Before her marriage to Daemon, Laena had been betrothed for almost a decade to the son of a former Sealord of Braavos, but the youth had squandered his father’s fortune and influence and had become nothing but a hanger-on at High Tide and an embarrassment to Lord Corlys. It was no great surprise when Daemon, paying a visit after his wife’s death, saw Laena (who was said to be surpassingly lovely) and spoke in private with the Sea Snake about a marriage. Soon after, Prince Daemon provoked her Braavosi betrothed so mercilessly that the youth challenged him to a single combat.
So ended the Sealord’s wastrel son.
The sons of Princess Rhaenyra (l. to r.): Jacaerys, Joffrey, and Lucerys. (illustration credit 51)
In the end, Viserys attempted to make peace, and he did so by proclaiming that any man or woman who questioned the paternity of Rhaenyra’s children would have his or her tongue torn out. He then commanded Alicent and his sons to return to King’s Landing, while Rhaenyra was to remain with her sons at Dragonstone, so that they might not quarrel again. Ser Erryk Cargyll remained at Dragonstone as Rhaenyra’s sworn shield, taking the place of Ser Harwin Strong, who returned to Harrenhal.
The last tragedy—and some might say the least—was the fire at Harrenhal that took the lives of Lord Lyonel and his son and heir, Ser Harwin. But those who speak so are ignorant. Viserys, now old and weary, and increasingly disinterested in the governance of the realm, was left without a Hand, while Rhaenyra was left without both a husband and, as some claimed, a paramour. Some accounts see it as an accident, no more. But others suggest more wicked possibilities. Some believe that Larys Clubfoot—one of the king’s inquisitors and Lord Lyonel’s youngest son—might have arranged it so that he might rule Harrenhal. Other histories even hint that Prince Daemon himself was behind it.
Rather than bring in a new Hand, the king recalled Ser Otto from Oldtown at Alicent’s urging and named him Hand again. And rather than mourn her late husband, Rhaenyra at last wed her uncle, Prince Daemon. In the last days of 120 AC, she even delivered to him his first son, whom she named Aegon, after the Conqueror. (When she learned of it, Queen Alicent was said to be enraged, for her own eldest son also bore the Conqueror’s name. The two Aegons came to be known as Aegon the Elder and Aegon the Younger.) The year 122 AC saw Rhaenyra and Daemon delivered of a second son, Viserys. Viserys was not so robust as Aegon the Younger or his Velaryon half siblings, but he proved precocious. Some took it as an omen, however, when the dragon egg placed in his cradle did not hatch.
And so matters progressed, until the fateful day in 129 AC when Viserys I at last died. His son, Aegon the Elder, had wed his daughter, Helaena, and Helaena had borne to Aegon the twins Jaehaerys and Jaehaera (the latter of whom was a strange child, slow to grow, never weeping or smiling as children do), and another son named Maelor in 127 AC. On Driftmark, the Sea Snake began to fail and took to his bed. Viserys, now in the winter of his years but still hearty, injured himself on the Iron Throne in 128 AC after rendering a judgment. The wound became dangerously infected, and in the end Maester Orwyle (who had succeeded Maester Mellos in the previous year) was forced to amputate two fingers. That measure was not stringent enough, however, and as 128 ended and 129 began, Viserys was growing increasingly ill.
On the third day of the third moon of 129 AC, while entertaining Jaehaerys and Jaehaera from his bed with a tale of their great-great-grandsire and his queen battling giants, mammoths, and wildlings beyond the Wall, the king grew tired. He sent his grandchildren away when the tale was done and fell into a sleep from which he never awoke. He had ruled for six-and-twenty years, reigning over the most prosperous era in the history of the Seven Kingdoms but seeding within it the disastrous decline of his house and the death of the last of the dragons.
The sons of King Viserys (l. to r.): Aegon, Daeron, and Aemond.
A EGON II
NO WAR WAS ever bloodier or crueler than the Dance of the Dragons, as the singers and Munkun have chosen to name it. It was the worst kind of war—a war between siblings. Despite Viserys’s unwavering preference for Rhaenyra, Prince Aegon was convinced to take up his father’s crown, by his mother and the small council, before Viserys I’s corpse was cold. When Rhaenyra, the Princess of Dragonstone, learned of it, she fell into a rage. She was, at the time, in confinement at Dragonstone, awaiting the birth of her third child to Prince Daemon.
