On the thirteenth day of the fourth moon, in the year 56 after Aegon’s Conquest, a black dragon the size of a fortress crossed the sky above King’s Landing.
Dragons were no rare sight over the capital.
Locals smirked when strangers stopped in the street and pointed; country folk always did.
This time no one smirked.
Men and women halted where they stood.
The shape above them was Balerion, the Black Dread, gone more than a year and given up for lost.
A scream tore along the cobbles.
Three walkers going together jerked, smoked, and went down rolling.
Neighbors tore off cloaks and beat at them.
Someone flung sand.
Nothing helped.
The crowd thickened.
A man who had seen war said it plain.
“Dragonblood.
Balerion’s blood.”
“Get back!”
“The Seven save us.”
What fell from the sky landed like poured iron.
The screaming thinned.
Cloth, hair, and flesh sloughed off in wet sheets.
The Seven did not stoop to smallfolk.
The street was left with three blackened corpses and the stink of cooked meat.
Two days earlier, Rhaegar had dropped into the world.
One moment he had been a grown man.
The next, some force he could not name wrapped him, crushed him down to an infant’s size, and flung him out of high cloud like a burning star.
The great black dragon that rose to meet the fall took the blow across its chest.
The white-haired girl who waded into the crater afterward and lifted the child took what was left.
They bound him in a black cloak and lashed the bundle beside the saddle.
On his back, he had the sky and the girl.
At first he took her for a woman grown.
Only after he had punched through the dragon and hit the earth, only after she ran into the mud under Balerion’s eye and gathered him up, speaking a tongue he did not know, did he see her clear: a girl of fourteen or fifteen.
Fate had sent the dragon and the girl to catch him.
Fate did not stay with her.
The force that came with him had opened Balerion’s armor.
When she held the child against her ribs, a last smear of it sank into her.
Two days and two nights they flew without rest.
The pretty, healthy girl wasted to bone.
By the end she could barely keep her grip on the reins.
The wind on Rhaegar’s face eased.
Balerion changed the beat of his wings and started down.
A red castle rose ahead.
Voices shouted from the walls and the yard.
The Black Dread settled on the stones of the Red Keep.
Princess Aerea was already slumped over the saddle.
Balerion’s roar hit the keep like a hammer.
Dust shook from beams.
Gravel jumped.
Glass shivered in its leads.
Alarm bells answered from every quarter of the city.
The City Watch spilled into the streets with clubs.
More men pushed toward the Red Keep to hold the crowd.
By then all King’s Landing knew it.
Balerion and Princess Aerea Targaryen had come home.
Dragonkeepers in grey hemp came at a run, hooked poles ready for the hanging saddle-lines, the same work they had done a hundred times.
Balerion swung his bulk, lashed his tail, and gave them a sound that stopped their feet.
No one was to come near him.
Age had only hardened his scales.
A steel scorpion bolt meant for gates would not have found a seam.
Yet on the left of his chest a wound ran some ten feet, half closed, chewed at the edges, deep enough to show bone.
The muscle around it was simply gone.
Fresh blood welled, struck the yard, and hissed.
Green smoke lifted off it, thick with sulfur.
The keepers froze.
King Jaehaerys leaned from a window, saw the wound, and went white.
He did not wait for the robe a squire held out.
He snatched the crown, crushed it in his fist, and ran for the yard.
A dragon older than a century and a half, built like a keep, armored against the world, armed with fire that ate metal and stone: his absence had been a wound the house could not afford.
An angry wounded Balerion made numbers meaningless.
Jaehaerys shouted back the Kingsguard who moved to screen him and walked alone to that vast head.
He pushed the hair out of his face and began an old Valyrian song, low and steady.
The rage in the dragon ebbed by degrees.
They waited in the yard a long while.
Aerea stirred at last, clutched the swaddled child, and came down the netting hand over hand.
Two Kingsguard in white cloaks and silver plate caught her.
She shook so hard she could not stand.
They held her off the stones.
Her silver hair hung dry and dull.
Her face had fallen in on itself.
Blood-tears had tracked the hollows of her cheeks.
The clothes she wore were a single sodden mass, stuck to her with pus.
There was no flesh left on her hands.
One white cloak lifted her as if she weighed nothing.
Then the worse thing.
The same knight turned toward the king with horror on him and opened his gauntlet.
In the palm lay a slab of Aerea’s arm, skin and meat together, come away in one piece.
The grand maester had no name for what was eating her.
That night whatever lived in the princess burned her out from the inside.
By morning the bed held a black, smoking cage of bone.
At the gates of the Red Keep the families of the dead found their voice.
“The black-haired brat has a foreign face.
He’s a curse.
He killed his mother the day he came, and he killed a hundred innocents in the streets.
Burn him.”
The king sent men to look.
The loudest throats belonged to leftover blades of the Warrior’s Sons.
That same night a dozen corpses went down the Blackwater and out to the crabs.
In the council some argued blood.
The child had Targaryen blood, they said; wait for the girl’s mother; a grandmother had the right.
Others said the city had burned from dragonblood, not from a baby, and Aerea had sickened while the infant had not.
They would not murder a child who had done nothing.
No one could swear the princess’s sickness would not walk.
Lords talked over one another.
Some meant to force a woman’s hand with the noise in the street.
Some meant to be seen as just.
Princess Rhaena Targaryen reached King’s Landing two days later.
She gave her daughter to the fire and scattered the ashes on the wind.
She fought the king after.
The father was unknown.
Rhaena took the boy herself and named him.
Rhaegar Therys.
A High Valyrian name.
A name Westeros had never heard.
It settled on a royal bastard the realm was not allowed to pretend did not exist.