had carnal knowledge of the bastard girl, but in light of what followed we must surely judge that more likely than most of Mushroom’s tales. Yet however these dragonriders spent their nights, it is a certainty that their days were spent prowling the skies, hunting after Prince Aemond and Vhagar without success. So let us leave them for the nonce, and turn our gaze briefly across Blackwater Bay.
It was about this time that a battered merchant cog named Nessaria came limping into the harbor beneath Dragonstone to make repairs and take on provisions. She had been returning from Pentos to Old Volantis when a storm drove her off course, her crew said…but to this common song of peril at sea, the Volantenes added a queer note. As Nessaria beat westward, the Dragonmont loomed up before them, huge against the setting sun…and the sailors spied two dragons fighting, their roars echoing off the sheer black cliffs of the smoking mountain’s eastern flanks. In every tavern, inn, and whorehouse along the waterfront the tale was told, retold, and embroidered, till every man on Dragonstone had heard it.
Dragons were a wonder to the men of Old Volantis; the sight of two in battle was one the men of Nessaria would never forget. Those born and bred on Dragonstone had grown up with such beasts…yet even so, the sailors’ story excited interest. The next morning some local fisherfolk took their boats around the Dragonmont and returned to report seeing the burned and broken remains of a dead dragon at the mountain’s base. From the color of its wings and scales, the carcass was that of Grey Ghost. The dragon lay in two pieces, and had been torn apart and partially devoured.
On hearing this news Ser Robert Quince, the amiable and famously obese knight whom the queen had named castellan of Dragonstone upon her departure, was quick to name the Cannibal as the killer. Most agreed, for the Cannibal had been known to attack smaller dragons in the past, though seldom so savagely. Some amongst the fisherfolk, fearing that the killer might turn upon them next, urged Quince to dispatch knights to the beast’s lair to put an end to him, but the castellan refused. “If we do not trouble him, the Cannibal will not trouble us,” he declared. To be certain of that, he forbade fishing in the waters beneath the Dragonmont’s eastern face, where the vanquished dragon’s body lay rotting.
His decree did not satisfy his restless charge, Baela Targaryen, Prince Daemon’s daughter by his first wife, Laena Velaryon. At ten-and-four, Baela was a wild and willful young maiden, more boyish than ladylike, and very much her father’s daughter. Though slim and short of stature, she knew naught of fear, and lived to dance and hawk and ride. As a younger girl she had oft been chastised for wrestling with squires in the yard, but of late she had taken to playing kissing games with them instead. Not long after the queen’s court removed to King’s Landing (whilst leaving Lady Baela on Dragonstone), Baela had been caught allowing a kitchen scullion to slip his hand inside her jerkin. Ser Robert, outraged, had sent the boy to the block to have the offending hand removed. Only the girl’s tearful intercession had saved him.
“She is overly fond of boys,” the castellan wrote Baela’s father, Prince Daemon, after that incident, “and should be married soon, lest she surrender her virtue to someone unworthy of her.” Even more than boys, however, Lady Baela loved to fly. Since first riding her dragon Moondancer into the sky not half a year past, she had flown every day, ranging freely to every part of Dragonstone and even across the sea to Driftmark.
Always eager for adventure, the girl now proposed to find the truth of what had happened on the other side of the mountain for herself. She had no fear of the Cannibal, she told Ser Robert. Moondancer was younger and faster; she could easily outfly the other dragon. But the castellan forbade her taking any such risk. The garrison was given strict instructions; Lady Baela was not to leave the castle. When caught attempting to defy his command that very night, the angry maiden was confined to her chambers.
Though understandable, this proved in hindsight to be unfortunate, for had Lady Baela been allowed to fly she might have spied the fishing boat that was even then making its way around the island. Aboard was an aged fisherman called