The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Prince Aenys was so oft in his sire’s company that his own instruction in the chivalric arts came largely from the knights of Aegon’s Kingsguard, and sometimes the king himself. The boy was diligent, his instructors all agreed, and did not want for courage, but he lacked his sire’s size and strength, and never showed himself as any more than adequate as a fighter, even when the king pressed Blackfyre into his hands, as he did from time to time. Aenys would not disgrace himself in battle, his tutors told one another, but no songs would ever be sung about his prowess.

  Such gifts as this prince possessed lay elsewhere. Aenys was a fine singer himself, as it happened, with a strong, sweet voice. He was courteous and charming, clever without being bookish. He made friends easily, and young girls seemed to dote on him, be they highborn or low. Aenys loved to ride as well. His father gave him coursers, palfreys, and destriers, but his favorite mount was his dragon, Quicksilver.

  Prince Maegor rode as well, but showed no great love for horses, dogs, or any animal. When he was eight, a palfrey kicked him in the stables. Maegor stabbed the horse to death…and slashed half the face off the stableboy who came running at the beast’s screams. The Prince of Dragonstone had many companions through the years, but no true friends. He was a quarrelsome boy, quick to take offense, slow to forgive, fearsome in his wroth. His skill with weapons was unmatched, however. A squire at eight, he was unhorsing boys four and five years his elder in the lists by the time he was twelve and battering seasoned men-at-arms into submission in the castle yard. On his thirteenth name day in 25 AC, his mother Queen Visenya bestowed her own Valyrian steel blade, Dark Sister, upon him…half a year before his marriage.

  The tradition amongst the Targaryens had always been to marry kin to kin. Wedding brother to sister was thought to be ideal. Failing that, a girl might wed an uncle, a cousin, or a nephew; a boy a cousin, aunt, or niece. This practice went back to Old Valyria, where it was common amongst many of the ancient families, particularly those who bred and rode dragons. The blood of the dragon must remain pure, the wisdom went. Some of the sorcerer princes also took more than one wife when it pleased them, though this was less common than incestuous marriage. In Valryia before the Doom, wise men wrote, a thousand gods were honored, but none were feared, so few dared to speak against these customs.

  This was not true in Westeros, where the power of the Faith went unquestioned. The old gods were still worshipped in the North, but in the rest of the realm there was a single god with seven faces, and his voice upon this earth was the High Septon of Oldtown. And the doctrines of the Faith, handed down through centuries from Andalos itself, condemned the Valyrian marriage customs as practiced by the Targaryens. Incest was denounced as vile sin, whether between father and daughter, mother and son, or brother and sister, and the fruits of such unions were considered abominations in the sight of gods and men. With hindsight, it can be seen that conflict between the Faith and House Targaryen was inevitable. Indeed, many amongst the Most Devout expected the High Septon to speak out against Aegon and his sisters during the Conquest, and were most displeased when the Father of the Faithful instead counseled Lord Hightower against opposing the Dragon, and even blessed and anointed him at his second coronation.

  Familiarity is the father of acceptance, it is said. The High Septon who had crowned Aegon the Conqueror remained the Shepherd of the Faithful until his death in 11 AC, by which time the realm had grown accustomed to the notion of a king with two queens, who were both wives and sisters. King Aegon always took care to honor the Faith, confirming its traditional rights and privileges, exempting its wealth and property from taxation, and affirming that septons, septas, and other servants of the Seven accused of wrongdoing could only be tried by the Faith’s own courts.

  The accord between the Faith and the Iron Throne continued all through the reign of Aegon I. From 11 AC to 37 AC, six High Septons wore the crystal crown; His Grace remained on good terms with each of them, calling at the Starry Sept each time he came to Oldtown. Yet the question of incestuous marriage remained, simmering below the courtesies like poison. Whilst the High Septons of King Aegon’s reign never spoke out against the king’s marriage to his sisters, neither did they declare it to be lawful. The humbler members of the Faith—village septons, holy sisters, begging brothers, Poor Fellows—still believed it sinful for brother to lie with sister, or for a man to take two wives.

  Aegon the Conqueror had fathered no daughters, however, so these matters did not come to a head at once. The sons of the Dragon had no sisters to marry, so each of them was forced to seek elsewhere for a bride.

