed and its gates broken, and if you watch at dawn you might still catch a pale shape rising from the caves beneath. The Red Keep's ravens carry letters to every corner of the realm. On the surface, it looks very much like a kingdom at peace.
Beneath the surface, it is something else entirely.
The king's Hand and council are his own appointments now, no longer chosen by regents. But regency leaves its fingerprints. The men Unwin Peake placed throughout the castle — in the Kingsguard, in the City Watch, among the ladies of the court — did not leave with him when he swept back to Starpike in his fury. They remained. They remain still. Whom they serve now, and what they were left behind to do, is a question no one has been able to answer with proof.
The king is known to be serious and deliberate, a man who moves through court with the measured quiet of someone who has seen what carelessness costs. Those who have stood before him say he watches with eyes that are older than his face. Beyond that, he is his own man, and the court is still learning what that means.
His brother Viserys is a dimmer light than he once was. The departure of his wife Larra for Essos last year left a mark that has not faded — the easy charm that once made him the darling of court has given way to something quieter, more guarded. He remains the heir presumptive, father to young Aegon, Aemon, and infant Naerys, and the dynasty's future is secure enough on paper. But the warmth that once made lords and smallfolk alike lean toward him is harder to find these days.
The great houses of the realm are finding their feet again. Lords who bent the knee after the Dance are consolidating what they salvaged. Houses that backed the wrong dragon are rebuilding, carefully. New marriages are being arranged. Old grudges are being nursed behind careful smiles. Power in King's Landing has never gone uncontested for long, and the court is full of people who understand that very well.
Adding to the general bustle of court, word has spread that His Grace may at last be considering the question of a queen. Whether the king himself shares this view is a matter of some debate — though Princess Rhaena, his sister and one of the few people at court who speaks to him without apparent fear of the answer, has taken it upon herself to extend invitations to a number of eligible ladies and their retinues on his behalf. The halls of the Red Keep are filling accordingly. There are whispers of a ball, a proper one this time, with dancing.
Prince Viserys, still wifeless and still grieving in his quiet way, has found himself swept up in the same current whether he wills it or no.
For the ladies arriving with hope in their hearts, for the lords who sent them, for the ambitious and the calculating and the merely curious — the capital has not offered this particular kind of opportunity in some time. Court is crowded. Everyone is watching everyone else. And somewhere in the Red Keep, a king who did not ask for any of this is enduring it anyway.
This is where the story begins. Not at some grand crisis, not at the moment a war is declared or a king falls — but here, in the ordinary days before any of that, when the shape of things is still being decided by the people in the room. By what they want. By what they are willing to do to get it.