Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History #1) - George R.R. Martin Page 0,164

was breaking up). Even Harrenhal could not contain such multitudes, for each lord was accompanied by a retinue of knights, squires, grooms, cooks, and serving men. Tymond Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock, brought three hundred men with him. Not to be outdone, Lord Matthos Tyrell of Highgarden brought five hundred.

Lords came from every corner of the realm, from the Dornish Marches to the shadow of the Wall, from the Three Sisters to the Iron Islands. The Evenstar of Tarth was there, and the Lord of the Lonely Light. From Winterfell came Lord Ellard Stark, from Riverrun Lord Grover Tully, from the Vale Yorbert Royce, regent and protector for young Jeyne Arryn, Lady of the Eyrie. Even the Dornishmen were represented; the Prince of Dorne sent his daughter and twenty Dornish knights to Harrenhal as observers. The High Septon came from Oldtown to bless the assembly. Merchants and tradesmen descended upon Harrenhal by the hundreds. Hedge knights and freeriders came in hopes of finding work for their swords, cutpurses came seeking after coin, old women and young girls came seeking after husbands. Thieves and whores, washerwomen and camp followers, singers and mummers, they came from east and west and north and south. A city of tents sprang up outside the walls of Harrenhal and along the lakeshore for leagues in each direction. For a time Harrenton was the fourth city in the realm; only Oldtown, King’s Landing, and Lannisport were larger.

No fewer than fourteen claims were duly examined and considered by the lords assembled. From Essos came three rival competitors, grandsons of King Jaehaerys through his daughter Saera, each sired by a different father. One was said to be the very image of his grandsire in his youth. Another, a bastard born to a triarch of Old Volantis, arrived with bags of gold and a dwarf elephant. The lavish gifts he distributed amongst the poorer lords undoubtedly helped his claim. The elephant proved less useful. (Princess Saera herself was still alive and well in Volantis, and only thirty-four years of age; her own claim was clearly superior to those of any of her bastard sons, but she did not choose to press it. “I have my own kingdom here,” she said, when asked if she meant to return to Westeros.) Another contestant produced sheafs of parchment that demonstrated his descent from Gaemon the Glorious, the greatest of the Targaryen Lords of Dragonstone before the Conquest, by way of a younger daughter and the petty lord she had married, and on for seven further generations. There was as well a strapping red-haired man-at-arms who claimed to be a bastard son of Maegor the Cruel. By way of proof he brought his mother, an aged innkeep’s daughter who said that she had once been raped by Maegor. (The lords were prepared to believe the fact of rape, but not that the act had gotten her with child.)

The Great Council deliberated for thirteen days. The tenuous claims of nine lesser competitors were considered and discarded (one such, a hedge knight who put himself forward as a natural son of King Jaehaerys himself, was seized and imprisoned when the king exposed him as a liar). Archmaester Vaegon was ruled out on account of his vows and Princess Rhaenys and her daughter on account of their sex, leaving the two claimants with the most support: Viserys Targaryen, eldest son of Prince Baelon and Princess Alyssa, and Laenor Velaryon, the son of Princess Rhaenys and grandson of Prince Aemon. Viserys was the Old King’s grandson, Laenor his great-grandson. The principle of primogeniture favored Laenor, the principle of proximity Viserys. Viserys had also been the last Targaryen to ride Balerion…though after the death of the Black Dread in 94 AC he never mounted another dragon, whereas the boy Laenor had yet to take his first flight upon his young dragon, a splendid grey-and-white beast he named Seasmoke.

But Viserys’s claim derived from his father, Laenor’s from his mother, and most lords felt that the male line must take precedence over the female. Moreover, Viserys was a man of twenty-four, Laenor a boy of seven. For all these reasons, Laenor’s claim was generally regarded as the weaker, but the boy’s mother and father were such powerful and influential figures that it could not be dismissed entirely.

Mayhaps this would be a good place to add a few additional words about his sire, Corlys of House Velaryon, Lord of the Tides and Master of Driftmark, renowned in song and story