  Prince Aenys was the first to marry. In 22 AC, he wed the Lady Alyssa, the maiden daughter of the Lord of the Tides, Aethan Velaryon, King Aegon’s lord admiral and master of ships. She was fifteen, the same age as the prince, and shared his silvery hair and purple eyes as well, for the Velaryons were an ancient family descended from Valyrian stock. King Aegon’s own mother had been a Velaryon, so the marriage was reckoned one of cousin to cousin.

  It soon proved both happy and fruitful. The following year, Alyssa gave birth to a daughter. Aenys named her Rhaena, and the realm rejoiced…save, perhaps, for Queen Visenya. Prince Aenys was the heir to the Iron Throne, all agreed, but now an issue arose as to whether Prince Maegor remained second in the line of succession, or should be considered to have fallen to third, behind the newborn princess. Queen Visenya proposed to settle the matter by betrothing Rhaena to Maegor, who had just turned twelve. Aenys and Alyssa spoke out against the match, however…and when word reached Oldtown’s Starry Sept, the High Septon sent a raven, warning the king that such a marriage would not be looked upon with favor by the Faith. He proposed a different bride for Maegor: Ceryse Hightower, maiden daughter to the Lord of Oldtown (and the High Septon’s own niece). Aegon, mindful of the advantages of closer ties with Oldtown and its ruling House, saw wisdom in the choice and agreed to the match.

  Thus it came to pass that in 25 AC, Maegor Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, wed Lady Ceryse Hightower in the Starry Sept of Oldtown, with the High Septon himself performing the nuptials. Maegor was thirteen, the bride ten years his senior…but the lords who bore witness to the bedding all agreed that the prince made a lusty husband, and Maegor himself boasted that he had consummated the marriage a dozen times that night. “I made a son for House Targaryen last night,” he proclaimed as he broke fast.

  The son came the next year…but the boy, named Aegon after his grandsire, was born to Lady Alyssa and fathered by Prince Aenys. Lady Ceryse did not quicken in the years that followed, though other children came one after the other to Alyssa. In 29 AC, she gave Aenys a second son, Viserys. In 34 AC, she gave birth to Jaehaerys, her fourth child and third son. In 36 AC came another daughter, Alysanne. Each son pushed Prince Maegor further down in the succession; some said he stood behind his brother’s daughters too. All whilst Maegor and Ceryse remained childless.

  On tourney ground and battlefield, however, Prince Maegor’s accomplishments far exceeded those of his brother. In the great tourney at Riverrun in 28 AC, Prince Maegor unhorsed three knights of the Kingsguard in successive tilts before falling to the eventual champion. In the melee, no man could stand before him. Afterward he was knighted on the field by his father, who dubbed him with no less a blade than Blackfyre. At ten-and-six, Maegor became the youngest knight in the Seven Kingdoms.

  Others feats followed. In 29 AC and again in 30 AC, Maegor accompanied Osmund Strong and Aethan Velaryon to the Stepstones to root out the Lysene pirate king Sargoso Saan, and fought in several bloody affrays, showing himself to be both fearless and deadly. In 31 AC, he hunted down and slew a notorious robber knight in the riverlands, the so-called Giant of the Trident.

  Maegor was not yet a dragonrider, however. Though half a dozen hatchlings had been born amidst the fires of Dragonstone in the later years of Aegon’s reign, and were offered to the prince, Maegor refused them all. His brother’s wife teased him about it one day in court, wondering aloud
whether “my good-brother is afraid of dragons.” Maegor darkened in rage at the jape then replied coolly that there was only one dragon worthy of him.

  The last seven years of the reign of Aegon the Conqueror were peaceful ones. After the frustrations of his Dornish War the king accepted the continued independence of Dorne, and flew to Sunspear on Balerion on the tenth anniversary of the peace accords to celebrate a “feast of friendship” with Deria Martell, the reigning Princess of Dorne. Prince Aenys accompanied him on Quicksilver; Maegor remained on Dragonstone. Aegon had made the Seven Kingdoms one with fire and blood, but after celebrating his sixtieth name day in 33 AC, he turned instead to brick and mortar. Half of every year was still given over to a royal progress, but now it was Prince Aenys and his wife Alyssa who journeyed from castle to castle, whilst the aging king remained at home, dividing his days between Dragonstone and King’s Landing.

