In the sixty-third year of the reign of Jaehaerys I, the Old King called the greatest council in the history of the Seven Kingdoms. He was not long for the world and he knew it, and the question of succession weighed heavily upon him, for death had not been kind to his children. Lords great and small answered the summons to Harrenhal, totaling more than a thousand lords and their retinues.
Fourteen claims were put before the council over thirteen days of deliberation. Nine lesser claims were quickly set aside. Archmaester Vaegon, himself of Targaryen blood, was passed over on account of his maester's vows. Princess Rhaenys and her daughter Laena were passed over on account of their sex, as the lords of Westeros were disinclined to see a woman upon the Iron Throne — a sentiment that would, in the years to come, prove to have consequences no man in that hall could have foreseen. That left two candidates standing: Prince Viserys, son of the late Prince Baelon, and Laenor Velaryon, son of Princess Rhaenys.
When the votes were counted, Viserys had carried the day by an overwhelming margin. Jaehaerys I died the following year, and Viserys I ascended to the Iron Throne.
Viserys I Targaryen was a generous and amiable king, beloved of lords and smallfolk alike, and at the center of his court was his only surviving child by Queen Aemma Arryn: the Princess Rhaenyra, whom the singers called the Realm's Delight. She was a dragonrider at seven and her father's constant companion at court, and the realm adored her for it. The tedium of rule, however, fell to others, for Ser Otto Hightower, the King's Hand, was an able and tireless servant of the crown. So tireless, in truth, that it grew difficult to say where his will ended and the king's began.
The greatest obstacle to Ser Otto's designs was Prince Daemon Targaryen, the king's younger brother, charming and dangerous, a dragonrider of fearsome ability who passed briefly through the small council before finding his purpose as Commander of the City Watch, clothing its men in black ringmail and long golden cloaks that have been known ever since as the gold cloaks. He regarded himself as his brother's rightful heir, and Ser Otto had written to his brother in Oldtown that should Daemon ever sit the Iron Throne, he would be a second Maegor the Cruel, or worse.
When Queen Aemma died in childbirth in 105 AC, her infant son surviving her by a single day, Daemon chose to celebrate rather than mourn, and the king sent him from court. Setting aside two prior precedents on the matter of succession, Viserys named his daughter Rhaenyra heir to the Iron Throne and Princess of Dragonstone, and hundreds of lords swore to honor her claim. The following year he took a second wife in Alicent, the daughter of his own Hand — a match that surprised no one who had watched Ser Otto closely.
Alicent bore the king four children — Aegon, Helaena, Aemond, and Daeron — and the court arranged itself around the two women accordingly, neither willing to yield precedence to the other. At a tourney celebrating the fifth anniversary of the royal marriage in 111 AC the queen appeared in green and the princess in Targaryen red and black, and the division that had long existed in whispers finally had names: the Greens for Alicent's party, the Blacks for Rhaenyra's. Viserys, for his part, loved both his wife and his daughter and spent his reign striving to keep the peace between them, a labor that grew harder with each passing year.
He was not entirely without will in other matters. In 109 AC, wearied by his Hand's unceasing counsel on the succession, Viserys stripped Ser Otto of his office and named in his place Lord Lyonel Strong of Harrenhal, a learned and capable man and no ally of the Hightowers.
Rhaenyra's foremost champion at court in these years was Ser Criston Cole, a gifted young knight of the Kingsguard, though what passed between them is a matter the chroniclers cannot resolve. Septon Eustace, who served as confessor in the Red Keep, and the fool Mushroom, who was considered too simple to hide things from, have left accounts that contradict one another on nearly every particular. What is beyond dispute is that by 114 AC Cole had given his sword entirely to the Greens, and the princess had lost her finest defender.
While the court fractured, Daemon had found a war. The Triarchy, an alliance of Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh, had seized the Stepstones and imposed a regime of ruinous tolls, seized cargo, and enslaved passengers upon the shipping lanes. No man in Westeros suffered more from this than Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides, whose fleets had made House Velaryon the wealthiest in the realm. He and Daemon launched a private campaign against the Triarchy in 106 AC, funded quietly by a king who was glad enough to have his brother occupied. The war went well at first, and by 109 AC Daemon had slain the Triarchy's commander in single combat and crowned himself King of the Stepstones and the Narrow Sea, with Corlys placing the crown upon his head. Fresh forces and a Dornish alliance ground the campaign down in the years that followed, however, and Daemon eventually abandoned his kingdom to wed Laena Velaryon, Corlys's daughter, in 115 AC. Five more men called themselves King of the Narrow Sea before the last of them died, and the Stepstones returned to their natural state of contested, ungoverned, and dangerous.
Rhaenyra wed Laenor Velaryon that same year, a union chosen to repair the rift between the crown and House Velaryon that had festered since the Great Council, and she bore him three sons — Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey — none of whom bore any resemblance to their silver-haired father. The Greens called them Strongs, after Ser Harwin Strong, son of the King's Hand and the princess's constant companion, and Viserys decreed the tongue of any man who said so aloud would be removed. The matter was silenced, if never settled.
In 120 AC, the troubles came all at once. Laena Velaryon died in childbirth on Driftmark, Laenor was murdered in Spicetown, and Lord Lyonel Strong and his son Harwin perished when fire consumed a tower at Harrenhal, the cause never established, suspicion falling variously upon Daemon, upon the princess herself, and upon Larys Strong, Lyonel's clubfooted younger son, who inherited Harrenhal entire when the smoke cleared. Viserys, bereft of his Hand, recalled Ser Otto Hightower to court. Before the year was out, Rhaenyra had married Daemon on Dragonstone, quickly and without the king's blessing, both their spouses barely cold.
At Laenor's funeral on Driftmark, Prince Aemond, ten years old and the only one of the king's sons without a dragon, slipped out before dawn and claimed Vhagar, his late aunt's mount, and the largest and most formidable dragon alive. When Rhaenyra's sons confronted him, Lucerys drew a knife and took the prince's eye, and Viserys compelled apologies on all sides and decreed that none should call the Velaryon boys Strongs again on pain of losing their tongue. Aemond said he had lost an eye and gained a dragon, counting it a worthy exchange.
In the aftermath of 120 AC, Viserys sought to contain what he could not cure. Rhaenyra and her sons were confined to Dragonstone whilst Alicent's children remained at court, and the two households were kept apart as much as the realm's business allowed. It was a peace maintained by distance rather than reconciliation, and it held only so long as the king had the strength to enforce it.
That strength was leaving him. He had grown fat and short of breath, plagued by gout and failing joints, and in 126 AC he cut his hand upon the Iron Throne itself, losing two fingers to the wound's fever before Rhaenyra's own maester saved his life, a debt the queen's party did not thank her for. To celebrate his recovery, a great feast was held in 127 AC at which both households were commanded to attend. The chronicles record declarations of love and cups raised in friendship, Daemon toasting Ser Otto, the children of each party greeting the other with kisses. Viserys was well pleased. When he tired and retired for the evening, however, Aemond One-Eye rose to toast his Velaryon nephews, praising at length and in mock admiration their remarkable strength. Later still, angry words were exchanged when Jacaerys asked Helaena, Alicent's daughter and Aegon the Elder's wife, for a dance. The king's peace had lasted precisely as long as the king was in the room.
Viserys passed his final years in his solar, then his bedchamber, the governance of the realm left to Ser Otto and the small council. On the third day of the third moon of 129 AC, he lay down in the Red Keep and did not wake. He was fifty-two years old, and had reigned for twenty-six years.
When Viserys I was found dead in his chambers at the hour of the bat, the servant who discovered him ran to tell the queen, and no one else. Alicent went at once with Ser Criston Cole to confirm it, ordered the room sealed, and summoned the small council to her chambers. No bells rang that night. No ravens flew to Dragonstone. Lords and knights thought sympathetic to Rhaenyra were quietly arrested before dawn. Lord Lyman Beesbury, master of coin and the sole voice in that room to argue for the rightful queen, did not survive the meeting. The manner of his end has never been agreed upon, but all three of the chief chronicles concur on one point: the first blood of the Dance of the Dragons was his. The council closed the night with a blood oath, each man drawing a blade across his palm and clasping hands with the others, swearing brotherhood unto death.
What followed was not a succession. It was a coup.
The royal treasury was seized and divided between the Iron Bank, Casterly Rock, and Oldtown, with a reserve kept for bribes and sellswords. Ravens flew to every lord Queen Alicent thought sympathetic, whilst the annals of the Great Council of 101 were examined for houses likely to support Rhaenyra. House Baratheon was judged the greatest danger — Lord Boremund had always been the staunchest friend to Princess Rhaenys and her children, and though he was dead, his son Borros was said to be even more belligerent. It was not a raven that flew to Storm's End, but Vhagar, with Aemond on her back, carrying the promise of a royal marriage for whichever of Lord Borros's four daughters the prince might choose. When dawn broke, Aemond was already gone, Helaena was breaking her fast with her children, and Aegon was nowhere to be found.
Seven days passed before the bells finally rang over King's Landing, the king's body rotting in his sealed chambers all the while. Most of the smallfolk stared in silence as riders passed through the streets proclaiming Aegon king. Now and again a voice cried out for their queen. The coronation was held in the Dragonpit. Ser Criston Cole placed the iron-and-ruby crown of Aegon the Conqueror upon Alicent's eldest son and proclaimed him Aegon of House Targaryen, Second of His Name. Queen Alicent placed her own crown upon the head of her daughter Helaena, knelt before her, and said, "My Queen." The Greens had their king, crowned with a conqueror's crown, seated on the Iron Throne, with the gold of three cities behind them.
The news reached Dragonstone as Rhaenyra labored, the child coming a full moon's turn before its time. The child was stillborn, a girl, malformed. Rhaenyra named her Visenya, and said that they had stolen her crown and murdered her daughter, and that they would answer for it.
She called her own council. Daemon sat beside her, and Corlys Velaryon, old now but fierce in his purpose, with his wife Princess Rhaenys at his side — the Queen Who Never Was, as Mushroom had long called her, white-haired and unbowed. Her sons Jacaerys, Lucerys, and Joffrey sat at the table, none yet of age. The blacks had fewer men, less gold, and no city behind them. What they had was the sea, the wealth of House Velaryon, and dragons.
It was Rhaenys who tallied the strength of both sides. Aegon rode Sunfyre, Aemond rode Vhagar, Helaena rode Dreamfyre, and young Prince Daeron rode Tessarion in Oldtown — four dragons of fighting size. Against them the blacks counted seven ridden dragons, with three more sitting unclaimed in the caves of the Dragonmont: Silverwing, Seasmoke, and old Vermithor, who had carried Jaehaerys the Conciliator himself. Beyond those, three wild dragons had never known a rider — Sheepstealer, Grey Ghost, and the Cannibal. Find riders for the unclaimed three, Rhaenys argued, and they would have nine dragons against four. That was how the war would be won.
Daemon urged patience. In the Stepstones he had learned that dragons could kill dragons, and he would not spend them carelessly when the war could first be won with words. Rhaenyra would be crowned. Ravens would fly. Daemon himself would take Harrenhal, a stronghold in the heart of the riverlands where Rhaenyra's friends along the Trident could rally. The Velaryon fleet would close off the Gullet, choking the trade of King's Landing. And Jacaerys and Lucerys would carry the queen's messages to the great lords in person, on dragonback, both having sworn oaths upon the Seven-Pointed Star to ride as envoys and take no part in any fighting.
A stolen crown arrived the same day, carried by Ser Steffon Darklyn, who had slipped away from King's Landing in the night — the band of yellow gold set with seven gems that Viserys had worn, and Jaehaerys before him. Daemon set it on his wife's head and named her Rhaenyra of House Targaryen, First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men. Her first act was to name Ser Otto and Queen Alicent traitors, and to offer clemency to her half-brothers and Helaena, whom she said had been led astray by evil counsel, should they come to Dragonstone and bend the knee.
