tenth the size of the old, for the smallfolk said the very ground was haunted.
One hundred sixty leagues to the north, other dragons soared above the Trident, where Prince Daemon Targaryen and the small brown girl called Nettles were hunting Aemond One-Eye without success. They had based themselves at Maidenpool, at the invitation of Lord Manfryd Mooton, who lived in terror of Vhagar descending on his town. Instead Prince Aemond struck at Stonyhead, in the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon; at Sweetwillow on the Green Fork and Sallydance on the Red Fork; he reduced Bowshot Bridge to embers, burned Old Ferry and Crone’s Mill, destroyed the motherhouse at Bechester, always vanishing back into the sky before the hunters could arrive. Vhagar never lingered, nor did the survivors oft agree on which way the dragon had flown.
Each dawn Caraxes and Sheepstealer flew from Maidenpool, climbing high above the riverlands in ever-widening circles in hopes of espying Vhagar below…only to return defeated at dusk. The Chronicles of Maidenpool tell us Lord Mooton made so bold as to suggest that the dragonriders divide their search, so as to cover twice the ground. Prince Daemon refused. Vhagar was the last of the three dragons that had come to Westeros with Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters, he reminded his lordship. Though slower than she had been a century before, she had grown nigh as large as the Black Dread of old. Her fires burned hot enough to melt stone, and neither Caraxes nor Sheepstealer could match her ferocity. Only together could they hope to withstand her. And so he kept the girl Nettles by his side, day and night, in sky and castle.
Yet was fear of Vhagar the only reason Prince Daemon kept Nettles close to him? Mushroom would have us believe it was not. By the dwarf’s account, Daemon Targaryen had come to love the small brown bastard girl, and had taken her into his bed.
How much credence can we give the fool’s testimony? Nettles was no more than ten-and-seven, Prince Daemon nine-and-forty, yet the power young maidens exert over older men is well-known. Daemon Targaryen was not a faithful consort to the queen, we know. Even our normally reticent Septon Eustace writes of his nightly visits to Lady Mysaria, whose bed he oft shared whilst at court…with the queen’s blessing, purportedly. Nor should it be forgotten that during his youth, every brothel keeper in King’s Landing knew that Lord Flea Bottom took an especial delight in maidens, and kept aside the youngest, prettiest, and more innocent of their new girls for him to deflower.
The girl Nettles was young, beyond a doubt (though perhaps not as young as those the prince had debauched in his youth), but it seems doubtful that she was a true maiden. Growing up homeless, motherless, and penniless on the streets of Spicetown and Hull, she would most likely have surrendered her innocence not long after her first flowering (if not before), in return for half a groat or a crust of bread. And the sheep she fed to Sheepstealer to bind him to her…how would she have come by those, if not by lifting her skirts for some shepherd? Nor could Netty truly be called pretty. “A skinny brown girl on a skinny brown dragon,” writes Munkun in his True Telling (though he never saw her). Septon Eustace says her teeth were crooked, her nose scarred where it had once been slit for thieving. Hardly a likely paramour for a prince, one would think.
Against that we have The Testimony of Mushroom…and in this case, the Chronicles of Maidenpool as set down by Lord Mooton’s maester. Maester Norren writes that “the prince and his bastard girl” supped together every night, broke their fast together every morning, slept in adjoining bedchambers, that the prince “doted upon the brown girl as a man might dote upon his daughter,” instructing her in “common courtesies” and how to dress and sit and brush her hair, that he made gifts to her of “an ivory-handled hairbrush, a silvered looking glass, a cloak of rich brown velvet bordered in satin, a pair of riding boots of leather soft as butter.” The prince taught the girl to wash, Norren says, and the maidservants who fetched their bath water said he oft shared a tub with her, “soaping her back or washing the dragon stink from her hair, both of them as naked as their namedays.”
None of this constitutes proof that Daemon Targaryen