  The fishing village where Aegon had first landed had grown into a sprawling, stinking city of a hundred thousand souls by that time; only Oldtown and Lannisport were larger. Yet in many ways King’s Landing was still little more than an army camp that had swollen to grotesque size: dirty, reeking, unplanned, impermanent. And the Aegonfort, which had spread halfway down Aegon’s High Hill by that time, was as ugly a castle as any in the Seven Kingdoms, a great confusion of wood and earth and brick that had long outgrown the old log palisades that were its only walls.

  It was certainly no fit abode for a great king. In 35 AC, Aegon moved with all his court back to Dragonstone, and gave orders that the Aegonfort be torn down, so that a new castle might be raised in its place. This time, he decreed, he would build in stone. To oversee the design and construction of the new castle, he named the King’s Hand, Lord Alyn Stokeworth (Ser Osmund Strong had died the previous year), and Queen Visenya. (A jape went about the court that King Aegon had given Visenya charge of building the Red Keep so he would not have to endure her presence on Dragonstone.)

  Aegon the Conqueror died of a stroke on Dragonstone in the thirty-seventh year after the Conquest. His grandsons Aegon and Viserys were with him at his death, in the Chamber of the Painted Table; the king was showing them the details of his conquests. Prince Maegor, in residence at Dragonstone at the time, spoke the eulogy as his father’s body was laid upon a funeral pyre in the castle yard. The king was clad in battle armor, his mailed hands folded over the hilt of Blackfyre. Since the days of old Valyria, it had ever been the custom of House Targaryen to burn their dead, rather than consigning their remains to the ground. Vhagar supplied the flames to light the fire. Blackfyre was burned with the king, but retrieved by Aenys afterward, its blade darker but elsewise unharmed. No common fire can damage Valyrian steel.

  The Dragon was survived by his sister Visenya, his sons Aenys and Maegor, and five grandchildren. Prince Aenys was thirty years of age at his father’s death, Prince Maegor five-and-twenty.

  Aenys had been at Highgarden on his progress when his father died, but Quicksilver returned him to Dragonstone for the funeral. Afterward he donned his father’s iron-and-ruby crown, and Grand Maester Gawen proclaimed him Aenys of House Targaryen, the First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm. The lords and knights and septons who had come to Dragonstone to bid their king farewell knelt and bowed their heads. When Prince Maegor’s turn came, Aenys drew him back to his feet, kissed his cheek, and said, “Brother, you need never kneel to me again. We shall rule this realm together, you and I.” Then the king presented his father’s sword, Blackfyre, to his brother, saying, “You are more fit to bear this blade than me. Wield it in my service, and I shall be content.”

  Afterward the new king sailed to King’s Landing, where he found the Iron Throne standing amidst mounds of rubble and mud. The old Aegonfort had been torn down, and pits and tunnels pockmarked the hill where the cellars and foundations of the Red Keep were being dug, but the new castle had not yet begun to rise. Nonetheless, thousands came to cheer King Aenys as he claimed his father’s seat for his own. Thereafter His Grace set out for Oldtown to receive the blessing of the High Septon, traveling by way of Riverrun, Lannisport, and Highgarden on a grand royal progress. His wife and children made the journey with him, and all along the route the smallfolk appeared by the hundreds and thousands to hail their new king and queen. At the Starry Sept, the High Septon anointed him as he had his father, and presented him with a crown of yellow gold, with the faces of the Seven inlaid in jade and pearl.

  Yet even as Aenys was receiving the High Septon’s blessing, some were casting doubt on his fitness to sit the Iron Throne. Westeros required a warrior, not a dreamer, they whispered to one another, and Prince Maegor was the stronger of the Dragon’s two sons. And foremost amongst the whisperers was Maegor’s mother, the Dowager Queen Visenya Targaryen. “The truth is plain enough,” she is reported to have said. “Even Aenys sees it. Why else would he have given Blackfyre to my son? He knows that only Maegor has the strength to rule.”

  The young king’s mettle would be tested sooner than anyone could have imagined. The Wars of Conquest had left scars throughout the realm. Sons now come of age dreamed of avenging long-dead fathers. Knights remembered the days when a man with a sword and a horse and a suit of armor could slash his way to riches and glory. Lords recalled a time when they did not need a king’s leave to tax their smallfolk or kill their enemies. “The chains the Dragon forged can yet be broken,” the discontented told one another. “We can win our freedoms back, but now is the time to strike, for this new king is weak.”