Aegon II received the news with fury. Grand Maester Orwyle crossed Blackwater Bay under a peace banner with terms that amounted to Rhaenyra's surrender dressed in generous language. She heard him out in silence, had his chain of office stripped from his neck, and sent him back across the bay. What happened next was war.
The war began in earnest before the ink was dry on either coronation. The Velaryon fleet sailed from Hull and Spicetown to close the Gullet, choking the trade of King's Landing. Daemon flew Caraxes to the Trident. Jacaerys flew north on Vermax, Lucerys south on Arrax, both having sworn upon the Seven-Pointed Star to go as envoys and nothing more.
Harrenhal fell without a drop of blood. Its lord, Larys Strong, was in King's Landing, the castle lightly garrisoned and its elderly castellan disinclined to suffer the fate of Black Harren. When Caraxes settled atop Kingspyre Tower, the banners came down. Daemon had his foothold in the riverlands, and the smallfolk came to fill it, arriving by the hundreds and then the thousands — men who remembered the Realm's Delight and the oaths they had sworn her father, carrying swords or pitchforks or whatever else came to hand. The lords of the Trident were slower to move, but most came in time. Riverrun alone held its silence, Lord Grover Tully raging from his deathbed for Aegon whilst his grandson quietly barred the gates and waited.
Jacaerys proved himself more than a messenger. At the Eyrie, Lady Jeyne Arryn pledged the Vale on the condition that dragonriders be sent to her — she had no fear of armies, she said, but she misliked feeling powerless from the sky. The prince agreed, and the Vale was won. At White Harbor, Lord Manderly bargained shrewdly, extracting a betrothal between his youngest daughter and young Joffrey before he would commit his strength. At Winterfell, Jacaerys and the young Lord Cregan Stark took to one another at once, and sealed their accord in the old way — an oath of brotherhood, sworn in blood. The agreement Munkun calls the Pact of Ice and Fire promised that Jacaerys's firstborn daughter would one day wed Cregan's heir. When the prince flew south again he had won three great lords and all their bannermen for his mother.
His brother's mission ended in catastrophe.
Lucerys arrived at Storm's End to find Aemond already there, deep in negotiations for the hand of one of Lord Borros Baratheon's daughters. The Stormlands were already lost. When Lucerys presented Rhaenyra's letter, Lord Borros asked which of his daughters the prince would take in return for his allegiance. Lucerys was already betrothed and could offer nothing. Lord Borros sent him away. Aemond moved to block him, demanding the eye Lucerys had taken from him years before, but Lord Borros would not have blood shed beneath his roof, and his guards escorted the prince back to his dragon. And there it might have ended, had a lord's daughter not said something cutting to Aemond on his way out.
The sky above Shipbreaker Bay was black, the rain falling in sheets, when Vhagar caught Arrax above the water. Vhagar was five times his size and had survived a hundred battles. Watchers on the walls of Storm's End saw distant bursts of flame and heard a shriek cut through the thunder. Arrax fell broken into the bay. Lucerys Velaryon was thirteen years old, and his body was never found.
Aemond returned to King's Landing having secured the Stormlands and killed his nephew. Queen Alicent went pale. Ser Otto observed that Aemond had only ever lost one eye, and asked how he could have been so blind. Aegon II held a feast in his brother's honor and called it a good beginning. On Dragonstone, Rhaenyra collapsed when told. Young Joffrey swore vengeance against Aemond and Lord Borros both. A raven arrived from Harrenhal not long after, written in Daemon's hand: An eye for an eye, a son for a son.
Daemon still had friends in the low places of King's Landing, allies among the gold cloaks, and at least one trusted go-between who moved through the city's shadows as easily as he once had. Through this pale intermediary, known on the Street of Silk as the White Worm, two men were found in the stews of Flea Bottom. One had been a sergeant of the City Watch, dismissed for beating a woman to death in a drunken rage. The other was a ratcatcher who knew the Red Keep's hidden passages as well as the rats he hunted. History remembers them only as Blood and Cheese.
Cheese led Blood through the secret tunnels Maegor the Cruel had built, bypassing every guard, to the chambers of Queen Alicent in the Tower of the Hand, where they bound and gagged the Dowager Queen and settled in to wait. It was Helaena's custom to bring her children to visit their grandmother each evening before bed. When she arrived with the twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera, six years old, and little Maelor, who was two, Blood barred the door and Cheese put a knife to the smallest boy. They told the queen they were debt collectors. A son for a son. She need only choose which one she wished to lose.
Helaena begged them to kill her instead. They would not; a wife was not a son. She named Maelor — perhaps because he was too young to understand, or perhaps because Jaehaerys was the king's heir and next in line to the Iron Throne. Cheese whispered to the child that his mother wanted him dead, and then Blood struck off Jaehaerys's head with a single blow. They kept their word and did no further harm, fleeing into the castle's hidden passages with the prince's head.
Blood was caught two days later at the city gates, the head hidden in his saddlebags. Under torture he named the White Worm as his contact — a pale foreign woman known on the Street of Silk as Misery. Cheese was never found. The White Worm was never found. Aegon II had every ratcatcher in the city hanged.
Helaena did not recover. She would not eat, nor bathe, nor leave her chambers, and she could not bear to look upon Maelor, knowing she had named him to die. The king took the boy away and gave him to Alicent to raise. Aegon raged, and drank, and raged.
The Dying of the Dragons: The Red Dragon and the Gold
The war that had begun with ravens and envoys became a war of fire and blood in earnest. In the riverlands, the Blackwoods and Brackens settled old scores beneath their respective banners, their ancient quarrel swallowed by the larger one. The Battle of the Burning Mill left both lords dead and the Blacks the victors. Daemon took Stone Hedge with Caraxes shortly after, and the last Green support in the riverlands collapsed. Riverrun held its silence throughout, Lord Grover raging from his deathbed while his grandson quietly kept the gates shut and waited.
In King's Landing, Aegon II had grown impatient with his grandfather's letters. He tore the chain of office from Ser Otto's neck and gave it to Ser Criston Cole, who was not a man for letters. Those lords and knights imprisoned in the Red Keep who still refused to bend the knee were dragged into the yard and beheaded, their heads mounted above the city gates. Ser Criston then marched on the lords whose loyalty remained uncertain, sacking Duskendale and beheading its lord, before turning his attention to Rook's Rest.
It was a trap. Cole knew Rhaenyra would answer the castle's plea for relief, and he had two dragons waiting in the fields beyond: Aegon on Sunfyre, Aemond on Vhagar. Princess Rhaenys came on Meleys, the Red Queen, and did not know until too late. The three dragons met violently above the field. Meleys caught Sunfyre by the neck before Vhagar fell upon them from above, and all three went spinning to earth together. When the fires guttered out, only Vhagar rose unharmed. Rhaenys Targaryen was dead at fifty-five, the Queen Who Never Was, who had lived fearlessly and died in the same manner. Sunfyre could not fly, his wing half torn away, and his rider was borne back to the city in a closed litter with his armor melted into the flesh of his arm. Aegon II would not leave his bed for the rest of the year.
Aemond took up the iron-and-ruby crown in his brother's absence and named himself Prince Regent and Protector of the Realm, though he did not assume the style of king. He did not need to. Ser Criston meanwhile devised a more intimate vengeance, sending Ser Arryk Cargyll to Dragonstone disguised as a common fisherman. Ser Arryk and his twin Ser Erryk were identical in all respects; once inside the castle in his white cloak, Arryk hoped to pass as his brother, who served the queen. Deep in the heart of Dragonstone the twins came face to face instead. All three chronicles agree on the outcome if little else: the brothers fought, dealt each other mortal wounds, and died together.
On Dragonstone, with Rhaenyra still hollowed by grief, Jacaerys came to the fore. He put out a call for dragonseeds — men of Targaryen blood born of generations of Targaryen lords and the smallfolk of Dragonstone — to attempt to claim the riderless dragons. It was a ghastly business that Munkun calls the Red Sowing, and the name was earned. Sixteen died in the attempt and thrice that number were burned or maimed, but four riders were found: Hugh the Hammer on Vermithor, Ulf the White on Silverwing, Addam of Hull on Seasmoke, and a girl called Nettles, who won Sheepstealer not by force but by bringing him a freshly killed sheep each morning until the dragon learned to expect her. Addam was claimed by Corlys Velaryon as a natural grandson, legitimized by the queen, and named heir to Driftmark. Meanwhile Jacaerys sent Daemon's two youngest sons, Aegon the Younger and Viserys, to Pentos for safekeeping aboard a Velaryon cog.
The cog sailed straight into the teeth of the Triarchy. Ser Otto's offer of alliance had at last been accepted in Tyrosh, and ninety warships swept up from the Stepstones into the Gullet. The escort was sunk or scattered. Nine-year-old Aegon the Younger escaped on his dragon Stormcloud, arriving on Dragonstone trembling and stinking of fear, the dragon dying of his wounds within the hour. Young Viserys had no dragon. He disguised himself amongst the crew until a ship's boy gave him away, and was taken captive by the Lysene admiral Sharako Lohar.
The Battle of the Gullet was among the bloodiest sea engagements in the history of the realm. Jacaerys led the new dragonriders against the Triarchy fleet, and ship after ship burst into flame. Of the ninety warships that had swept up from the Stepstones, twenty-eight limped home. But the Triarchy's sailors had faced dragons before in the Stepstones and were prepared for them, and as Vermax swept low over the water a grapnel found purchase between his scales, the weight of the ship tearing a ragged gash in the dragon's belly. Vermax went down screaming into the burning fleet and did not rise again. Jacaerys was seen clinging to wreckage before the crossbow bolts found him. He was fifteen years old. Driftmark paid its own toll: Spicetown was sacked and put to the torch and never rebuilt, High Tide destroyed, the Velaryon fleet reduced by a third. When the Sea Snake was congratulated on the victory, he said only: "If this be victory, I pray I never win another."
In the south the Greens had cause for celebration of their own. Lord Ormund Hightower's army had been encircled on the banks of the Honeywine and was near broken when a shadow crossed the field and a dragon's roar cut through the clash of steel. Prince Daeron had come from Oldtown on Tessarion, the Blue Queen, and his arrival reversed the battle entirely. The queen's forces in the Reach were scattered and their commanders killed or taken. Daeron was knighted on the field and dubbed Ser Daeron the Daring. He was fifteen years old.
The death of Jacaerys burned away whatever remained of Rhaenyra's grief and hesitation. She had more dragons than her half-brother, and she resolved to use them. Daemon had been thinking the same. He sent ravens from Harrenhal, mounted Caraxes, and flew — not toward Aemond and Ser Criston, who were marching north to meet him, but south, skirting their line of march, crossing the Blackwater, and turning east for King's Landing. Rhaenyra followed on Syrax.
Aemond had stripped the city of defenders when he marched, and King's Landing had never loved the Greens the way it had once loved Daemon, the Prince of the City who had put the gold cloaks into their cloaks. The rank and file opened the gates without a fight. The captains loyal to Aegon were murdered or imprisoned before Caraxes touched ground. Ser Gwayne Hightower rushed to raise the alarm and was run through by his own commander. Alicent's riders were taken at the gates. The Grand Maester was dragged to the black cells. King's Landing, which had never fallen, fell in less than a day.
Aegon II was gone. His children were gone with him, along with two Kingsguard and Larys Strong, who had simply vanished. Not even Alicent knew where. The Dowager Queen emerged from Maegor's Holdfast with Ser Otto and the remnants of the green council and proposed a great council to settle the succession, as the Old King had done in days of old. Rhaenyra rejected it with contempt and offered her stepmother a choice instead: yield or burn. Alicent surrendered the keys to the castle. "The city is yours, Princess," she said, "but you will not hold it long. My son Aemond will return with fire and blood."