FROM THE HISTORY OF ARCHMAESTER GYLDAYN
On Dragonstone, no cheers were heard. Instead, screams echoed through the halls and stairwells of Sea Dragon Tower, and down from the queen’s apartments where Rhaenyra Targaryen strained and shuddered in her third day of labor. The child had not been due for another turn of the moon, but the tidings from King’s Landing had driven the princess into a black fury, and her rage seemed to bring on the birth, as if the babe inside her were angry too, and fighting to get out. The princess shrieked curses all through her labor, calling down the wroth of the gods upon her half brothers and their mother, the queen, and detailing the torments she would inflict upon them before she would let them die. She cursed the child inside her too, Mushroom tells us. “Get out,” she screamed, clawing at her swollen belly as her maester and her midwife tried to restrain her. “Monster, monster, get out, get out, GET OUT!”
When the babe at last came forth, she proved indeed a monster: a stillborn girl, twisted and malformed, with a hole in her chest where her heart should have been, and a stubby, scaled tail. Or so Mushroom describes her. The dwarf tells us that it was he who carried the little thing to the yard for burning. The dead girl had been named Visenya, Princess Rhaenyra announced the next day, when milk of the poppy had blunted the edge of her pain. “She was my only daughter, and they killed her. They stole my crown and murdered my daughter, and they shall answer for it.”
Once past the birth, Rhaenyra prepared for war. Both she and Alicent had their supporters among their kin—and among the great lords of the realm. And each side had dragons. It was a recipe for disaster, and so it proved. The realm bled as it never had before, and it would be years before all the scars were healed.
Mushroom’s claim that Queen Alicent had hurried her husband’s demise with a “pinch of poison” in his wine we may, perhaps, dismiss. But none can doubt that the first blood to be spilled in the Dance was that of the aged master of coin, Lord Beesbury, when he insisted that Viserys’s true heir was Rhaenyra, and that she must be crowned. The accounts differ as to how this dissenter was removed. Some say he died of a chill after being thrown into the black cells, and some that Ser Criston Cole—the Lord Commander who would soon be called the Kingmaker—opened his throat with his dagger there at the table. Mushroom disagrees, suggesting Cole threw Beesbury out a window—though it should be remembered that Mushroom was on Dragonstone at this time, with Rhaenyra. But that was far from the last murder in the early days of the Dance. However, the most lamentable were the murders of the young princes Lucerys Velaryon, the son of Rhaenyra, and Jaehaerys, the son and heir of Aegon.
Luke Velaryon’s death was witnessed by many eyes at the court of Storm’s End, and the accounts largely agree. Dispatched by his mother to Storm’s End to enlist Lord Borros’s support, he arrived to find Prince Aemond Targaryen there before him. Aemond was older, stronger, and crueler than Lucerys—and he hated Lucerys with a passion, for it was Lucerys who had cost him his eye nine years earlier. Lord Borros denied Aemond his desire for revenge inside his hall—but stated that he had no care whatever for what happened without. So Prince Aemond, upon Vhagar, chased down the fleeing Lucerys and his young dragon Arrax. The prince and his dragon—hampered by the storm raging outside the castle walls—both died within sight of Storm’s End, plummeting into the sea.
Rhaenyra, the accounts all say, collapsed at the news. Not so, Lucerys’s stepfather, Prince Daemon Targaryen. The words Prince Daemon sent to Dragonstone after having learned the news of Lucerys’s death were, “An eye for an eye, a son for a son. Lucerys shall be avenged.” He was the Prince of the City, and he still
had many friends in the stews and brothels of King’s Landing. Chief of them was his once-paramour, Mysaria, the White Worm. She arranged his vengeance, hiring a brute and a rat-catcher known to history as Blood and Cheese. Thanks to his profession, the rat-catcher knew all the secrets of Maegor’s tunnels. Slipping into the Red Keep, Blood and Cheese seized hold of Queen Helaena and her children … and then offered Aegon II’s wife a brutal choice: which of her sons would die? She wept and pled and offered her own life to no avail. In the end, she named Maelor—the youngest, and deemed too young to understand. Blood and Cheese killed Prince Jaehaerys instead, as his mother screamed her horror. Then Blood and Cheese fled with the prince’s head; true to their word that they were only after one of Aegon’s sons.
