The fishing village where Aegon had first landed had grown that had swollen to grotesque size: dirty, reeking, unplanned, impermanent. And the Aegonfort, which had spread halfway down Aegon’s High Hill by that time, was as ugly a castle as any in the Seven Kingdoms, a great confusion of wood and earth and brick that had long outgrown the old log palisades that were its only walls.
It was certainly no fit abode for a great king. In 35 AC, Aegon moved with all his court back to Dragonstone, and gave orders that the Aegonfort be torn down, so that a new castle might be raised in its place. This time, he decreed, he would build in stone. To oversee the design and construction of the new castle, he named the King’s Hand, Lord Alyn Stokeworth (Ser Osmund Strong had died the previous year), and Queen Visenya. (A jape went about the court that King Aegon had given Visenya charge of building the Red Keep so he would not have to endure her presence on Dragonstone.)
Aegon the Conqueror died of a stroke on Dragonstone in the thirty-seventh year after the Conquest. His grandsons Aegon and Viserys were with him at his death, in the Chamber of the Painted Table; the king was showing them the details of his conquests. Prince Maegor, in residence at Dragonstone at the time, spoke the eulogy as his father’s body was laid upon a funeral pyre in the castle yard. The king was clad in battle armor, his mailed hands folded over the hilt of Blackfyre. Since the days of old Valyria, it had ever been the custom of House Targaryen to burn their dead, rather than consigning their remains to the ground. Vhagar supplied the flames to light the fire. Blackfyre was burned with the king, but retrieved by Aenys afterward, its blade darker but elsewise unharmed. No common fire can damage Valyrian steel.
The Dragon was survived by his sister Visenya, his sons Aenys and Maegor, and five grandchildren. Prince Aenys was thirty years of age at his father’s death, Prince Maegor five-and-twenty. Aenys had been at Highgarden on his progress when his father died, but Quicksilver returned him to Dragonstone for the funeral. Afterward he donned his father’s iron-and-ruby crown, and Grand Maester Gawen proclaimed him Aenys of House Targaryen, the First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm. The lords and knights and septons who had come to Dragonstone to bid their king farewell knelt and bowed their heads. When Prince Maegor’s turn came, Aenys drew him back to his feet, kissed his cheek, and said, “Brother, you need never kneel to me again. We shall rule this realm together, you and I.” Then the king presented his father’s sword, Blackfyre, to his brother, saying, “You are more fit to bear this blade than me. Wield it in my service, and I shall be content.”
Afterward the new king sailed to King’s Landing, where he found the Iron Throne standing amidst mounds of rubble and mud. The old Aegonfort had been torn down, and pits and yet begun to rise. Nonetheless, thousands came to cheer King Aenys as he claimed his father’s seat for his own. Thereafter His Grace set out for Oldtown to receive the blessing of the High Septon, traveling by way of Riverrun, Lannisport, and Highgarden on a grand royal progress. His wife and children made the journey with him, and all along the route the smallfolk appeared by the hundreds and thousands to hail their new king and queen. At the Starry Sept, the High Septon anointed him as he had his father, and presented him with a crown of yellow gold, with the faces of the Seven inlaid in jade and pearl.
Yet even as Aenys was receiving the High Septon’s blessing, some were casting doubt on his fitness to sit the Iron Throne. Westeros required a warrior, not a dreamer, they whispered to one another, and Prince Maegor was the stronger of the Dragon’s two sons. And foremost amongst the whisperers was Maegor’s mother, the Dowager Queen Visenya Targaryen. “The truth is plain enough,” she is reported to have said. “Even Aenys sees it. Why else would he have given Blackfyre to my son? He knows that only Maegor has the strength to rule.”
The young king’s mettle would be tested sooner than anyone could have imagined. The Wars of Conquest had left scars throughout the realm. Sons now come of age dreamed of avenging long-dead fathers. Knights remembered the days when a man with a sword and a horse and a suit of armor could slash his way to riches and glory. Lords recalled a time when they did not need a king’s leave to tax their smallfolk or kill their enemies. “The chains the Dragon forged can yet be broken,” the discontented told one another. “We can win our freedoms back, but now is the time to strike, for this new king is weak.”