That night the torches were lit in the throne room and every man and woman in the Red Keep was brought forth to kneel and swear their lives to Rhaenyra Targaryen as their queen. The ceremony lasted until well past dawn. When it was finally done, Rhaenyra rose from the Iron Throne and walked from the hall on her husband's arm. Those nearest her saw the cuts on her legs and the palm of her left hand, and the drops of blood that fell to the floor as she passed. The throne had spurned her. Those who noticed said nothing aloud.
Even as King's Landing fell, Prince Aemond and Ser Criston Cole were marching on Harrenhal, only to find it empty. Daemon had abandoned the castle before they arrived, and when word reached Aemond that the city had fallen in his absence, his fury was fearsome to behold. He turned it first on Ser Simon Strong, the elderly castellan who had yielded Harrenhal to Daemon without a fight, forcing the old man to face him sword in hand and cutting him to pieces. Then he fed the corpse to Vhagar. Every man and boy with Strong blood in his veins followed, dragged out and put to death until no trueborn Strong remained alive. The ancient line ended in the yard at Harrenhal, in a heap of heads three feet high. Aemond took Alys Rivers — a wet nurse of uncertain origin long resident in the castle, and rumored to practice the darker arts — into his bed that same night.
Ser Criston urged a march south to join Lord Ormund Hightower and Prince Daeron in the Reach. Aemond refused, and the two parted ways. Cole would take the host south. Aemond would wage his own war from the air, and Vhagar's fires would do what four thousand men could not. Castle Darry was the first to burn. Lord Harroway's Town followed, then Buckle, Claypool, Swynford, and a score of villages besides, until half the riverlands seemed to be smoldering at once. The riverlords wrote to Rhaenyra begging for dragons to defend their lands. She had other uses for her dragons.
Ser Criston's march south was a misery from the first day. The riverlords burned the villages and fouled the wells ahead of him, and archers picked his men off from the trees. When he finally emerged from the riverlands he found the queen's host waiting atop a stony ridge, fresh and well-fed and holding the high ground. He rode out under a peace banner to treat. The answer came in three arrows — belly, neck, and breast. The Kingmaker died in the field without a song, and the battle that followed, known ever after as the Butcher's Ball, was not so much a battle as a reckoning.
In the Reach, Lord Ormund Hightower's army had crossed the Mander and was grinding north toward King's Landing with Prince Daeron and Tessarion flying ahead of it. At Tumbleton, a prosperous market town fifty leagues southwest of the city, Rhaenyra's defenders had gathered in strength behind walls and gates, with two dragons of their own — Vermithor, ridden by Hugh the Hammer, and Silverwing, ridden by Ulf the White. What followed is remembered as the Treasons of Tumbleton.
The Two Betrayers, as history has named them, had their grievances. Rhaenyra had rewarded their valor at the Gullet with knighthoods and modest holdings — poor thanks, they felt, for men who rode dragons into battle. When Lords Rosby and Stokeworth were executed for having bent the knee to Aegon II under duress, it had been proposed that their lands pass to Hugh and Ulf through marriage to the dead lords' daughters, but the queen allowed the sons to inherit instead. Whatever drove them, when Lord Hightower's host closed around Tumbleton, Vermithor and Silverwing turned their fires on the town itself. Tumbleton burned from within whilst Tessarion fell on the defenders from without. Lord Ormund Hightower died in the fighting, slain by the Lord of Barrowton before the northman's own destruction, but his army swept into the ruins regardless. The sack that followed was savage beyond reckoning. Prince Daeron was sickened by what he saw and could not stop it. Tumbleton never recovered.
In King's Landing, Rhaenyra's reign was souring. The treasury Aegon II had left her was empty, and her master of coin Lord Bartimos Celtigar set about filling it in ways that made the city despise her. Taxes were doubled and trebled, port fees tripled, and when the treasury still ran short, executions became a source of revenue. When Lords Rosby and Stokeworth — men who had first supported Rhaenyra, then bent the knee to Aegon to avoid death, then attempted to return to her cause — were executed for their faithlessness, the city took careful note of what loyalty was worth. The girl they had once cheered as the Realm's Delight was now called King Maegor with teats, and the name would endure for a hundred years.
Then came the death of Prince Maelor. The boy was only two years old, smuggled out of King's Landing by Ser Rickard Thorne of the Kingsguard and carried as far as Bitterbridge before they were discovered. Ser Rickard died on the bridge fighting off a mob. In the struggle over who would claim the queen's reward for the boy's return, Maelor was torn apart. When his head arrived at the Red Keep, even those with no love for Aegon II went quiet. In Cobbler's Square, a one-handed wandering preacher the city came to call the Shepherd had already begun drawing crowds, declaring dragons to be demons born of Valyrian sorcery and calling down doom on Rhaenyra and all who stood with her. Each day his crowds grew larger, and the gold cloaks could not disperse them.
Against this darkening backdrop, the black council received word of Tumbleton. If Hugh Hammer and Ulf White had betrayed the queen, who else might? Suspicion fell on the remaining dragonseeds — Addam Velaryon, who held Seasmoke in the Dragonpit, and the girl Nettles, who hunted Aemond with Daemon in the riverlands. Lord Corlys argued passionately for both. Grand Maester Gerardys urged caution. The voice that decided the matter belonged to Mysaria.
Mysaria had risen far from her origins as a Lysene dancer — the woman Daemon had once tried to gift a dragon's egg now sat at the heart of the queen's intelligence, her ears in every brothel and alehouse and hall in the city. Daemon visited her chambers each evening — with the queen's apparent blessing, the chronicles say. It was Mysaria who appeared before the council in her hooded black robe and told them, softly, that Nettles had already betrayed the queen. The girl shared Prince Daemon's bed, she said, and would soon carry his bastard. Whether Mysaria spoke from genuine knowledge, or from something rather more personal, the chronicles do not say. The queen believed her.
Rhaenyra sent gold cloaks to arrest Addam Velaryon and a command to Lord Mooton at Maidenpool to take Nettles's head. She threw Corlys into the black cells when it emerged that he had warned Addam in time for him to flee on Seasmoke. The Grand Maester was dismissed from the council and sent back to Dragonstone. In a single night Rhaenyra had imprisoned her most loyal lord, driven away her heir to Driftmark, and condemned a girl whose only certain crime was riding a dragon for her.
Lord Mooton's maester went to Daemon and Nettles at their supper and showed them the queen's letter. The old prince read it without a word, then looked at the girl across the table. He sent her away at dawn. She fed Sheepstealer a black ram — the largest in Maidenpool, slitting its throat herself — before she mounted for the last time, her riding leathers stained with blood and her cheeks with tears. No farewell passed between them. Caraxes raised his head and screamed as Sheepstealer climbed into the morning sky and turned toward the Bay of Crabs. The girl called Nettles was never seen again at court or castle.
Daemon flew to Harrenhal and waited. Each evening at dusk he cut the heart tree in the godswood with his sword, marking another day. Thirteen cuts. On the fourteenth day, Vhagar's shadow fell across the castle.
Aemond came with Alys Rivers behind him, her black hair streaming, her belly swollen with child. The two princes spoke briefly in the yard before mounting their dragons and taking to the sky above the Gods Eye as the sun began to set.
The fishermen on the lake below saw it all and spoke of it for the rest of their lives. Caraxes dove from the clouds out of the dying sun, on Aemond's blind side, and slammed into Vhagar with a force that shook the air for miles around. The dragons tore at one another as they fell — Vhagar raking Caraxes open, Caraxes's jaws locked on Vhagar's neck and not releasing. And then Daemon Targaryen swung from his saddle and leapt from one dragon to the other above the water. He tore off Aemond's helm and drove Dark Sister through his nephew's blind eye so hard the point came out the back of his throat. Both dragons struck the lake a heartbeat later. Caraxes crawled ashore and died beneath the walls of Harrenhal. Daemon's body was never recovered, even when his sword, Dark Sister, was found years later. The singers gave him a better ending, riding off to find Nettles and live out his days at her side. Even Mushroom found this too generous.
Daemon was nine-and-forty at his death. Prince Aemond had only just turned twenty. And Vhagar, the last living creature from the days of Aegon's Conquest, one hundred and eighty-one years old and the greatest dragon in the world since the passing of Balerion the Black Dread, sank to the bottom of the Gods Eye with her rider's bones still chained to her saddle. They died on the twenty-second day of the fifth moon of 130 AC, as darkness swallowed Black Harren's accursed seat. Caraxes, gutted and broken, did not long outlive them, dying on the lakeshore beneath the castle walls. Of Daemon Targaryen, no trace was ever found.
With Corlys in the dungeons and Addam Velaryon fled, the men of House Velaryon — half the army that had taken the city — began deserting by the hundreds. Some slipped over the walls in the night. Others made their way to Cobbler's Square, where the Shepherd drew larger crowds each evening, declaring dragons to be demons born of Valyrian sorcery and calling down divine vengeance upon the queen and all who served her.
Then Helaena Targaryen threw herself from her window in Maegor's Holdfast onto the iron spikes of the dry moat below. She was one-and-twenty. The city did not wait for an explanation. By nightfall the whisper was everywhere: Rhaenyra had murdered her. It was not true, and it did not matter.
The riot that followed was the worst the city had ever seen. Gold cloaks were beaten in the streets. Ser Luthor Largent rode into Cobbler's Square with five hundred men to seize the Shepherd and was pulled from his horse and bludgeoned to death with a cobblestone. The mob, tens of thousands strong, turned toward the Hill of Rhaenys and the Dragonpit. Rhaenyra watched from the roof of Maegor's Holdfast. When Prince Joffrey — thirteen years old and desperate to prove himself as his brothers had — slipped away and vaulted onto Syrax without saddle or whip, the queen's dragon threw him. Syrax was the queen's, and had known no other rider. Two hundred feet above Flea Bottom the prince fell to his death. Three of the Seven Who Rode to recover his body did not return.
Inside the Dragonpit, four dragons died that night. Shrykos, Morghul, and Tyraxes were torn apart by the mob at hideous cost. Dreamfyre, who had burst two of her chains at the very moment Helaena died, fought longer and harder than all three combined, slaughtering hundreds before a crossbow bolt took her eye and she flew blind into the dome above, bringing it crashing down on herself and her killers alike. Syrax descended on the mob outside and died there as well, by means the chronicles cannot agree upon. By morning the Dragonpit was a ruin, five dragons were dead, and the city had no queen to answer to.
What followed is called the Moon of the Three Kings by those chroniclers who are being charitable, and the Moon of Madness by those who are not. The Shepherd held the smoking hill. A court of whores and mummers proclaimed a four-year-old bastard king in Flea Bottom. A hedge knight named Ser Perkin the Flea crowned his squire Trystane Truefyre — a supposed natural son of Viserys I, by no credible account — and sat him on the Iron Throne. Larys Strong, who had not been seen since the fall of King's Landing, emerged from wherever he had been and took a place at the pretender's side as though he had never left. Rhaenyra fled at dawn with Aegon the Younger and a handful of loyalists, slipping out through the Dragon Gate with nothing. No gold, no fleet, no dragons. Mysaria, the White Worm, was taken whilst trying to flee and whipped naked through the streets until she died on the cobblestones.
Far to the southwest, the war was ending as well, though the queen would never learn how. Addam Velaryon had spent weeks assembling an army from the riverlords — House Tully at last declaring for the queen, persuaded when Addam brought Seasmoke down into Riverrun's own courtyard — and fell upon Tumbleton in the dead of night. The Green host was taken completely unawares, its discipline long since rotted by weeks of idleness and atrocity, its commanders quarreling over plunder and precedence. Prince Daeron died when his burning pavilion collapsed upon him. Hard Hugh Hammer was run through in the yard by Bold Jon Roxton, who died moments later under the blades of Hammer's men. Tessarion lasted until sunset, too badly wounded to fly, until young Benjicot Blackwood had his finest archer put three arrows through her eye as she lay helpless on the ground. Ulf the White slept through the entire battle drunk beneath a table, and was poisoned the following morning by Ser Hobert Hightower, who laced the Arbor gold and unwisely drank from the same cup. Neither man woke again. Vermithor and Seasmoke died together in the mud, riderless and raging, tearing each other apart. Silverwing alone survived, circling the battlefield for hours before settling amongst the dead. Lord Unwin Peake ordered a retreat.
