Only in one respect did the plan go awry. As Tom Tangletongue and his ruffians smashed down the door of Lady Baela’s bedchamber to take her prisoner, the girl slipped out her window, scrambling across rooftops and down walls until she reached the yard. The king’s men had taken care to send guards to secure the stable where the castle dragons had been kept, but Baela had grown up in Dragonstone, and knew ways in and out that they did not. By the time her pursuers caught up with her, she had already loosed Moondancer’s chains and strapped a saddle onto her.
So it came to pass that when King Aegon II flew Sunfyre over Dragonmont’s smoking peak and made his descent, expecting to make a triumphant entrance into a castle safely in the hands of his own men, with the queen’s loyalists slain or captured, up to meet him rose Baela Targaryen, Prince Daemon’s daughter by the Lady Laena, and fearless as her father.
Moondancer was a young dragon, pale green, with horns and crest and wingbones of pearl. Aside from her great wings, she was no larger than a warhorse, and weighed less. She was very quick, however, and Sunfyre, though much larger, still struggled with a malformed wing, and had taken fresh wounds from Grey Ghost.
They met amidst the darkness that comes before the dawn, shadows in the sky lighting the night with their fires. Moondancer eluded Sunfyre’s flames, eluded his jaws, darted beneath his grasping claws, then came around and raked the larger dragon from above, opening a long smoking wound down his back and tearing at his injured wing. Watchers below said that Sunfyre lurched drunkenly in the air, fighting to stay aloft, whilst Moondancer turned and came back at him, spitting fire. Sunfyre answered with a furnace blast of golden flame so bright it lit the yard below like a second sun, a blast that took Moondancer full in the eyes. Like as not, the young dragon was blinded in that instant, yet still she flew on, slamming into Sunfyre in a tangle of wings and claws. As they fell, Moondancer struck at Sunfyre’s neck repeatedly, tearing out mouthfuls of flesh, whilst the elder dragon sank his claws into her underbelly. Robed in fire and smoke, blind and bleeding, Moondancer’s wings beat desperately as she tried to break away, but all her efforts did was slow their fall.
The watchers in the yard scrambled for safety as the dragons slammed into the hard stone, still fighting. On the ground, Moondancer’s quickness proved of little use against Sunfyre’s size and weight. The green dragon soon lay still. The golden dragon screamed his victory and tried to rise again, only to collapse back to the ground with hot blood pouring from his wounds.
King Aegon had leapt from the saddle when the dragons were still twenty feet from the ground, shattering both legs. Lady Baela stayed with Moondancer all the way down. Burned and battered, the girl still found the strength to undo her saddle chains and crawl away as her dragon coiled in her final death throes. When Alfred Broome drew his sword to slay her, Martson Waters wrenched the blade from his hand. Tom Tangletongue carried her to the maester.
Thus did King Aegon II win the ancestral seat of House Targaryen, but the price he paid for it was dire. Sunfyre would never fly again. He remained in the yard where he had fallen, feeding on the carcass of Moondancer, and later on sheep slaughtered for him by the garrison. And Aegon II lived the rest of his life in great pain … though to his honor, this time His Grace refused the milk of the poppy. “I shall not walk that road again,” he said.
Not long after, as the king lay in the Stone Drum’s great hall, his broken legs bound and splinted, the first of Queen Rhaenyra’s ravens arrived from Duskendale. When Aegon learned that his half sister would be returning on the Violande, he commanded Ser Alfred Broome to prepare a “suitable welcome” for her homecoming.
All of this is known to us now. None of this was known to the queen, when she stepped ashore into her brother’s trap.
Rhaenyra laughed when she beheld the ruin of Sunfyre the Golden. “Whose work is this?” she said. “We must thank him.”
“Sister,” the King called down from a balcony. Unable to walk, or even stand, he had been carried there in a chair. The hip shattered at Rook’s Rest had left Aegon bent and twisted, his once-handsome features had grown puffy from milk of the poppy, and burn scars covered half his body. Yet Rhaenyra knew him at once, and said, “Dear brother. I had hoped that you were dead.”
“After you,” Aegon answered. “You are the elder.”
“I am pleased to know that you remember that,” Rhaenyra answered. “It would seem we are your prisoners … but do not think that you will hold us long. My leal lords will find me.”
“If they search the seven hells, mayhaps,” the King made answer, as his men tore Rhaenyra from her son’s arms. Some accounts say it was Ser Alfred Broome who had hold of her arm, others name the two Toms, Tanglebeard the father and Tangletongue the son. Ser Marston Waters stood witness as well, clad in a white cloak, for King Aegon had named him to his Kingsguard for his valor.
Yet neither Waters nor any of the other knights and lords present in the yard spoke a word of protest as King Aegon II delivered his half sister to his dragon. Sunfyre, it is said, did not seem at first to take any interest in the offering, until Broome pricked the queen’s breast with his dagger. The smell of blood roused the dragon, who sniffed at Her Grace, then bathed her in a blast of flame, so suddenly that Ser Alfred’s cloak caught fire as he leapt away. Rhaenyra Targaryen had time to raise her head toward the sky and shriek out one last curse upon her half brother before Sunfyre’s jaws closed round her, tearing off her arm and shoulder.