The first stirrings of revolt were in the riverlands, amidst the colossal ruins of Harrenhal. Aegon had granted the castle to Ser Quenton Qoherys, his old master-at-arms. When Lord Qoherys died in a fall from his horse in 9 AC, his title passed to his grandson Gargon, a fat and foolish man with an unseemly appetite for young girls who became known as Gargon the Guest. Lord Gargon soon became infamous for turning up at every wedding celebrated within his domains so that he might enjoy the lord’s right of first night. A more unwelcome wedding guest can scarce be imagined. He also made free with the wives and daughters of his own servants.
King Aenys was still on his progress, guesting with Lord Tully of Riverrun, when the father of a maid Lord Qoherys had ruined opened a postern gate at Harrenhal to an outlaw who styled himself Harren the Red, and claimed to be a grandson of Harren the Black. The outlaws pulled his lordship from his bed and dragged him to the castle godswood, where Harren sliced off his genitals and fed them to a dog. A few leal men-at-arms were killed; the rest agreed to join Harren, who declared himself Lord of Harrenhal and King of the Rivers (not being ironborn, he did not claim the islands).
When word reached Riverrun, Lord Tully urged the king to to mount Quicksilver and descend on Harrenhal as his father had. But His Grace, perhaps mindful of his mother’s death in Dorne, instead commanded Tully to gather his banners, and lingered at Riverrun as they gathered. Only when a thousand men were assembled did Aenys march…but when his men reached Harrenhal, they found it empty but for corpses. Harren the Red had put Lord Gargon’s leal servants to the sword and taken his band into the woods.
By the time Aenys returned to King’s Landing the news had grown even worse. In the Vale, Lord Ronnel Arryn’s younger brother Jonos had deposed and imprisoned his loyal sibling, and declared himself King of Mountain and Vale. In the Iron Islands, another priest-king had walked out of the sea, announcing himself to be Lodos the Twice-Drowned, the son of the Drowned God, returned at last from visiting his father. And high in the Red Mountains of Dorne, a pretender called the Vulture King appeared, and called on all true Dornishmen to avenge the evils visited on Dorne by the Targaryens. Though Princess Deria denounced him, swearing that she and all leal Dornishmen wanted only peace, thousands flocked to his banners, swarming down from the hills and up out of the sands, through goat tracks in the mountains into the Reach.
“This Vulture King is half-mad, and his followers are a rabble, undisciplined and unwashed,” Lord Harmon Dondarrion wrote to the king. “We can smell them coming fifty leagues away.” Not long after, that selfsame rabble stormed and seized his castle of Blackhaven. The Vulture King personally sliced off Dondarrion’s nose before putting Blackhaven to the torch and marching away.
King Aenys knew these rebels had to be put down, but seemed unable to decide where to begin. Grand Maester Gawen wrote that the king seemed unable to comprehend why this was happening. The smallfolk loved him, did they not? Jonos Arryn, this new Lodos, the Vulture King…had he wronged them? If they had grievances, why not bring them to him? “I would have heard them out,” he said. He spoke of sending messengers to the rebels, to learn the reasons for their actions. Fearing that King’s Landing might not be safe with Harren the Red alive and near, he sent his wife and children to Dragonstone. He commanded his Hand, Lord Alyn Stokeworth, to take a fleet and army to the Vale to put down Jonos Arryn and restore his brother Ronnel to the lordship. But when the ships were about to sail, he countermanded the order, fearing that Stokeworth’s departure would leave King’s Landing undefended. Instead he sent the Hand with but a few hundred men to hunt down Harren the Red, and decided he would summon a great council to discuss how best to put down the other rebels.
Whilst the king prevaricated, his lords took to the field. Some acted on their own authority, others in concert with the Dowager Queen. In the Vale, Lord Allard Royce of Runestone assembled twoscore loyal lords and marched against the Eyrie, easily defeating the supporters of the self-styled King of Mountain and Vale. But when they demanded the release of their rightful lord, Jonos Arryn sent his brother to them through the Moon Door. Such was the sad end of Ronnel Arryn, who had flown thrice about the Giant’s Lance on dragonback. The Eyrie was impregnable to any conventional assault, so “King” Jonos and his die-hard followers spat down defiance at the loyalists, and settled in for a siege…until Prince Maegor appeared in the sky above, astride Balerion. The Conqueror’s son had claimed a dragon at last, and none other than the Black Dread, the greatest of them all.