Addam Velaryon died beside his dragon. His brother Alyn eventually had him returned to Hull, the town of his birth. His tomb bears a single word: LOYAL.
All the while, Aegon II had been hiding on Dragonstone itself. Larys Strong had smuggled the king out of King's Landing in a fishing skiff hidden beneath a load of codfish, reasoning that no one would think to look for Aegon in the shadow of his half-sister's own stronghold. The garrison Rhaenyra had left behind was small and poorly chosen — the old, the wounded, the doubtful — and amongst them was Ser Alfred Broome, passed over for castellan in favor of the more affable Ser Robert Quince, and nursing that slight through every month of the queen's triumph.
Sunfyre found his way to Dragonstone as well, drawn by instinct or bond or something no maester has yet explained to any satisfaction, his wing healed at a ruined angle, barely able to fly. He had killed Grey Ghost in the waters off the Dragonmont before finding the eastern slopes of the volcano and the king who waited there. Aegon and his dragon found each other, and each found purpose in the other.
Dragonstone fell in less than an hour. Ser Alfred opened a postern gate in the hour of ghosts. The armory was seized, the loyal guards taken, Ser Robert Quince run through in his bed, Grand Maester Gerardys dragged from his rookery before a raven could fly and executed at the king's express command, what remained of him hung from the battlements to greet the queen on her return. Only one thing went awry. Baela Targaryen — Daemon's daughter by Laena Velaryon, fourteen years old and every inch her father's child — slipped from her window, scrambled across the rooftops in the dark, found Moondancer in the stables, and rose to meet Sunfyre as he descended.
Moondancer was young and quick, and Sunfyre was large and damaged. She evaded and harried, raking wounds down his back, tearing at his ruined wing, and for a time it seemed she might prevail. Then Sunfyre caught her full in the face with a blast of golden flame. Blind, she flew on regardless, slamming into the larger dragon and driving them both to the stones of the yard. Moondancer died there. Sunfyre would never fly again. Aegon II leapt from the saddle twenty feet from the ground and shattered both his legs. Baela crawled from her dead dragon's coils, burned and barely conscious. When Ser Alfred moved to finish her, Ser Marston Waters wrenched the blade from his hand and carried the girl to the maester himself. She would bear the scars of that morning for the rest of her long life.
None of this was known to Rhaenyra when she sailed for Dragonstone from Duskendale, having sold her crown for passage on a Braavosi merchantman. She had been turned away from Rosby and barely tolerated at Duskendale, and she had nothing left her but the thought of Dragonstone, of dragon eggs, of beginning again. Aegon the Younger was beside her, pale and quiet, as he had been since the night Joffrey died.
It was the boy who understood first, when Ser Alfred Broome's escort met them at the harbor and led them through the gates into the yard. Sunfyre lay broken on the fused black stone, his golden scales dulled with old blood, one eye a crusted socket, wounds still smoking at his neck. Above, carried to a balcony in a chair for he could neither walk nor stand, Aegon II looked down at his half-sister — bent and burned, his face changed by pain and milk of the poppy, but unmistakable.
"Dear brother," Rhaenyra said. "I had hoped that you were dead."
"After you," the king answered. "You are the elder."
"I am pleased to know that you remember that. It would seem we are your prisoners — but do not think that you will hold us long. My leal lords will find me."
"If they search the seven hells," Aegon replied, "mayhaps."
Ser Alfred pricked the queen's breast with his dagger. The smell of blood roused Sunfyre. The dragon that had once been called the most magnificent in the world consumed Rhaenyra Targaryen in six bites, leaving only her left leg below the shin. Her son Aegon the Younger stood in the yard and watched every moment of it, held fast by men on either side, unable to look away. He was ten years old.
Rhaenyra Targaryen, the Realm's Delight and the Half-Year Queen, died on the twenty-second day of the tenth moon of 130 AC. She was thirty-three years old. Aegon the Younger was taken in chains to the dungeons of Dragonstone, and the ravens flew to tell the realm that the pretender was dead and the true king was coming home.
Sunfyre died on the ninth day of the twelfth moon of 130 AC, in the yard of Dragonstone where he had fallen. Aegon II wept, then ordered his cousin Baela brought up from the dungeons and put to death. He relented only when his maester reminded him that her mother had been a Velaryon, the Sea Snake's own daughter, and that her life might yet purchase something useful from Driftmark. Another raven flew.
The city had not waited for him. Lord Borros Baratheon had marched north from Storm's End with six hundred knights and four thousand foot upon hearing of Rhaenyra's death, and arrived at King's Landing to find the Moon of the Three Kings already burning itself out. The Shepherd's crowds had dwindled from tens of thousands to hundreds. Gaemon Palehair's court of whores and mummers held Visenya's Hill. Trystane Truefyre sat the Iron Throne with Larys Strong at his shoulder, comfortable as a man who had never left. Borros put an end to all three with characteristic efficiency, riding down the street scum on Visenya's Hill, taking the Shepherd at spearpoint in the ruins of the Dragonpit whilst he preached amongst the rotting dragon heads, and letting Ser Perkin the Flea deliver the pretender in chains.
Aegon II returned to King's Landing in a closed litter, carried through silent streets past abandoned homes and looted shops. He could not mount the steps of the Iron Throne; henceforth he held court from a cushioned chair at its base, a blanket across his ruined legs. He was four-and-twenty years old, burned across half his body, unable to walk without a crutch, and in constant pain. What remained of his reign he spent from that chair, dispensing the justice he had long deferred.
Trystane Truefyre asked only to be knighted before he died. Aegon granted it, and Ser Alfred Broome beheaded him. Gaemon Palehair, having just turned five, was spared and made a ward of the Crown. The Shepherd was denied even a clean death. Aegon had his tongue torn out with hot pincers, then on the last day of the year lined two hundred and forty-one of the prophet's most devoted followers along the street from Cobbler's Square to the Dragonpit, chained them to posts, and processed between them in his litter as his knights set them alight one by one. At the top of the hill, where the Shepherd had been bound amongst the heads of the five dragons he had helped to kill, Aegon rose from his cushions on the arms of two Kingsguard and set the man aflame with his own hand. The street has been known as Shepherd's Way ever since.
Justice dispensed, the king turned to the question of survival, and found it pressing. Corlys Velaryon had negotiated terms during the Moon of Madness: a general pardon for all who had fought for Rhaenyra, Aegon the Younger betrothed to Princess Jaehaera, Lady Baela freed. Aegon II had no intention of honoring any of it. He wanted Cassandra Baratheon for his queen, and he wanted Rhaenyra's surviving son castrated or sent to the Wall. The betrothal, he said, would muddy the succession. His sister's line must end.
The lords around him were less certain. Corlys argued for reconciliation, pardon, and peace, pointing out that Cregan Stark was marching south with eight thousand northmen, that Kermit Tully had six thousand riverlords moving down the kingsroad, and that the Maiden of the Vale had an army embarking at Gulltown. Borros Baratheon wanted to fight them all. Ser Tyland Lannister, blind from Rhaenyra's torturers but still sharp of mind, proposed hiring sellswords from across the narrow sea. Larys Strong, as ever, counseled patience and subtlety, keeping the peace with Driftmark until the moment was ripe to do otherwise. To the Sea Snake's face he spoke of reconciliation. In private, according to Grand Maester Orwyle, he told Corlys the truth of what the king intended, and let the old man draw his own conclusions.
Those conclusions became clear soon enough. Borros Baratheon led Aegon's last army out to meet the riverlords two days from the city, where the kingsroad passed between a wood and a low hill. His knights charged into a wall of shields whilst archers on the hill shot their horses out from under them. When the foot came crashing in and seemed to be gaining ground, Benjicot Blackwood burst from the wood and took them in the flank. The men of Rosby, Stokeworth, and Hayford let the king's banner fall. The knights of Duskendale went over to the foe. The rabble from Flea Bottom scattered. Borros fought on afoot, bareheaded, bleeding from a score of wounds, until Kermit Tully rode up and offered terms. Lord Borros answered with a curse and threw himself at the young lord, and died on the spiked iron ball of Kermit Tully's morningstar. The last army of the Greens was gone.
The ravens brought word back to the Red Keep, and the green council convened in a mood of quiet desperation. Casterly Rock and Oldtown had sent excuses in place of armies. The sellswords were still somewhere across the narrow sea. Cregan Stark was days away, the Vale's fleet already in the Gullet. And in the Vale itself, Rhaena Targaryen's dragon egg had hatched. She named the hatchling Morning.
Aegon II never learned the outcome of that council. He was carried down to the yard afterward, helped into his litter, and given his customary flagon of Arbor red. When the litter reached the sept and the curtains did not open, Ser Gyles Belgrave of the Kingsguard threw them back and found the king dead on his cushions, a thin line of blood at the corner of his mouth. He looked, by all accounts, entirely at peace. The hand that had put the poison in the wine was never established beyond doubt, though no serious student of the period has ever looked far from Larys Strong.
In the same hour, Ser Alfred Broome was crossing the drawbridge to Maegor's Holdfast to mutilate Prince Aegon the Younger on the king's orders, and found Ser Perkin the Flea and six gutter knights barring his way. "We have a new king now," Ser Perkin said, and shoved him off the bridge onto the iron spikes below, where he died over the course of two days. Baela was freed by Larys's agents. Tom Tangletongue was beheaded in the yard. The Dowager Queen Alicent was taken on the serpentine steps and returned to the dungeons. By the time the castle understood what had happened, it was done.
Corlys Velaryon rode out to meet the vanguard of Kermit Tully's host two days later, with Aegon the Younger somber at his side. "The king is dead," the Sea Snake said. "Long live the king."
Across Blackwater Bay, in the Gullet, Lord Leowyn Corbray watched from the prow of a Braavosi cog as the Velaryon fleet hauled down Aegon's golden dragon banner and raised in its place the red dragon of House Targaryen, the banner all the Targaryen kings had flown before the Dance began.
On the seventh day of the seventh moon of 131 AC, a date deemed sacred to the Seven, the High Septon pronounced the vows as Aegon the Younger wed Princess Jaehaera in the sight of gods and men, uniting the two branches of House Targaryen that had torn the realm apart.
The Dance of the Dragons was done. The melancholy reign of Aegon III had begun.
The riverlords who had broken Aegon II's last army at the Battle of the Kingsroad marched to King's Landing prepared for a siege and found the city handed to them instead. Lord Corlys Velaryon and Prince Aegon rode out to meet them under a peace banner, the old man grave and the boy somber at his side. The king was dead, the Sea Snake announced. Long live the king.
The corpse of Aegon II was consigned to the flames before the day was out, in the hope that the ills and hatreds of his reign might burn away with his remains. Thousands climbed Aegon's High Hill to hear Prince Aegon proclaim that peace was at hand. A fortnight of euphoria followed, which Grand Maester Munkun would later call the False Dawn. The riverlords rode through streets lined with cheering smallfolk. Three young lords had emerged from the carnage of the war as their undoubted leaders: Kermit Tully, Lord of Riverrun, nineteen years old; his brother Oscar, a knight of the battlefield at sixteen; and Benjicot Blackwood, Lord of Raventree, thirteen years old and already known as Bloody Ben. Bound by battle, the three were inseparable, and their men had taken to calling them the Lads. Riding beside them were two remarkable women: Alysanne Blackwood, called Black Aly, aunt to Bloody Ben, a huntress and archer of fearsome reputation; and Sabitha Frey, the Lady of the Twins, a widow who wore mail instead of silk and was more dangerous than her late husband had been.
The good fellowship lasted the best part of a fortnight, until Cregan Stark arrived.
