Prince Aegon was the first to realize what they meant. “Mother, flee,” he shouted, but too late.
Ser Alfred’s men fell upon the queen’s protectors. An axe split Ser Harrold Darke’s head before his sword could clear its scabbard, and Ser Adrian Redfort was stabbed through the back with a spear. Only Ser Loreth Lansdale moved quickly enough to strike a blow in the queen’s defense, cutting down the first two men who came at him before being slain himself. With him died the last of the Queensguard. When Prince Aegon snatched up Ser Harrold’s sword, Ser Alfred knocked the blade aside contemptuously.
The boy, the queen, and her ladies were marched at spearpoint through the gates of Dragonstone to the castle ward. There (as Mushroom put it so memorably many years later) they found themselves face-to-face with “a dead man and a dying dragon.”
Sunfyre’s scales still shone like beaten gold in the sunlight, but as he sprawled across the fused black Valyrian stone of the yard, it was plain to see he was a broken thing, he who had been the most magnificent dragon ever to fly the skies of Westeros. The wing all but torn from his body by Meleys jutted at an awkward angle, whilst fresh scars along his back still smoked and bled when he moved. Sunfyre was coiled in a ball when the queen and her party first beheld him. As he stirred and raised his head, huge wounds were visible along his neck, where another dragon had torn chunks from his flesh. On his belly were places where scabs had replaced scales, and where his right eye should have been was only an empty hole, crusted with black blood.
One must ask, as Rhaenyra surely did, how this had come to pass.
We now know much and more that the queen did not. For that we must be grateful to Grand Maester Munkun, for it was his True Telling, based in large part on the account of Grand Maester Orwyle, that revealed how Aegon II came to Dragonstone.
It was Lord Larys Strong the Clubfoot, who spirited the king and his children out of the city when the queen’s dragons first appeared in the skies above King’s Landing. So as not to pass through any of the city gates, where they might be seen and remembered, Lord Larys led them out through some secret passage of Maegor the Cruel, of which only he had knowledge.
It was Lord Larys who decreed the fugitives should part company as well, so that even if one were taken, the others might win free. Ser Rickard Thorne was commanded to deliver two-year-old Prince Maelor to Lord Hightower. Princess Jaehaera, a sweet and simple girl of six, was put in the charge of Ser Willis Fell, who swore to bring her safely to Storm’s End. Neither knew where the other was bound, so neither could betray the other if captured.
And only Larys himself knew that the king, stripped of his finery and clad in a salt-stained fisherman’s cloak, had been concealed amongst a load of codfish on a fishing skiff in the care of a bastard knight with kin on Dragonstone. Once she learned the king was gone, the Clubfoot reasoned, Rhaenyra was sure to send men hunting after him…but a boat leaves no trail upon the waves, and few hunters would ever think to look for Aegon on his sister’s own island, in the very shadow of her stronghold. All this Grand Maester Orwyle had from Lord Strong’s own lips, Munkun tells us.
And there Aegon might have remained, hidden yet harmless, dulling his pain with wine and hiding his burn scars beneath a heavy cloak, had Sunfyre not made his way to Dragonstone. We may ask what drew him back to the Dragonmont, for many have. Was the wounded dragon, with his half-healed broken wing, driven by some primal instinct to return to his birthplace, the smoking mountain where he had emerged from his egg? Or did he somehow sense the presence of King Aegon on the island, across long leagues and stormy seas, and fly there to rejoin his rider? Septon Eustace goes so far as to suggest that Sunfyre sensed Aegon’s desperate need. But who can presume to know the heart of a dragon?
After Lord Walys Mooton’s ill-fated attack drove him from the field of ash and bone outside Rook’s Rest, history loses sight of Sunfyre for more than half a year (certain tales told in the halls of the