The golden dragon devoured the queen in six bites, leaving only her left leg below the shin “for the Stranger.” The queen’s son watched in horror, unable to move. Rhaenyra Targaryen, the Realm’s Delight and Half-Year Queen, passed from this veil of tears upon the twenty-second day of tenth moon of the 130th year after Aegon’s Conquest. She was thirty-three years of age.
Ser Alfred Broome argued for killing Prince Aegon as well, but King Aegon forbade it. Only ten, the boy might yet have value as a hostage, he declared. Though his half sister was dead, she still had supporters in the field who must need be dealt with before His Grace could hope to sit the Iron Throne again. So Prince Aegon was manacled at neck, wrist, and ankle, and led down to the dungeons under Dragonstone. The late queen’s ladies-in-waiting, being of noble birth, were given cells in Sea Dragon Tower, there to await ransom. “The time for hiding is done,” King Aegon II declared. “Let the ravens fly that the realm may know the pretender is dead, and their true king is coming home to reclaim his father’s throne.” Yet even true kings may find some things more easily proclaimed than accomplished.
In the days following his half sister’s death, the king still clung to the hope that Sunfyre might recover enough strength to fly again. Instead the dragon only seemed to weaken further, and soon the wounds in his neck began to stink. Even the smoke he exhaled had a foul smell to it, and toward the end he would no longer eat. On the ninth day of the twelfth moon of 130 AC, the magnificent golden dragon that had been King Aegon’s glory died in the yard of Dragonstone where he had fallen. His Grace wept.
When his grief had passed, King Aegon II summoned his loyalists and made plans for his return to King’s Landing, to reclaim the Iron Throne and be reunited once again with his lady mother, the Queen Dowager, who had at last emerged triumphant over her great rival, if only by outliving her. “Rhaenyra was never a queen,” the king declared, insisting that henceforth, in all chronicles and court records, his half sister be referred to only as “princess,” the title of queen being reserved only for his mother Alicent and his late wife and sister Helaena, the “true queens.” And so it was decreed.
Yet Aegon’s triumph would prove to be as short-lived as it was bittersweet. Rhaenyra was dead, but her cause had not died with her, and new “black” armies were on the march even as the king returned to the Red Keep. Aegon II would sit the Iron Throne again, but he would never recover from his wounds, would know neither joy nor peace. His restoration would endure for only half a year.
The account of how o
f the Second Aegon fell and was succeeded by the Third is a tale for another time, however. The war for the throne would go on, but the rivalry that began at a court ball when a princess dressed in black and a queen in green has come to its red end, and with that concludes this portion of our history.
Footnote
The Princess and the Queen, or, the Blacks and the Greens
1 In 111 AC, a great tourney was held at King’s Landing on the fifth anniversary of the king’s marriage to Queen Alicent. At the opening feast, the queen wore a green gown, whilst the princess dressed dramatically in Targaryen red and black. Note was taken, and thereafter it became the custom to refer to “greens” and “blacks” when talking of the queen’s party and the party of the princess, respectively. In the tourney itself, the blacks had much the better of it when Ser Criston Cole, wearing Princess Rhaenyra’s favor unhorsed all of the queen’s champions, including two of her cousins and her youngest brother, Ser Gwayne Hightower.
Copyright Acknowledgments
“Some Desperado” copyright © 2013 by Joe Abercrombie
“My Heart Is Either Broken” copyright © 2013 by Megan Abbott
“Nora’s Song” copyright © 2013 by Cecelia Holland
“The Hands That Are Not There” copyright © 2013 by Melinda Snodgrass
“Bombshells” copyright © 2013 by Jim Butcher
“Raisa Stepanova” copyright © 2013 by Carrie Vaughn
“Wrestling Jesus” copyright © 2013 by Joe R. Lansdale
“Neighbors” copyright © 2013 by Megan Lindholm
“I Know How to Pick ’Em” copyright © 2013 by Lawrence Block
“Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” copyright © 2013 by Brandon Sanderson
“A Queen in Exile” copyright © 2013 by Sharon Kay Penman
“The Girl in the Mirror” copyright © 2013 by Lev Grossman
“Second Arabesque, Very Slowly” copyright © 2013 by Nancy Kress
“City Lazarus” copyright © 2013 by Diana Rowland
“Virgins” copyright © 2013 by Diana Gabaldon
“Hell Hath No Fury” copyright © 2013 by Sherrilyn Kenyon
“Pronouncing Doom” copyright © 2013 by S. M. Stirling
“Name the Beast” copyright © 2013 by Sam Sykes
“Caretakers” copyright © 2013 by Pat Cadigan
“Lies My Mother Told Me” copyright © 2013 by Caroline Spector
“The Princess and the Queen” copyright © 2013 by George R. R. Martin
Copyright
HarperVoyager
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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2013
Copyright © George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois 2013
Dangerous Women / Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
The author of each individual story asserts their moral rights, including the right be identified as the author of their work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007549412
Version: 2013-10-24
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George R. R. Martin, Dangerous Women
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