The Lord of Winterfell was twenty-three, only a few years older than the Lads, yet all those who saw them together sensed the difference at once. Stark was a man and they were boys, and the eight thousand northmen at his back made the point plainly. He had marched south to honor his pledge to Prince Jacaerys, only to find Jacaerys dead and the war apparently over. He was not satisfied. Others had started this war, he said, but he meant to finish it. He would march on Storm's End, Oldtown, and Casterly Rock in turn. When Kermit Tully pointed out that half his men would die in the attempt, Lord Cregan replied that they had died the day they marched. The northmen who had come south with him were winter men who had left their hearths so that those with fewer mouths to feed might survive the cold. Victory was secondary. They had come for a worthy end.
The Lads were cowed and agreed to join their strength to Lord Stark's when he marched. For six days King's Landing trembled on the edge of a sword. Cregan had arrested Corlys Velaryon, Larys Strong, Grand Maester Orwyle, Ser Perkin the Flea, and half a hundred others he found cause to mistrust. When he arrested Corlys, he did not trouble himself with subtlety. "Small wonder you are called the Sea Snake," Stark told the old man to his face. "You slither this way and that, but your fangs are venomous. Aegon was an oathbreaker and a usurper, yet still a king, and when he would not heed your counsel you removed him as a craven would — with poison." Prince Aegon, meanwhile, found himself confined to Maegor's Holdfast with no company save the boy Gaemon Palehair. Stark told him the city was a nest of vipers, and that his friends had saved him only to make use of him. In the pot shops and wine sinks of Flea Bottom, men placed wagers on how long any of the prisoners would keep their heads.
Then the Three Widows made their peace, and Lord Stark found all his plans for war undone before he could begin.
Lady Johanna Lannister had little appetite for renewing the struggle. With the Red Kraken's longships still harrying her coasts, the west had enough troubles without marching east to fight a war already lost. She agreed to the Sea Snake's terms, promised to restore the Crown's gold, and asked only that the Iron Throne command Dalton Greyjoy back to his islands and free the women he had taken. Lady Elenda Baratheon, nursing a newborn son, sent word that she would agree to terms as well, and that Princess Jaehaera was already on her way to King's Landing in the care of Ser Willis Fell.
Oldtown proved more stubborn. Young Lyonel Hightower, fifteen, had torn the Sea Snake's terms to pieces and sworn to write his reply in the old man's blood. His father's young widow, Lady Samantha, had other ideas. Fierce and clever, she had no intention of losing her place as Lady of Oldtown to a war her stepson could not win. She yielded to the boy's longstanding infatuation with her and promised to marry him — but only if he made peace. Lyonel capitulated. A great scandal followed when he announced his intention to wed his father's widow, and the High Septon ultimately forbade the marriage, but the young lord kept Lady Sam by his side regardless, fathering six children on her and eventually making her his wife when a new High Septon reversed his predecessor's ruling.
The Maiden of the Vale arrived from Gulltown with an army at her back and Lady Rhaena Targaryen at her side, a pale pink dragon no larger than a cat perched on her shoulder. The smallfolk of King's Landing, who not a year before had slaughtered every dragon in the city, became rapturous at the sight. Rhaena and her twin Baela became the darlings of the city overnight. When the twins were at last permitted to visit their brother, Rhaena brought Morning with her. The boy went pale at the sight of the creature and commanded the guards to take it from his sight.
Lord Stark could not confine the twins to the castle as he had their brother, and soon found he could not control them either. The Hour of the Wolf was waning. With the Vale, the Lannisters, and the Baratheons all agreed to terms, the great lords around Cregan Stark were united in telling him the war was done and the peace must be made. He yielded on everything but one point: the king's killers must answer for what they had done. Unworthy as Aegon II might have been, his murder was treason. The others acquiesced, and Prince Aegon named Lord Stark his Hand.
Lord Cregan did not presume to sit the Iron Throne, but took a simple wooden bench beneath it. One by one the condemned were brought before him. Almost all of them took the black to save their lives — litter bearers, serving men, gutter knights, three Sworn Brothers of the Kingsguard, even Grand Maester Orwyle, who had given the poison to Larys Strong without asking what it was for. Cregan spared them all. Only two refused.
Ser Gyles Belgrave of the Kingsguard would not exchange his white cloak for black. "A knight of the Kingsguard should not outlive his king," he said when his turn came. Lord Cregan took his head off with a single swift swing of Ice, the Valyrian greatsword that was the pride of House Stark.
Larys Strong was the last. When asked if he wished to take the black, the Clubfoot said he would not, that he would be going to a warmer hell. He asked only one boon: that when he was dead, Lord Stark hack off his clubfoot with that great sword. He had dragged it with him all through life, he said. Let him be free of it in death. This Lord Cregan granted. Thus perished the last Strong, and an ancient line came to its end.
Corlys Velaryon did not die that day, though Lord Cregan had condemned him. It was Black Aly who saved him, asking the boon plainly: let the prince's pardon stand. Their exchange, as Mushroom records it, was lengthy and winding, but it ended with Lord Cregan agreeing — in exchange for her hand in marriage. She accepted. Mushroom says this was her intent from the beginning.
The morning after the executions, Cregan Stark returned his chain of office to Prince Aegon. He had no interest in staying. "The snows are falling in the North," he said, "and my place is at Winterfell." The war was over. What came next was someone else's problem.
The coronation of Aegon III was held on Visenya's Hill on the seventh day of the seventh moon of 131 AC, a date deemed auspicious by the Faith. The Dragonpit still lay in ruins, so towering grandstands were erected on the hillside. The High Septon of Oldtown performed the ceremony himself. Both king and bride were undeniably handsome children — he lean and silver-white, she delicate and dark-eyed — yet those who stood close remarked on how solemn they were, and how still. The Dowager Queen Alicent, as Jaehaera's grandmother, ought to have been present. She was nowhere to be seen.
Aegon's first act as king was to name the men who would rule for him. Ser Tyland Lannister, lately returned from Myr, was made Hand of the King. Leowyn Corbray was named Lord Protector of the Realm. Over them sat a council of regency: Lady Jeyne Arryn of the Vale, Lord Corlys Velaryon, Lord Roland Westerling, Lord Royce Caron of Nightsong, Lord Manfryd Mooton of Maidenpool, Ser Torrhen Manderly of White Harbor, and Grand Maester Munkun, newly arrived from the Citadel to take up Orwyle's chain of office. Lord Cregan Stark was offered a place amongst the regents and refused. Conspicuous by his exclusion was Unwin Peake, Lord of Starpike, who was said to be the only man truly angered by the slight.
The departures followed swiftly. Within a fortnight of the coronation, Cregan Stark led his northmen home, with Black Aly and her nephew Benjicot at his side. Three days later, Lord Blackwood and his aunt set out for Raventree, and more than a thousand of Stark's northmen went with them — Lady Alysanne's solution to the problem of men who could not go home. The lands along the Trident were full of widows, she had pointed out, and willing hands would be welcome. Widow Fairs were held at Raventree, Riverrun, the Twins, and elsewhere, and hundreds of marriages were made. The resettled northmen strengthened the riverlords who took them in and spread the worship of the old gods further south of the Neck than it had been in living memory.
Ser Oscar Tully, meanwhile, had organized a free company called the Stormbreakers from the men who had no wish to go home to winter, and set sail for Tyrosh and the Disputed Lands, where the collapse of the Triarchy had set the Free Cities to warring amongst themselves and created a brisk market for swords. Ser Tyland refused to be drawn into the resulting conflict. "It would be a grave mistake for Westeros to become embroiled in the endless quarrels of the Free Cities," he told the council of regents. The merchants continued to howl.
Before the year was out, Grand Maester Orwyle contrived to bribe a guard, slip into a beggar's rags, and disappear into the stews of the city rather than take ship to the Wall. He would not surface again for some time.
Of all the men who came to serve Aegon III in those early years, none proved more consequential than Ser Tyland Lannister. Once as tall and golden-haired as his twin brother Jason, he had been left so disfigured by Rhaenyra's torturers that ladies new to court had been known to faint at the sight of him. To spare them, the Hand took to wearing a silken hood over his head on formal occasions, which gave him a sinister aspect and earned him the name the Hooded Hand amongst the smallfolk. His wits, however, remained as sharp as they had ever been. Claiming a curious failure of memory as regarded who had been black and who green during the Dance, Ser Tyland served the son of the very queen who had sent him to the torturers with a dogged loyalty that surprised many and moved some. By law, both the Hand and the Lord Protector were subject to the regency council, but as the months passed the regents convened less and less, whilst the tireless blind man in the hood gathered more and more of the realm's governance to himself.
The challenges he faced were considerable. Winter had descended upon Westeros. Trade had collapsed during the Dance, roads were haunted by outlaws and broken men, and countless villages and castles lay in ruin. His first acts were to abolish the taxes enacted by Rhaenyra and Lord Celtigar, set aside a million gold dragons as rebuilding loans for lords whose holdings had been destroyed, and order the construction of three fortified granaries in King's Landing, Lannisport, and Gulltown. He set hundreds of stonemasons and carpenters to work repairing the Dragonpit, strengthened the city gates, and commissioned fifty new war galleys — ostensibly to defend against the Triarchy, though many suspected his real purpose was to lessen the Crown's dependence on the fleet of House Velaryon.
Within the Red Keep, two problems demanded his attention. The first was the Dowager Queen Alicent, who had taken to cursing the king at meals and had once advised the little queen to cut her husband's throat whilst he slept, sending the child into screaming fits. Ser Tyland confined her gently but firmly to her own apartments. The second was the marriage itself. Grand Maester Munkun's private letters to the Citadel describe both children with barely concealed despair. Aegon seldom spoke, never laughed, had no friends save the ward Gaemon Palehair, and spent the hours of the wolf standing at windows staring at the sky. Any mention of dragons sent him into a rare rage. "Orwyle was wont to call His Grace calm and self-possessed," Munkun wrote. "I say the boy is dead inside." Jaehaera was, if anything, worse — wetting her bed at night, weeping inconsolably when corrected, mentally a child of four despite her eight years. Munkun had laced her milk with sweetsleep before the wedding, convinced she would otherwise have collapsed during the ceremony. "These are not normal children," he wrote. "They have no joy in them."
In this grim atmosphere, the twin daughters of Prince Daemon by Laena Velaryon — Baela and Rhaena — became something remarkable: the only Targaryens the people ever saw. Aegon rarely set foot outside the Red Keep after his coronation, and Jaehaera never left her chambers, so it fell to the twins to receive envoys, attend feasts, and ride out to give alms and be seen. Their elevation was not merely social. With the king as yet childless, the question of succession pressed upon the regency council, and the twins found themselves raised to the rank of princess — not as claimants in their own right, for the realm had just fought a devastating war over that very question and no man in the council was eager to revisit it, but as potential channels through which the crown might one day pass. Their firstborn sons could be Aegon's heirs. They mattered, in the realm's reckoning, as mothers not yet born.
The sisters had been shaped by their years apart into very different women. Rhaena, who had spent the war as a ward of Lady Jeyne Arryn in the Vale, was graceful and tractable, at ease in court, with Morning coiled perpetually about her shoulders. Baela was lean and quick and wild, her silver hair cropped short so it would not whip about her face when she rode. She raced horses, swam the Blackwater Rush at midnight, drank with the gold cloaks, and wagered coin in the rat pits of Flea Bottom. When the regents attempted to arrange her marriage to the widowed Lord Thaddeus Rowan of Goldengrove — a prudent choice, forty years her senior — Baela climbed out a window, walked out the front gate, and married Alyn Velaryon on Dragonstone before anyone could stop her. She was sixteen, he nearly seventeen. Ser Tyland accepted it with bemused resignation and had it put about that the match had been arranged by the court.
Rhaena proved easier to settle. Asked if she had preferences among her suitors, she said she was especially fond of Ser Corwyn Corbray, whom she had met in the Vale. He was a second son of thirty-two with two daughters from a previous marriage — not ideal, the regents felt, but his house was ancient and honorable, his brother was the Lord Protector, and Rhaena wanted him. The match was made, and the wedding followed a fortnight later.