  The first stirrings of revolt were in the riverlands, amidst the colossal ruins of Harrenhal. Aegon had granted the castle to Ser Quenton Qoherys, his old master-at-arms. When Lord Qoherys died in a fall from his horse in 9 AC, his title passed to his grandson Gargon, a fat and foolish man with an unseemly appetite for young girls who became known as Gargon the Guest. Lord Gargon soon became infamous for turning up at every wedding celebrated within his domains so that he might enjoy the lord’s right of first night. A more unwelcome wedding guest can scarce be imagined. He also made free with the wives and daughters of his own servants.

  King Aenys was still on his progress, guesting with Lord Tully of Riverrun, when the father of a maid Lord Qoherys had ruined opened a postern gate at Harrenhal to an outlaw who styled himself Harren the Red, and claimed to be a grandson of Harren the Black. The outlaws pulled his lordship from his bed and dragged him to the castle godswood, where Harren sliced off his genitals and fed them to a dog. A few leal men-at-arms were killed; the rest agreed to join Harren, who declared himself Lord of Harrenhal and King of the Rivers (not being ironborn, he did not claim the islands).

  When word reached Riverrun, Lord Tully urged the king to mount Quicksilver and descend on Harrenhal as his father had. But His Grace, perhaps mindful of his mother’s death in Dorne, instead commanded Tully to gather his banners, and lingered at Riverrun as they gathered. Only when a thousand men were assembled did Aenys march…but when his men reached Harrenhal, they found it empty but for corpses. Harren the Red had put Lord Gargon’s leal servants to the sword and taken his band into the woods.

  By the time Aenys returned to King’s Landing the news had grown even worse. In the Vale, Lord Ronnel Arryn’s younger brother Jonos had deposed and imprisoned his loyal sibling, and declared himself King of Mountain and Vale. In the Iron Islands, another priest-king had walked out of the sea, announcing himself to be Lodos the Twice-Drowned, the son of the Drowned God, returned at last from visiting his father. And high in the Red Mountains of Dorne, a pretender called the Vulture King appeared, and called on all true Dornishmen to avenge the evils visited on Dorne by the Targaryens. Though Princess Deria denounced him, swearing that she and all leal Dornishmen wanted only peace, thousands flocked to his banners, swarming down from the hills and up out of the sands, through goat tracks in the mountains into the Reach.

  “This Vulture King is half-mad, and his followers are a rabble, undi
sciplined and unwashed,” Lord Harmon Dondarrion wrote to the king. “We can smell them coming fifty leagues away.” Not long after, that selfsame rabble stormed and seized his castle of Blackhaven. The Vulture King personally sliced off Dondarrion’s nose before putting Blackhaven to the torch and marching away.

  King Aenys knew these rebels had to be put down, but seemed unable to decide where to begin. Grand Maester Gawen wrote that the king seemed unable to comprehend why this was happening. The smallfolk loved him, did they not? Jonos Arryn, this new Lodos, the Vulture King…had he wronged them? If they had grievances, why not bring them to him? “I would have heard them out,” he said. He spoke of sending messengers to the rebels, to learn the reasons for their actions. Fearing that King’s Landing might not be safe with Harren the Red alive and near, he sent his wife and children to Dragonstone. He commanded his Hand, Lord Alyn Stokeworth, to take a fleet and army to the Vale to put down Jonos Arryn and restore his brother Ronnel to the lordship. But when the ships were about to sail, he countermanded the order, fearing that Stokeworth’s departure would leave King’s Landing undefended. Instead he sent the Hand with but a few hundred men to hunt down Harren the Red, and decided he would summon a great council to discuss how best to put down the other rebels.

  Whilst the king prevaricated, his lords took to the field. Some acted on their own authority, others in concert with the Dowager Queen. In the Vale, Lord Allard Royce of Runestone assembled twoscore loyal lords and marched against the Eyrie, easily defeating the supporters of the self-styled King of Mountain and Vale. But when they demanded the release of their rightful lord, Jonos Arryn sent his brother to them through the Moon Door. Such was the sad end of Ronnel Arryn, who had flown thrice about the Giant’s Lance on dragonback. The Eyrie was impregnable to any conventional assault, so “King” Jonos and his die-hard followers spat down defiance at the loyalists, and settled in for a siege…until Prince Maegor appeared in the sky above, astride Balerion. The Conqueror’s son had claimed a dragon at last, and none other than the Black Dread, the greatest of them all.