The deaths of Prince Lucerys and his dragon, Arrax. (illustration credit 52)
At the outset of the war, Aegon II’s chief supporters were Lord Hightower, Lord Lannister, and eventually Lord Baratheon. Lord Tully desired to fight for the king, but was old and bedridden, and his grandson defied him. Rhaenyra’s chief supporters were her good-father Lord Velaryon, her cousin Lady Jeyne Arryn, and Lord Stark (though his help was slow in coming, as he kept every man to harvest what they could before winter fell on the North). Lord Greyjoy attacked the westerlands in her name, as well, to the shock of King Aegon, who had courted his support. The Tullys eventually joined Rhaenyra’s cause, in defiance of the late Lord Tully’s wishes. The Tyrells, however, remained uninvolved in the war, as did the Dornishmen.
These were not the only murders in that long and brutal war. As piteous as Jaehaerys’s death was, that of little Prince Maelor, who did not long survive his brother, was worse. Ser Rickard Thorne of the Kingsguard was dispatched to carry Maelor away in secret to Oldtown, where he would be secure in the Hightower, but at Bitterbridge he was stopped and brought down by a mob. Maelor himself was torn apart at Bitterbridge as the men and women of the mob each struggled to claim the infant as their own prize. When Lord Hightower razed Bitterbridge in revenge and came to exact justice on Lady Caswell, she begged mercy for her children before hanging herself from her castle walls.
Even the Kingsguard were enlisted into the strife. Ser Criston Cole dispatched Ser Arryk Cargyll to Dragonstone with the intention of having him infiltrate the citadel in the guise of his twin, Ser Erryk. There, he was to kill Rhaenyra (or her children; accounts differ). Yet as chance would have it, Ser Erryk and Ser Arryk met by happenstance in one of the halls of the citadel. The singers tell us that they professed their love for one another before the steel clashed, and fought with love and duty in their hearts for an hour before they died weeping in one another’s arms. The account of Mushroom, who claims to have witnessed the duel, says the reality was far more brutal: they condemned one another for traitors, and within moments had mortally wounded each other.
While this took place, Ser Criston Cole decided to punish the “black lords”—those bannermen of the crownlands who remained loyal to Rhaenyra. Rosby, Stokeworth, and Duskendale fell before him, but at Rook’s Rest, Lord Staunton had already received word of Cole’s arrival. Instead of fighting, he barricaded himself in his castle, then dispatched a raven to Dragonstone, begging for aid.
On Dragonstone, where the Targaryens had long ruled, the common folk had seen their beautiful, foreign rulers almost as gods. Many maids deflowered by Targaryen lords accounted themselves blessed if a “dragonseed” was planted in their womb, and for this reason there were many on Dragonstone who could rightly claim—or at least suspect—that some Targaryen blood ran in their veins.
That aid arrived in the form of Princess Rhaenys—then five-and-fifty, but as fearless and determined as she had been in her youth—and her dragon Meleys, the Red Queen. But Cole had brought dragons too—for Aegon II himself arrived on the field upon Sunfyre, and his brother Aemond One-eye rode Vhagar, the greatest living dragon.
It is recounted that Princess Rhaenys, the Queen Who Never Was, did not shrink from her foe. With a glad cry and a crack of her whip, she sent Meleys flying up to face them. Only Vhagar and Aemond came out of that battle unscathed; Sunfyre was crippled, and King Aegon II barely survived, suffering broken ribs, a broken hip, and burns that covered half his body. Worst was his left arm, where the dragonfire melted the king’s armor into his flesh. Rhaenys’s body was found several days later amidst the ruin of the Red Queen’s corpse, but so burned as to be unrecognizable.
Aegon spent the next year of his reign in isolation, healing from his terrible wounds, but the war raged on. And while King Aegon had many advantages in the war with his elder sister, his strength in dragons was not among them. At the war’s outset, Aegon counted only four dragons large enough to fight, while his sister had eight and access to still more. First were three older dragons that had yet to be claimed by new riders: Silverwing, Queen Alysanne’s old mount; Seasmoke, who had been the pride of Ser Laenor Velaryon; and Vermithor, unridden since the death of King Jaehaerys. Then there were three wild dragons that might be tamed if riders could be found: the Cannibal, said by the smallfolk to have lurked on Dragonstone even before the Targaryens came (though Munkun and Barth are dubious of this claim); Grey Ghost, shy of people, gorging on fish it plucked from the sea; and the Sheepstealer, brown and plain, preferring to feed on what sheep it could steal from the sheepfolds. Prince Jacaerys announced (with the prompting of Mushroom, if his Testimony is to be believed) that any man or woman who could ride one of these dragons would be ennobled.