Rather than face his fires, the Eyrie’s garrison seized the pretender and delivered him to Lord Royce, opening the Moon Door once again and serving Jonos the kinslayer as he had served his brother. Surrender saved the pretender’s followers from burning, but not from death. After taking possession of the Eyrie, Prince Maegor executed them to a man. Even the highest born amongst them were denied the honor of dying by sword; traitors deserved only a rope, Maegor decreed, so the captured knights were hanged naked from the walls of the Eyrie, kicking as they strangled slowly. Hubert Arryn, a cousin to the dead brothers, was installed as Lord of the Vale. As he had already sired six sons by his lady wife, a Royce of Runestone, the Arryn succession was seen to be secure.
In the Iron Islands, Goren Greyjoy, Lord Reaper of Pyke, brought “King” Lodos (Second of That Name) to a similar swift end, marshaling a hundred longships to descend on Old Wyk and Great Wyk, where the pretender’s followers were most numerous, and putting thousands of them to the sword. Afterward he had the head of the priest-king pickled in brine and sent to King’s Landing. King Aenys was so pleased by the gift that he offered Greyjoy any boon he might desire. This proved unwise. Lord Goren, wishing to prove himself a true son of the Drowned God, asked the king for the right to expel all the septons and septas who had come to the Iron Islands after the Conquest to convert the ironborn to the worship of the Seven. King Aenys had no choice but to agree.
The largest and most threatening rebellion remained that of the Vulture King along the Dornish marches. Though Princess Deria continued to issue denunciations from Sunspear, there were many who suspected that she was playing a double game, for she did not take the field against the rebels and was rumored to be sending them men, money, and supplies. Whether that was true or not, hundreds of Dornish knights and several thousand seasoned spearmen had joined the Vulture King’s rabble, and the rabble itself had swelled enormously, to more than thirty thousand men. So large had his host become that the Vulture King made an ill-considered decision and divided his strength. Whilst he marched west against Nightsong and Horn Hill with half the Dornish power, the other half went east to besiege Stonehelm, seat of House Swann, under the command of Lord Walter Wyl, the son of the Widow-lover.
Both hosts met with disaster. Orys Baratheon, known now as Orys One-Hand, rode forth from Storm’s End one last time, to smash the Dornish beneath the walls of Stonehelm. When Walter Wyl was delivered into his hands, wounded but alive, Lord Orys said, “Your father took my hand. I claim yours as repayment.” So saying, he hacked off Lord Walter’s sword hand. Then he took his other hand, and both his feet as well, calling them his “usury.” Strange to say, Lord Baratheon died on the march back to Storm’s End, of the wounds he himself had taken during the battle, but his son Davos always said he died content, smiling at the rotting hands and feet that dangled in his tent like a string of onions.
The Vulture King himself fared little better. Unable to capture Nightsong, he abandoned the siege and marched west, only to have Lady Caron sally forth behind him, to join up with a strong force of marchmen led by Harmon Dondarrion, the mutilated Lord of Blackhaven. Meanwhile Lord Samwell Tarly of Horn Hill suddenly appeared athwart the Dornish line of march with several thousand knights and archers. “Savage Sam,” that lord was called, and so he proved in the bloody battle that ensued, cutting down dozens of Dornishmen with his great Valyrian steel blade, Heartsbane. The Vulture King had twice as many men as his three foes combined, but most were untrained and undisciplined, and when faced with armored knights at front and rear, their ranks shattered. Throwing down their spears and shields, the Dornish broke and ran, making for the distant mountains, but the marcher lords rode after them and cut them down, in what became known after as “the Vulture Hunt.”
As for the rebel king himself, the man who called himself the Vulture King was taken alive, and tied naked between two posts by Savage Sam Tarly. The singers like to say that he was torn to pieces by the very vultures from whom he took his style, but in truth he perished of thirst and exposure, and the birds did not descend on him until well after he was dead. (In later centuries, several other men would take the title “Vulture King,” but whether they were of the same blood as the first, no man can say).