The regency lost its most important member on the sixth day of the third moon of 132 AC, when Corlys Velaryon collapsed on the serpentine steps of the Red Keep and died before Grand Maester Munkun could reach him. He was seventy-nine years old. The hole his death tore in the council was not easily filled. Young Alyn Velaryon came to King's Landing to claim his grandsire's seat and was sent home; at sixteen, the regents felt he was too young. The place went instead to Unwin Peake, Lord of Starpike, Dunstonbury, and Whitegrove.
The wider world was not kind to the young reign. In the west, Dalton Greyjoy and his ironmen continued to harry the coasts of the westerlands, ignoring every command from the Iron Throne with cheerful contempt, whilst Lady Johanna Lannister raised and spent and raised armies again trying to drive him off. The Dornish were restless along the Marches. In the North, winter pressed hard, food stores dwindled, and wildlings tested the Wall with increasing boldness. At Harrenhal, outlaws and broken men had taken root under the leadership of a woman who called herself the widow of Prince Aemond Targaryen — Alys Rivers, the wet nurse whose nature the chroniclers had never agreed upon, now claiming her son was Aemond's trueborn heir and the rightful king of Westeros. When Ser Tyland sent a Kingsguard knight and a hundred men to clear them out, the knight was killed at the gates under circumstances the survivors could not clearly explain. A larger force would be needed, the council agreed — but before one could be organized, a far worse threat descended on the city.
The Winter Fever arrived in King's Landing on the third day of 133 AC, having already killed half of Sisterton and ravaged its way south. Three quarters of those it touched died. Leowyn Corbray died of it, and Ser Willis Fell, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, and two of his Sworn Brothers, and Roland Westerling, and the Commander of the City Watch and his successor both. The Dowager Queen Alicent died of it on a rainy night, after telling her septa she wanted to see her children again, and the Old King Jaehaerys, and to read to him as she had done when she was small. She had outlived all four of her children and spent her last year talking to herself in a locked room.
Through those dark days, Aegon III did something that surprised everyone who had dismissed him as a ghost in his own castle. He visited the sick. Day after day, the boy king moved through the city, sitting with the dying, holding their hands, listening to their stories. He seldom spoke. Most of those he visited died anyway, but those who lived spoke of his presence afterward, and the smallfolk who had barely seen their king began to speak of him differently.
The fever did not spare Ser Tyland. He had remained in the Tower of the Hand through the worst of it, working day and night, and seemed to have escaped — until a morning came when he asked his serving man to close a window and complained of the cold, though the fire blazed and the window was already shut. He was dead in two days. Aegon III held his hand as he breathed his last. The Hooded Hand had served the son of the queen who had destroyed him with a loyalty that neither blacks nor greens could quite account for, and left the realm considerably more stable than he had found it.
Ser Tyland Lannister had barely grown cold before the question of his succession became a battleground. King Aegon, twelve years old, moved without consulting his regents. He named two new Kingsguard of his own choosing, appointed the former Grand Maester Orwyle to summon Lord Thaddeus Rowan as his Hand, and announced that Alyn Velaryon would serve as his admiral. Lord Peake set all of it aside. No boy of twelve had the judgment for such appointments, he declared, and with Grand Maester Munkun's support — support Munkun would later come to rue — Peake combined the offices of Hand and Lord Protector into one and filled them himself. The two knights Aegon had chosen for the Kingsguard were commanded to surrender their white cloaks. Ser Marston Waters was confirmed as Lord Commander. Orwyle was returned to his cell.
The king protested once, quietly, that Kingsguard served for life. Lord Peake told him they did, when properly appointed. Aegon said nothing further.
Unwin Peake, Lord of Starpike, Dunstonbury, and Whitegrove, had fought for Aegon II at Tumbleton, stabbed a turncloak in a cellar at the second battle, and helped plot the murders of Hugh Hammer and Ulf White. He had survived everything the Dance could throw at him. Now he held the greatest office in the realm, and he moved quickly to make it secure.
Two of his kin received white cloaks: his nephew Ser Amaury Peake and his bastard brother Ser Mervyn Flowers. The City Watch passed to the son of a Caltrop who had died at Tumbleton. Five hundred of his own soldiers were given gold cloaks. For his personal protection he kept ten sellswords loyal only to him, led by a tattooed Volantene adventurer named Tessario, the Tiger to his face, the Thumb behind his back. Key positions at court, in the castle, and in the king's household passed to his men, his kin, or men who owed him something. Even Gaemon Palehair, the king's only companion, was made Aegon's whipping boy, so that the king's disobedience would be visited on his friend. Gaemon's tears reached the king as no words ever had.
"This Hand is not blind, nor veiled, nor crippled," Peake announced before court, drawing Orphan-Maker — the Valyrian steel blade last seen at Tumbleton in the hands of Bold Jon Roxton. "This Hand can still wield a sword."
On the Feast of Our Father Above in 133 AC, Peake emptied the city's gaols. Forty thieves lost hands. Eight rapers were gelded. Murderers were hanged and disemboweled. The former Grand Maester Orwyle, traitor and deserter from the Night's Watch, was granted the honor of dying by the sword. King Aegon stood atop the battlements throughout and never looked away. Grand Maester Munkun, watching beside him, wrote afterward: "Make no mistake. This feast was served by the Hand, and 'twas he who gorged upon it."
The Stepstones had fallen to Racallio Ryndoon — a Tyroshi captain-general who had been hired to clear them, betrayed his employers, and crowned himself King of the Narrow Sea instead — and the war his treachery had ignited amongst the Free Cities had all but closed the southern end of the narrow sea to trade. Peake resolved to open it by force, commissioning a fleet and appointing his uncle Ser Gedmund Peake to command it despite his lack of nautical knowledge, accompanied by the Velaryon fleet under Alyn Velaryon and a sellsail called Blackbean as nautical adviser.
Off the coast of Tarth, word reached them that Braavos, Tyrosh, and Racallio Ryndoon had made common cause to control the Stepstones. Ser Gedmund, seasick and cautious, resolved to wait for instruction from the Hand. Alyn argued against delay. The two parted angrily, and when the sun rose the next morning the Velaryon fleet was gone — south, not north. Three days later, whilst the royal fleet still lingered off Tarth, Lord Alyn fell upon the Braavosi fleet at anchor in the Stepstones, their grand admiral and forty captains feasting on Bloodstone with Racallio and envoys from Tyrosh. Half the Braavosi ships were taken, burned, or sunk. The Grand Defiance, a towering dromond of four hundred oars, fought her way clear only to find Lord Alyn bearing down on her in the Queen Rhaenys. The dromond was ponderous in the water. The Queen struck her broadside and split her nearly in two. She sank in moments.
Lord Alyn returned to King's Landing with captured galleys, hostages, vast coin, and an elephant intended for the Sealord's menagerie. Tens of thousands lined the streets shouting his name. At the gates of the Red Keep, King Aegon himself came out to welcome him. Alyn Oakenfist, they called him ever after, for the blow the Queen Rhaenys had struck.
Once within the walls, the king had somehow vanished. Peake sat atop the Iron Throne in his place and told Alyn he had given the realm a war with Braavos. "And an elephant," Lord Alyn replied. "Pray, do not forget the elephant." The hall tittered. The Hand was not amused.
He was not wrong about the danger. Lord Mooton was dispatched to Braavos with six noble lords and a very large indemnity. The Sealord accepted the gold, dissolved his Tyroshi alliance, broke ties with Racallio, and ceded the Stepstones to the Iron Throne — islands held at the time by Ryndoon and the Pentoshi, so the Sealord had in effect sold something he did not own. The indemnity so depleted the royal treasury that Peake was forced to reinstate certain of the taxes Ser Tyland had abolished, which cost him support he could ill afford.
Alyn Oakenfist did not long remain at court to enjoy his triumph. Having named him master of ships, Peake now exercised that office's authority, dispatching Lord Alyn and the Velaryon fleet west around the bottom of Westeros to deal with Dalton Greyjoy and restore Fair Isle to its lords. Lord Alyn saw it clearly enough, and sailed anyway. His wife Baela was with child as he left. He told her to name the boy Corlys. She told him she would name the girl Laena. The ship he sailed was a captured Braavosi war galley he called the Lady Baela.
On the twenty-second day of the ninth moon of 133 AC, Queen Jaehaera died as her mother had died — thrown from a window in Maegor's Holdfast onto the iron spikes of the dry moat below. She was ten years old, and she died half an hour after she fell. King's Landing wept, and then it whispered. The little queen had been a frightened, simple child, largely confined to her chambers — but she had seemed content there, with her maids and her kittens and her dolls. What could have driven her to it? Theories multiplied. So did suspicions. The Kingsguard posted at her door that night was Ser Mervyn Flowers, bastard brother to the Hand. No proof was ever found. There never was, with Unwin Peake. Mushroom, who had drunk with Flowers and knew him well, suggested that the Kingsguard need not have done the deed himself — only stood aside and not asked questions when Tessario the Thumb came to call.
Seven days after her body was consigned to the flames, Lord Peake came to the grieving king with Munkun, Septon Bernard, and Ser Marston Waters to inform him he must wed again for the good of the realm. His new queen had already been chosen: Myrielle Peake, the Hand's only surviving child. The outrage from lords across the realm was immediate. Even Munkun wavered, cautioning Peake that others might imply he had chosen his daughter for reasons of power rather than the good of the king. The Hand held firm — until every lord in the realm began putting forward his own daughters, sisters, nieces, and cousins, and the door Peake had opened could no longer be controlled. Lady Myrielle, brown-haired and shy with her smile on account of crooked teeth, became known throughout the Seven Kingdoms as Lady Turnips — for when the king had asked what if he did not like her, Peake had replied that a king need not like his queen, only wed her, and that his cooks prepared turnips whether he liked them or not.
Forced to give ground, the Hand announced the Maiden's Day Ball. The king himself would choose. The word went out. Every highborn maid in Westeros began to primp and wonder: why not me?
Myrielle arrived at court nearly a moon's turn before the ball. Her father arranged suppers with the king, and worked quietly to eliminate her competition. Slanders circulated about promising rivals. A groom was found in Tyshara Lannister's bed. Lucinda Penrose had her nose slit by hired men whilst hawking along Blackwater Bay. Lady Buckler and both her daughters drowned when their boat crossing the Blackwater foundered. Some spoke of a Maiden's Day curse. Those wiser in the ways of power held their tongues. Mushroom confesses in his Testimony that Tessario the Thumb paid him silver to whisper poison about certain maidens to the king. He took the coin.
On the night of the ball, more than a thousand maidens crowded the throne room until the great hall was suffocatingly hot and the herald lost his voice and had to be replaced. King Aegon sat atop the Iron Throne in black and gold, each maid was brought before him, curtsied, received a nod, and was moved along. Mushroom called it the Maiden's Day Cattle Show. The king grew visibly more restless as the hours wore on, which suited Peake well enough — every weary nod brought Myrielle closer to the crown.
Then, when fewer than a dozen maidens remained, a trumpet blast announced the arrival of Baela Velaryon and Rhaena Corbray. The doors flew open and the twins rode the length of the hall on coal-black chargers, dressed in the black and red of House Targaryen. When Ser Marston Waters moved to block them, Baela slashed him across the cheek with her riding crop. "His Grace, my brother can command me. You cannot." At the foot of the Iron Throne they reined up and ignored Peake entirely as he rushed forward.
"Brother," said Rhaena, "if it please you, we have brought your new queen."
Ser Corwyn Corbray brought the girl forward. A gasp went through the hall. The herald announced her, hoarsely: Lady Daenaera of House Velaryon, daughter of the late Daeron Velaryon and Hazel of House Harte, ward of Lady Baela and Alyn Oakenfist, Lord of the Tides. Daenaera was six years old, silver-haired and blue-eyed. She had lost her mother to the Winter Fever and her father when the True Heart went down in the Stepstones. She stood before the Iron Throne and smiled — bright and sweet and mischievous all at once.