Princess Rhaenys upon Meleys attacking King Aegon II upon Sunfyre. (illustration credit 53)
Many attempted to mount the dragons that were still available on Dragonstone. The most perilous of these were the wild dragons, so it was no wonder that the dragons who had previously accepted riders were the first to find new riders. Among these new dragonriders was Addam of Hull—a brave and noble youth who was brought by his mother, Marilda of Hull, to try for a dragon along with his brother Alyn. She revealed that the boys were the sons of Laenor Velaryon—a fact that many found remarkable, but which Lord Corlys did not question when he adopted them both into House Velaryon.
Mushroom puts forward a more plausible possibility on Addam and Alyn’s parentage: that it was Lord Corlys himself who fathered both boys, back when he spent many of his days at the shipyards of Hull where Marilda’s father was a shipwright. The boys had gone unacknowledged, kept far from court, while the fiery-tempered Queen Who Never Was lived. But after her death, Lord Corlys took the opportunity to acknowledge them … after a fashion.
Addam claimed Laenor’s dragon, Seasmoke. His brother, Alyn, had less success with Sheepstealer, and for the rest of his days bore the marks of the dragon’s flames on his back and legs.
Sheepstealer was eventually tamed by Nettles—a plain, baseborn, disreputable girl who fed the dragon mutton day by day until it became used to her. The dragon and its rider played their part in the war, but Nettles’s loyalties were not so clear as brave Ser Addam’s. When she and Prince Daemon became lovers, it drove a final wedge between Rhaenyra and her lord husband. Nettles—whom the prince fondly called Netty—outlived her prince as well as his wife. Nettles and the Sheepstealer vanished before the war’s end, and none could say where they went until years after.
But of all the new dragonriders, the worst were the drunkard named Ulf the Sot, who took the name Ulf the White once knighted, and the huge and powerful blacksmith’s bastard Hugh the Hammer, also called Hard Hugh, who became known as Hugh Hammer when he received his knighthood. Not satisfied with the honor of riding upon the dragons Silverwing and Vermithor, they desired lordships and wealth. After first fighting for Rhaenyra, they turned their cloaks at the First Battle of Tumbleton in return for lordships, and were cursed as the Two Betrayers ever after. Both died miserable deaths, killed by the men they thought beholden to them—the one by poisoned wine, the other slain by Bold Jon Roxton with Orphan-Maker.
The battles during the Dance cannot be readily counted, for they were almost beyond number,
and much of the realm was torn asunder in the conflict. Men raised the banner of the king, bearing the golden three-headed dragon that Aegon had taken for his sigil, only to find their neighbor had taken up Rhaenyra’s red dragon quartered with the moon-and-falcon of her Arryn mother and the seahorse of her late husband. Brother fought brother, father fought son, and the whole realm bled.
Many of the hosts were gathered by various lords on behalf of the king or queen they supported, but if any could be said to have held command of all the loyal forces on each side, they were Prince Daemon Targaryen and Prince Aemond Targaryen respectively. Aemond took up the mantle of Protector of the Realm and Prince Regent after both Aegon II and Sunfyre were gravely injured at Rook’s Rest in the battle with Rhaenys and Meleys. He even donned his brother’s crown—Aegon the Conqueror’s crown of rubies and Valyrian steel—though he did not call himself king.
When Rhaenyra learned of the betrayal of Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White at First Tumbleton, where they turned their dragons against her forces, her rage was such that she tried to arrest the other dragonseed who had taken dragons at her behest. Among them was Addam Velaryon, but he was forewarned by the Sea Snake, and so escaped.
Young Ser Addam died bravely at the Second Battle of Tumbleton, proving his faithfulness with his life after it had been called into question by the deeds of the Two Betrayers. When his bones were returned to Driftmark from Raventree Hall in 138 AC, the epitaph Lord Alyn put on his tomb consisted of one word: “LOYAL.”
The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire) Page 12