Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History #1) - George R.R. Martin Page 0,200

shrugged and answered, “It is not for me to tell you what to do when you are not beneath my roof.” And his knights moved aside as Prince Aemond rushed to the doors.

Outside the storm was raging. Thunder rolled across the castle, the rain fell in blinding sheets, and from time to time great bolts of blue-white lightning lit the world as bright as day. It was bad weather for flying, even for a dragon, and Arrax was struggling to stay aloft when Prince Aemond mounted Vhagar and went after him. Had the sky been calm, Prince Lucerys might have been able to outfly his pursuer, for Arrax was younger and swifter…but the day was “as black as Prince Aemond’s heart,” says Mushroom, and so it came to pass that the dragons met above Shipbreaker Bay. Watchers on the castle walls saw distant blasts of flame, and heard a shriek cut the thunder. Then the two beasts were locked together, lightning crackling around them. Vhagar was five times the size of her foe, the hardened survivor of a hundred battles. If there was a fight, it could not have lasted long.

Arrax fell, broken, to be swallowed by the storm-lashed waters of the bay. His head and neck washed up beneath the cliffs below Storm’s End three days later, to make a feast for crabs and seagulls. Mushroom claims that Prince Lucerys’s corpse washed up as well, and tells us that Prince Aemond cut out his eyes and presented them to Lady Maris on a bed of seaweed, but this seems excessive. Some say Vhagar snatched Lucerys off his dragon’s back and swallowed him whole. It has even been claimed that the prince survived his fall, swam to safety, but lost all memory of who he was, spending the rest of his days as a simpleminded fisherman.

The True Telling gives all these tales the respect they deserve…which is to say, none. Lucerys Velaryon died with his dragon, Munkun insists. This is undoubtedly correct. The prince was thirteen years of age. His body was never found. And with his death, the war of ravens and envoys and marriage pacts came to an end, and the war of fire and blood began in earnest.

Aemond Targaryen…who would henceforth be known as Aemond the Kinslayer to his foes…returned to King’s Landing, having won the support of Storm’s End for his brother Aegon, and the undying enmity of Queen Rhaenyra. If he thought to receive a hero’s welcome, he was disappointed. Queen Alicent went pale when she heard what he had done, crying, “Mother have mercy on us all.” Nor was Ser Otto pleased. “You only lost one eye,” he is reported to have said. “How could you be so blind?” The king himself did not share their concerns, however. Aegon II welcomed Prince Aemond home with a great feast, hailed him as “the true blood of the dragon,” and announced that he had made “a good beginning.”

On Dragonstone, Queen Rhaenyra collapsed when told of Luke’s death. Luke’s young brother Joffrey (Jace was still away on his mission north) swore a terrible oath of vengeance against Prince Aemond and Lord Borros. Only the intervention of the Sea Snake and Princess Rhaenys kept the boy from mounting his own dragon at once. (Mushroom would have us believe he played a part as well.) As the black council sat to consider how to strike back, a raven arrived from Harrenhal. “An eye for an eye, a son for a son,” Prince Daemon wrote. “Lucerys shall be avenged.”

Let it not be forgotten: in his youth, Daemon Targaryen had been the “Prince of the City,” his face and laugh familiar to every cutpurse, whore, and gambler in Flea Bottom. The prince still had friends in the low places of King’s Landing, and followers amongst the gold cloaks. Unbeknownst to King Aegon, the Hand, or the Queen Dowager, he had allies at court as well, even on the green council…and one other go-between, a special friend he trusted utterly, who knew the wine sinks and rat pits that festered in the shadow of the Red Keep as well as Daemon himself once had, and moved easily through the shadows of the city. To this pale stranger he reached out now, by secret ways, to set a terrible vengeance into motion.

Amidst the stews of Flea Bottom, Prince Daemon’s go-between found suitable instruments. One had been a serjeant in the City Watch; big and brutal, he had lost his gold cloak