King Aegon III returned her smile. "Thank you for coming, my lady. You look very pretty."
The last few maidens were hurried through. When it was done the king summoned Gaemon Palehair, and to his cupbearer fell the honor of making the announcement. "His Grace will marry Lady Daenaera of House Velaryon!" Gaemon shouted happily.
Caught in a snare of his own making, Peake had no choice but to accept it — or so it appeared. The next day, behind closed doors, he gave vent to his fury. A girl of six was no queen, he declared. It would be years before she could give the realm an heir. The succession remained in jeopardy. The council refused to set the king's choice aside.
But Unwin Peake had not survived the Dance by accepting defeat gracefully. Unable to overturn the king's choice outright, he found another way. In the months that followed, he assembled a carefully chosen group of maesters who presented what was, in truth, a body of genuine findings: that women bore children more safely when older, that girls who married young died in childbed more often and their infants more often still, and that lords and kings who came to their seats young made poorer decisions, spent more lives carelessly, and ruled less ably for it. The arguments were sound. The law Peake drew from them was convenient. No marriage in the Seven Kingdoms could henceforth be solemnized until both parties had reached their eighteenth year. No lord or king could rule in his own right before the same age. No woman under eighteen could inherit or transmit succession rights. It was framed as wisdom and protection, and was nearly impossible to oppose without seeming to argue for the deaths of young girls and the follies of boy kings.
The council accepted the law. In doing so, they accepted its logic — and its logic dissolved the king's choice as surely as any decree. Daenaera Velaryon could not be queen under the new law for over a decade. The girl the king had smiled at remained at court unofficially, whilst the question of a proper betrothal stayed conspicuously open.
Peake moved immediately to fill that opening. Myrielle was one year older than the king. When Aegon turned eighteen, she would be nineteen — old enough to wed without delay. The realm could not afford to wait. The council had accepted his law. Would they not accept its natural conclusion?
They would not. Peake declared that they would have his resignation if they continued to defy him. They noted his threat, thanked him for his service, and moved on to other business. Peake remained at court, furious and diminished, biding his time. He was still Hand. For now.
The voyage of Alyn Oakenfist around the bottom of Westeros would change the course of the reign.
The Velaryon fleet passed through the Stepstones with more caution than on its previous visit. Lord Alyn sent scouts ahead disguised as fishermen and found the islands still in the grip of Racallio Ryndoon, who had proved as difficult to dislodge as a barnacle. To fight his way through would cost half his strength before he had even reached the Sunset Sea, so Alyn chose to treat instead. He sailed into Bloodstone beneath a parley flag and spent a fortnight as Racallio's guest — or captive, the distinction never being entirely clear — enduring mud wrestling, accusations of treachery, beheadings offered as tokens of fellowship, and two of the Queen's wives sent to his bedchamber with instructions to produce sons. In the end Ryndoon allowed the fleet to pass in exchange for three ships, a parchment alliance, and the promise of a kiss from Lady Baela should the Queen ever visit Driftmark. Lord Alyn gave him the three least seaworthy ships in the fleet.
Off Sunspear, Princess Aliandra Martell came out to meet them, reportedly much taken with the young hero who had humbled the Sealord of Braavos. She provided fresh water, provisions, and charts of the treacherous Dornish coast. Two ships were lost to a sudden storm west of Salt Shore and a third to bandits near the mouth of the Brimstone, but those losses were more than recovered at Oldtown, where Lyonel Hightower welcomed Oakenfist warmly and promised twenty warships. Lord Alyn lingered overlong in Whispering Sound waiting for a Redwyne fleet that had also been promised, and finally sailed without it.
Past the Shield Islands, past the mouth of the Mander, the fleet turned north into the Sunset Sea. The Red Kraken had been preparing to receive them. Dalton Greyjoy had gathered hundreds of longships and proclaimed that when he had sent Oakenfist to the bottom of the sea he would sail that same route in reverse — raise his banner over the Shields, sack Oldtown and Sunspear, and take Driftmark for his own. He had not yet taken a rock wife, he added, and silver hair had always appealed to him.
The Red Kraken never fought that battle. On a rainy night at Faircastle, as the longships gathered below, one of his salt wives slipped his own dagger from its sheath and opened his throat from ear to ear, then threw herself naked and bleeding into the sea. Her name was Tess. Nothing else is known of her with any certainty. Upon Greyjoy's death the fleet he had assembled began to dissolve as captain after captain slipped away to contest his succession. The ironmen still holding Faircastle fell to quarreling amongst themselves and were overwhelmed by a smallfolk uprising before Oakenfist ever arrived.
When the Lady Baela passed beneath the walls of Lannisport the city pealed its bells in welcome. Lady Johanna herself emerged from Casterly Rock to present the admiral with a seahorse wrought in gold. The west had been delivered without a battle fought. The voyage home was largely uneventful, save for a stop at Sunspear where Princess Aliandra was pleased to see him again — and where a Lyseni envoy named Drazenko Rogare asked for a private word. What Drazenko whispered in his ear sent Oakenfist to Lys before returning home.
In King's Landing, meanwhile, the court had settled into an uneasy calm under Peake's continued Handship. Daenaera remained at court whilst the succession question hung open. The king attended council again, asked his questions, and this time was answered without contempt — Peake had little choice but to permit it. He seethed quietly. Baela's child had been born — a girl, named Laena — which had mollified him somewhat, though Mushroom records that he told Ser Marston Waters privately that if the child had been a boy, the king would never have lived long enough to sire an heir of his own body.
Then the Lady Baela's sails appeared across Blackwater Bay with the rest of the Velaryon fleet behind her, and the bells of King's Landing rang out again. King Aegon descended from the castle in his litter to meet his admiral at the waterfront before tens of thousands, over Peake's objections. The other regents overruled him. Lord Alyn kissed his wife, held his daughter Laena up for the crowd to see, then knelt before the king. Aegon hung a chain about his neck and bade him rise, saying, "We are glad to have you safe home, my brother."
Then Oakenfist told the king there was one who was his brother by blood, and gestured toward the Lady Baela. Down from the ship came a pale young woman of surpassing beauty, arm in arm with a boy near the king's own age, his features hidden beneath the cowl of his cloak. Peake pushed forward demanding to know who this was. The boy threw back his cowl, and King Aegon III began to weep.
Viserys Targaryen had been seven years old when the Gay Abandon sailed into the teeth of the Triarchy fleet in 129 AC. He was twelve on his return. After the battle he had been sold to a Lyseni magister named Bambarro Bazanne for his weight in gold. When Bambarro died in debt, his assets — the prince among them — passed to Lysandro Rogare, patriarch of the most powerful banking dynasty in Lys, who had quickly revised whatever plans he might otherwise have had for the striking silver-haired boy and married him to his youngest daughter, Larra, instead. Drazenko Rogare, one of the family's envoys at Sunspear, had seen an opportunity in Alyn Oakenfist and taken it.
The terms Oakenfist had agreed to for the prince's return were considerable: a ransom of one hundred thousand golden dragons, a covenant against arms being raised against House Rogare or its interests for a hundred years, the Crown's funds moved from the Iron Bank of Braavos to the Rogare Bank of Lys, lordships for three of Lysandro's younger sons, and the marriage of Viserys to Larra guaranteed against all interference. Peake raged that Oakenfist had no authority to agree to any of it. The council overruled him, confirmed the terms, and moved an enormous sum of Crown gold across the narrow sea to Lys.
Viserys's marriage had the further distinction of bypassing Peake's own law entirely, having been contracted in Lys beyond the reach of any Westerosi decree. The Hand had spent months constructing a legal framework to control the succession, and the most consequential marriage of the reign slipped through it without touching the sides.
The return of his brother worked a transformation in Aegon III that nothing else had managed. Munkun wrote that the king had never forgiven himself for fleeing the Gay Abandon on dragonback and leaving Viserys behind. Now Viserys was alive and standing before him, and something that had been closed in Aegon opened. The brothers became inseparable as they had been on Dragonstone. Gaemon Palehair was cast aside, Daenaera neglected, and the darkness that had settled into Aegon at the age of ten seemed, for a time, to lift.
Viserys's return also resolved the succession. As the king's brother he was heir presumptive. He was twelve years old, lively and charming where his brother was quiet and withdrawn, and already wed to a Lyseni woman of nineteen well into her childbearing years. The dynasty seemed secure.
For Unwin Peake it was the final indignity. The Maiden's Day humiliation, Daenaera, the law turned against him, the council's repeated refusals of Myrielle, and now Viserys arriving already married and the succession settled without him. He declared his resignation before the full council, swept from the room, and was on the road to Starpike before the new Hand had even been named. Lord Thaddeus Rowan took up the chain of office in his place.
Peake's men did not follow him. His kin in the Kingsguard, his appointments throughout the castle and the City Watch, Tessario and the Fingers — all remained. Kingsguard serve for life, as Peake himself had once reminded the king. The Hand was gone. His shadow was not.
Peace settled over King's Landing in the closing months of 134 AC, marred only by the death of Manfryd Mooton, the last of Aegon III's original regents, who had never truly recovered his strength after the Winter Fever. To fill his place, Lord Rowan turned to Ser Corwyn Corbray, Lady Rhaena's husband. Lady Baela meanwhile returned to Driftmark with Lord Alyn and their daughter Laena. Not long after, Prince Viserys announced that the Lady Larra was with child.
Beyond the city the year was less kind. In the North, winter still held hard. At Barrowton, Lord Dustin closed his gates as hundreds of starving villagers gathered beneath his walls. Cold and hunger carried off a third of the Night's Watch, and when thousands of wildlings walked across the frozen sea east of the Wall, hundreds more of the black brothers perished fighting them back. In the Iron Islands, the death of the Red Kraken had touched off a savage three-way struggle for the Seastone Chair amongst his sisters, his cousins, and a pretender called Sam Salt. Lady Johanna Lannister saw her opportunity and launched an assault on the islands under the command of Ser Leo Costayne, the Sea Lion, with promises of marriage should he deliver the islands to her son's rule. Costayne died on Great Wyk, cut down by Arthur Goodbrother, and three-quarters of his ships were lost — but the Lannisters had made their point regardless, burning hundreds of longships and villages and carrying off enough grain and salt fish to leave thousands to starve through the winter. Toron Greyjoy remained upon the Seastone Chair; his half-brother Rodrik was brought back to Casterly Rock and made Lord Loreon's fool. The Iron Islands were broken for a generation.
In the Vale, Lady Jeyne Arryn died at forty, having named her fourth cousin Ser Joffrey Arryn her heir. Two rival claimants emerged at once — Eldric Arryn, son of the mad Ser Arnold who had twice tried to depose Lady Jeyne, and Isembard Arryn, the Gilded Falcon, a wealthy merchant of a distant branch of the house who began buying support with lavish bribes and hired swords. Lord Rowan summoned all three to King's Landing to present their cases. None came.
Despite these troubles, the mood in King's Landing had brightened. When early in 135 AC the Citadel sent forth its white ravens from Oldtown to herald the end of the long winter, the realm felt that something had lifted.
The arrival of spring coincided with what Munkun calls the Rogare Ascendancy, and what those who lived through it called, more simply, the Lysene Spring. The Rogare Bank atop Visenya's Hill was paying rich returns on all monies deposited with it, drawing in lords and merchants alike. Roggerio Rogare's pillow house, the Mermaid, became the most talked-about establishment in King's Landing. Ships from Tyrosh, Myr, Pentos, Braavos, and especially Lys crowded the docks along the Blackwater. Trade flourished. Even Driftmark experienced a rebirth, and Marilda of Hull expanded her fleet and began work on a great manse overlooking the harbor that Mushroom dubbed the Mouse House.
