It might be so. Yet Queen Rhaenyra did not act at once, but rather sent for Mysaria, the harlot and dancing girl who was her mistress of whisperers in all but name. With her skin as pale as milk, Lady Misery appeared before the council in a hooded robe of black velvet lined with blood-red silk, and stood with head bowed humbly as Her Grace asked whether she thought Ser Addam and Nettles might be planning to betray them. Then the White Worm raised her eyes and said in a soft voice, “The girl has already betrayed you, my queen. Even now she shares your husband’s bed, and soon enough she will have his bastard in her belly.”

Then Queen Rhaenyra grew most wroth, Septon Eustace writes. In a voice as cold as ice, she commanded Ser Luthor Largent to take twenty gold cloaks to the Dragonpit and arrest Ser Addam Velaryon. “Question him sharply, and we will learn if he is true or false, beyond a doubt.” As to the girl Nettles, “She is a common thing, with the stink of sorcery upon her,” the queen declared. “My prince would ne’er lay with such a low creature. You need only look at her to know she has no drop of dragon’s blood in her. It was with spells that she bound a dragon to her, and she has done the same with my lord husband.” So long as he was in the girl’s thrall, Prince Daemon could not be relied upon, Her Grace went on. Therefore, let a command be sent at once to Maidenpool, but only for the eyes of Lord Mooton. “Let him take her at table or abed and strike her head off. Only then shall my prince be freed.”

   And thus did betrayal beget more betrayal, to the queen’s undoing. As Ser Luthor Largent and his gold cloaks rode up Rhaenys’s Hill with the queen’s warrant, the doors of the Dragonpit were thrown open above them, and Seasmoke spread his pale grey wings and took flight, smoke rising from his nostrils. Ser Addam Velaryon had been forewarned in time to make his escape. Balked and angry, Ser Luthor returned at once to the Red Keep, where he burst into the Tower of the Hand and laid rough hands on the aged Lord Corlys, accusing him of treachery. Nor did the old man deny it. Bound and beaten, but still silent, he was taken down into the dungeons and thrown into a black cell to await trial and execution.

The queen’s suspicion fell upon Grand Maester Gerardys as well, for like the Sea Snake he had defended the dragonseeds. Gerardys denied having any part in Lord Corlys’s betrayal. Mindful of his long leal service to her, Rhaenyra spared the Grand Maester the dungeons, but chose instead to dismiss him from her council and send him back to Dragonstone at once. “I do not think you would lie to my face,” she told Gerardys, “but I cannot have men around me that I do not trust implicitly, and when I look at you now all I can recall is how you prated at me about the Nettles girl.”

All the while tales of the slaughter at Tumbleton were spreading through the city…and with them, terror. King’s Landing would be next, men told one another. Dragon would fight dragon, and this time the city would surely burn. Fearful of the coming foe, hundreds tried to flee, only to be turned back at the gates by the gold cloaks. Trapped within the city walls, some sought shelter in deep cellars against the firestorm they feared was coming, whilst others turned to prayer, to drink, and the pleasures to be found between a woman’s thighs. By nightfall, the city’s taverns, brothels, and septs were full to bursting with men and women seeking solace or escape, and trading tales of horror.

   ’Twas in this dark hour that there rose up in Cobbler’s Square a certain itinerant brother, a barefoot scarecrow of a man in a hair shirt and roughspun breeches, filthy and unwashed and smelling of the sty, with a begging bowl hung round his neck on a leather thong. A thief he had been, for where his right hand should have been was only a stump covered by ragged leather. Grand Maester Munkun suggests he might have been a Poor Fellow; though that order had long been outlawed, wandering Stars still haunted the byways of the Seven Kingdoms. Where he came from we cannot know. Even his name is lost to history. Those who heard him preach, like those who would later record his infamy, knew him only as the Shepherd. Mushroom names him “the Dead Shepherd,” for he claims the man was as pale and foul as a corpse fresh-risen from its grave.

Whoever or whatever he might have been, this one-handed Shepherd rose up like some malign spirit, calling down doom and destruction on Queen Rhaenyra to all who came to hear. As tireless as he was fearless, he preached all night and well into the following day, his angry voice ringing across Cobbler’s Square.

   Dragons were unnatural creatures, the Shepherd declared, demons summoned from the pits of the seven hells by the fell sorceries of Valyria, “that vile cesspit where brother lay with sister and mother with son, where men rode demons into battle whilst their women spread their legs for dogs.” The Targaryens had escaped the Doom, fleeing across the seas to Dragonstone, but “the gods are not mocked,” and now a second doom was at hand. “The false king and the whore queen shall be cast down with all their works, and their demon beasts shall perish from the earth,” the Shepherd thundered. All those who stood with them would die as well. Only by cleansing King’s Landing of dragons and their masters could Westeros hope to avoid the fate of Valyria.

Each hour his crowds grew. A dozen listeners became a score and then a hundred, and by break of dawn thousands were crowding into the square, shoving and pushing as they strained to hear. Many clutched torches, and by nightfall the Shepherd stood amidst a ring of fire. Those who tried to shout him down were savaged by the crowd. Even the gold cloaks were driven off when forty of them attempted to clear the square at spearpoint.

A different sort of chaos reigned in Tumbleton, sixty leagues to the southwest. Whilst King’s Landing quailed in terror, the foes they feared had yet to advance a foot toward the city, for King Aegon’s loyalists found themselves leaderless, beset by division, conflict, and doubt. Ormund Hightower lay dead, along with his cousin Ser Bryndon, the foremost knight of Oldtown. His sons remained back at the Hightower a thousand leagues away, and were green boys besides. And whilst Lord Ormund had dubbed Daeron Targaryen “Daeron the Daring” and praised his courage in battle, the prince was still a boy. The youngest of Queen Alicent’s sons, he had grown up in the shadow of his elder brothers, and was more used to following commands than giving them. The most senior Hightower remaining with the host was Ser Hobert, another of Lord Ormund’s cousins, hitherto entrusted only with the baggage train. A man “as stout as he was slow,” Hobert Hightower had lived sixty years without distinguishing himself, yet now he presumed to take command of the host by right of his kinship to Queen Alicent.

   Lord Unwin Peake, Ser Jon Roxton the Bold, and Lord Owain Bourney stepped forward as well. Lord Peake could boast descent from a long line of famous warriors, and had a hundred knights and nine hundred men-at-arms beneath his banners. Jon Roxton was as feared for his black temper as for his black blade, the Valyrian steel sword called Orphan-Maker. Lord Owain the Betrayer insisted that his cunning had won them Tumbleton, that only he could take King’s Landing. None of the claimants was powerful and respected enough to curb the bloodlust and avarice of the common soldiers. Whilst they squabbled over precedence and plunder, their own men joined freely in the orgy of looting, rape, and destruction.