Not everyone was charmed. Larra Rogare had taken up residence in the Red Keep with her husband yet remained in spirit a lady of Lys. She made no effort to learn the Common Tongue, kept only Lyseni ladies and servants, wore only Lysene fashions, and worshipped gods the city found deeply unsettling — among them Yndros of the Twilight, who was male by day and female by night, and faceless Saagael the giver of pain. Cats were seen coming and going from her chambers so often that men began to say they were her spies. Darker rumors followed. The people who told them had not forgotten Blood and Cheese.
Moredo Rogare commanded his sister's Lysene guard, Lotho ran the bank, and Roggerio ran the brothel. To the city, Larra and her brothers seemed pieces of a single creature, grasping and foreign and unknowable, growing fat on Westerosi gold. It was not entirely fair. But it was not entirely wrong, either.
On the third day of the third moon of 135 AC, King's Landing woke to a sight not seen since the Dance: a dragon in the sky. Lady Rhaena, nineteen years old, was flying Morning for the first time. The city went rapturous. Each day she flew farther and grew bolder, the pale pink dragon banking over rooftops and harbor masts whilst the smallfolk below craned their necks and cheered. Only once did Rhaena bring Morning into the Red Keep's yard, and only once was sufficient. King Aegon went pale at the sight of the dragon and commanded her removed from his presence. Rhaena, furious, flew Morning back across Blackwater Bay to Dragonstone, declaring that dragons and those who rode them were better welcomed there.
Less than a fortnight after Morning's first flight, Larra of Lys gave birth to a son. Viserys named him Aegon, after his brother the king, and the city rejoiced.
The joy did not last. On Driftmark, a dragon egg presented to Laena Velaryon upon her birth hatched not into a dragon but into a wingless wyrm, maggot-white and blind, that turned upon the babe in her cradle and tore a bloody chunk from her arm before Oakenfist ripped it free and slew it. The news of this monstrous birth troubled the king greatly. When Aegon decreed that no dragon eggs were to be kept within his castle, Viserys, who had carried his own egg through five years of captivity and exile, grew most wroth. The brothers stopped speaking for a moon.
It was during this estrangement that the poisoning occurred. King Aegon was taking supper in his solar with Daenaera, Gaemon Palehair, and Mushroom when Gaemon complained of cramping in his gut. By the time Mushroom returned with Grand Maester Munkun, Gaemon had collapsed and Daenaera was moaning that her belly hurt too. Munkun determined they had both been poisoned. He gave Daenaera a powerful purgative that likely saved her life; she survived. He came too late for Gaemon. The boy died within the hour. Born a bastard in a brothel, briefly a king during the Moon of Madness, he had served Aegon III as cupbearer, whipping boy, and friend. He was thought to be nine years old.
The poison had been baked into the crust of the apple tarts. Munkun determined this by feeding what remained of the supper to a cage of rats. The Kingsguard seized a dozen cooks and servants and delivered them to the Lord Confessor. Under torture, seven confessed, but their accounts disagreed on every particular and none correctly named the poisoned dish, so Lord Rowan dismissed their confessions as worthless. Who had put the poison in the tarts was never established. That it had been intended for the king, not his cupbearer, no one doubted. There were many who believed it to be the work of Unwin Peake. Though he was at Starpike, his men were not.
Gaemon's death left the king inconsolable. It also broke the silence between the brothers. Viserys set aside his anger over the dragon egg to sit with Aegon and keep watch at Daenaera's bedside, and the rift healed as it had begun — quietly, without ceremony. Still another rift healed when Rhaena came from Dragonstone and sat with her brother and spoke plainly about what the poisoning meant.
As long as Daenaera remained at court, Rhaena argued, no man would believe the king was truly open to considering a wife. She was the girl he had smiled at. Every eligible family in the realm knew the story of the Maiden's Day Ball. The king would be constrained, and would appear so besides. The council had accepted Peake's law. The law's logic was sound. Daenaera could not be queen for years yet, and the realm could not wait years. To send her home was not cruelty but sense, and it would protect her, for whoever had put poison in those tarts had not been aiming at a girl of seven.
Aegon took the decision to the council himself. It was received without objection. Daenaera Velaryon was sent home to Driftmark with honor and gifts. She was seven years old. The king was fifteen. Neither was given a choice in the matter that anyone would remember afterward as anything but wise.
In the Vale, meanwhile, the question of succession had grown uglier. Ser Corwyn Corbray was sent with a thousand men to impose the Crown's judgment and declare Joffrey Arryn the rightful lord. He imprisoned the Gilded Falcon and executed Eldric Arryn, but Ser Arnold eluded him and fled to Runestone, where Gunthor Royce refused to give him up. Words grew heated. When Ser Corwyn drew Lady Forlorn — whether to strike or merely threaten — a crossbowman on the battlements pierced him through the breast. Lady Rhaena's husband was dead, and the Vale was at war.
The Crown's response was to send two forces simultaneously. Five thousand men set out up the kingsroad under Ser Robert Rowan, Lord Thaddeus's son, to force the mountain passes. A second attack by sea was entrusted to Oakenfist, with Moredo Rogare commanding the army to be landed at Gulltown. Both campaigns went badly. Ser Robert's column struggled through deep snows and nightly attacks by mountain clansmen before encountering something worse — a dragon. Sixteen died in the fight that followed, and scores more were burned before Sheepstealer and Nettles took wing and fled deeper into the mountains. It was the last confirmed sighting of the pair. A third of Rowan's column had perished by the time it reached the Bloody Gate, Ser Robert among the dead, crushed by a boulder when the clansmen toppled half a mountainside down upon them. Benjicot Blackwood took command. At Gulltown, Moredo captured the harbor but could not communicate with his own men after his translator was killed, and the campaign dissolved into chaos. The Vale remained contested.
Far to the south, the Lysene Spring ended as abruptly as it had begun. Lysandro the Magnificent and his brother Drazenko died within a day of each other under strange circumstances. It was questioned whether the Faceless Men were responsible and at whose request, but no answers were found. Their heir Lysaro Rogare, possessed of twice his father's ambition and half his father's ability, began looting the Rogare Bank to finance his own political schemes. When word of the bank's insolvency spread, lords and merchants across Westeros realized the gold they had entrusted to the Rogares was gone. In King's Landing, Lotho Rogare was arrested as he attempted to flee, his ledgers and remaining gold seized. Roggerio was dragged from the Mermaid. In Lys, the collapse was total and savage — the Rogare family was ruined to its roots, its members sold into the slavery their patriarch had spent his life accumulating.
What happened next in King's Landing is called the Secret Siege, and it began the same night the Rogare brothers were arrested. Ser Marston Waters, acting without the king's authority, imprisoned Lord Thaddeus Rowan, dismissed him as Hand, and named himself in his place. When Ser Amaury Peake arrived at Maegor's Holdfast to take Lady Larra into custody, he found Prince Viserys on the drawbridge with a battleaxe and King Aegon standing at his shoulder. Viserys warned him not to cross the line of the axe. Amaury's men advanced anyway. Sandoq the Shadow killed seven of them on the bridge before Ser Amaury came at him himself. He was a brave knight and died well, but it was not enough. Sandoq split his head with the prince's battleaxe and shoved the corpses from the bridge into the spikes below. The king raised the drawbridge, lowered the portcullis, and barred the gates.
The holdfast held for eighteen days despite the appeals, threats, and demands of Ser Marston, Ser Gareth Long, and Munkun. On the twelfth day, Thaddeus Rowan was brought out in chains to confess. His face was so bruised and swollen as to be unrecognizable. All his teeth were missing. In a thick, slurred voice, he confessed to everything he was told to confess to — including, when Viserys pressed him, having poisoned King Viserys I, who had been dead for thirty years.
"Gaemon was as guilty as the rest of us," Viserys said then. "Of nothing." And Mushroom called down from the battlements: "Lord Rowan, was it you who poisoned King Viserys?" To which the old Hand nodded and said that it was.
The king's face, Munkun writes, grew hard. "Ser Marston," he said, "this man is my Hand and innocent of treason. Seize the Lord Confessor, if you love your king, else I will know that you are as false as he is." Something in the boy's voice reached Marston Waters where weeks of argument had not. He did as the king commanded. George Graceford was dragged to the very dungeon he had ruled that morning, Rowan's chains were removed, and the holdfast doors were opened.
What followed was swift and bloody. Graceford named names. Ser Mervyn Flowers offered Ser Marston his sword hilt-first, then drove a dagger into his belly and ran for the stables, where he killed three men before being beaten to death in his white cloak. Ser Marston died that same night of his wound. Lucas Leygood died fighting at the Gate of the Gods. Tessario the Tiger was taken in a dockside tavern. All the threads led back to the same man — Unwin Peake, still at Starpike, whose kin and appointees had been wound through the conspiracy from its beginning. None of them ever spoke his name. The proof was never found. It never was, with Unwin Peake.
Aegon did not leave Maegor's Holdfast for six more days. They had run so short of food within that the ladies had donned mail and taken up spears to make the garrison appear larger than it was. Only when Aegon saw Munkun send forth ravens summoning the lords of the realm did he allow the bridge to be lowered.
Lord Thaddeus Rowan resumed the Handship but was plainly broken. The things done to him in the dungeons had left him weeping without cause one moment and lucid the next. Mushroom made mock of him by eliciting elaborate false confessions. Munkun had the dwarf removed from the old man's presence and persuaded Aegon to relieve Rowan of his duties. Rowan set out for Goldengrove promising to return when he had recovered his health. He died on the road.
In 136 AC the lords assembled in King's Landing — the largest gathering of nobles since the Great Council of 101 — to choose new regents and a Hand. Unwin Peake arrived with fifteen hundred men, the largest retinue present. The lords chose to ignore the implication. Three regents were selected by lot: Willam Stackspear, Marq Merryweather, and Lorent Grandison. For Hand, after considerable debate, the lords settled on Torrhen Manderly of White Harbor. Isembard Arryn, the Gilded Falcon, was named master of coin. To placate Peake, Gedmund the Great-Axe was made lord admiral.
The trials that followed lasted three-and-thirty days. Gareth Long and George Graceford chose the black over the headsman. Septon Bernard was gelded and sent walking barefoot to Oldtown with his manhood hung about his neck. Tessario the Tiger died under questioning before he could give a fourth name — the name that mattered. Lotho Rogare lost his right hand. Roggerio received seven lashes for being Lyseni, a sentence Lord Manderly delivered without apology. Lady Clarice Osgrey, Peake's aunt, who had oversight of the ladies of the court, was questioned closely but nothing could be proved against her. Unwin Peake's name was never spoken in the trials. It hung over the proceedings regardless, thick as smoke.
In 136 AC Larra of Lys gave birth to a second son, Aemon. The following year Oakenfist set out on his second great voyage. In 138 AC Larra gave birth to a daughter, Naerys, and left a year later. She returned to Lys, citing her perpetual unhappiness, leaving Viserys and their three children — Aegon, Aemon, and the infant Naerys — behind her. Those who had known the formerly charming, lively prince noted a marked sternness in him thereafter.
On the morning of his sixteenth nameday in 138 AC, King Aegon walked into the council chamber where Manderly and the regents were debating the details of a royal progress planned in his honor. Four knights of the Kingsguard accompanied him. So did Sandoq the Shadow. Lord Torrhen lost his tongue for a moment at the sight of the veiled giant in the doorway. "Lord Manderly," the king said into the silence, "pray tell me how old I am." Manderly said he was ten-and-six, a man grown, and that it was time to take governance into his own hands. "I shall," Aegon said. "You are sitting in my chair."
There would be no progress. The king had no interest in spending a year sleeping in strange beds and trading courtesies with lords half of whom would gladly see him dead for a groat. If any man required words with him, he would find him on the Iron Throne. As for the love of the smallfolk — he meant to give them peace and food and justice, and if that did not suffice, he said, they might send a dancing bear. Lord Manderly departed for White Harbor within the fortnight, taking Mushroom with him.
And thus, with four cold words in a council chamber, the long regency ended, and the reign of Aegon III Targaryen began.