Mushroom remained behind, along with other members of the court, amongst them Lady Misery and Septon Eustace. Ser Garth the Harelip, captain of the gold cloaks at the Dragon Gate, was charged with the defense of the castle, a task for which the Harelip proved to have little appetite. Her Grace had not been gone half a day when Ser Perkin the Flea and his gutter knights appeared outside the gates, demanding that the castle yield. Though outnumbered ten to one, the queen’s garrison might still have resisted, but Ser Garth chose instead to strike Rhaenyra’s banners, open his gates, and trust to the mercy of the foe.

The Flea proved to have no mercy. Garth the Harelip was dragged before him and beheaded, along with twenty other knights still loyal to the queen, amongst them Ser Harmon of the Reeds, the Iron-Banger, who had been one of the Seven Who Rode. Nor was the mistress of whisperers, Lady Mysaria of Lys, spared on account of her sex. Taken whilst attempting to flee, the White Worm was whipped naked through the city, from the Red Keep to the Gate of the Gods. If she were still alive by the time they reached the gate, Ser Perkin promised, she would be spared and allowed to go. She made it only half that distance, dying on the cobblestones with hardly a patch of her pale white skin left upon her back.

   Septon Eustace feared for his own life. “Only the Mother’s mercy saved me,” he writes, though it seems more likely that Ser Perkin did not wish to provoke the enmity of the Faith. The Flea also freed all the prisoners found in the dungeons below the castle, amongst them Grand Maester Orwyle and the Sea Snake, Lord Corlys Velaryon. Both were on hand the next day to bear witness as Ser Perkin’s gangling squire Trystane mounted the Iron Throne. So too was the Queen Dowager, Alicent of House Hightower. Down in the black cells, Ser Perkin’s men even found King Aegon’s former master of coin, Ser Tyland Lannister, still alive…though Rhaenyra’s torturers had blinded him, pulled out his fingernails and toenails, cut off his ears, and relieved him of his manhood.

King Aegon’s master of whisperers, Larys Strong the Clubfoot, fared much better. The Lord of Harrenhal emerged intact from wherever he had been hiding. Like a man risen from the grave, he came striding through the halls of the Red Keep as if he had never left them, to be greeted warmly by Ser Perkin the Flea and take a place of honor at the side of his new “king.”

The queen’s flight brought no peace to King’s Landing. “Three kings reigned over the city, each on his own hill, yet for their unfortunate subjects there was no law, no justice, no protection,” says the True Telling. “No man’s home was safe, nor any maiden’s virtue.” This chaos endured for more than a moon’s turn.

Maesters and other scholars writing of this time oft take their cue from Munkun and speak of the Moon of the Three Kings (other scholars prefer the Moon of Madness), but this is a misnomer, as the Shepherd never claimed kingship, styling himself a simple son of the Seven. Yet it cannot be denied that he held sway over tens of thousands from the ruins of the Dragonpit.

The heads of the five dragons that his followers had slain had been set up on posts, and every night the Shepherd would appear amongst them to preach. With the dragons dead and the threat of immolation no longer imminent, the prophet turned his wroth upon the highborn and wealthy. Only the poor and humble would ever see the halls of the gods, he declared; lords and knights and rich men would be cast down in their pride and avarice to hell. “Cast off your silks and satins, and clothe your nakedness in roughspun robes,” he told his followers. “Throw away your shoes, and walk barefoot through the world, as the Father made you.” Thousands obeyed. But thousands more turned away, and each night the crowds that came to hear the prophet grew smaller.

   At the other end of the Street of the Sisters, Gaemon Palehair’s queer kingdom blossomed atop Visenya’s Hill. The court of this four-year-old bastard king was made up of whores, mummers, and thieves, whilst gangs of ruffians, sellswords, and drunkards defended his “rule.” One decree after another came down from the House of Kisses where the child king had his seat, each more outrageous than the last. Gaemon decreed that girls should henceforth be equal with boys in matter of inheritance, that the poor be given bread and beer in times of famine, that men who had lost limbs in war must afterward be fed and housed by whichever lord they had been fighting for when the loss took place. Gaemon decreed that husbands who beat their wives should themselves be beaten, irrespective of what the wives had done to warrant such chastisement. These edicts were almost certainly the work of a Dornish whore named Sylvenna Sand, reputedly the paramour of the little king’s mother Essie, if Mushroom is to be believed.

Royal decrees also issued forth from atop Aegon’s High Hill, where Ser Perkin’s catspaw Trystane sat the Iron Throne, but those were of a very different nature. The squire king began by repealing Queen Rhaenyra’s unpopular taxes and dividing the coin in the royal treasury amongst his own followers. He followed that with a general cancellation of debt, raised threescore of his gutter knights to the ranks of the nobility, and answered “King” Gaemon’s promise of free bread and beer for the starving by granting the poor the right to take rabbits, hares, and deer from the kingswood as well (though not elk nor boar). All the while, Ser Perkin the Flea was recruiting scores of surviving gold cloaks to Trystane’s banner. With their swords he took control of the Dragon Gate, the King’s Gate, and the Lion Gate, giving him four of the city’s seven gates and more than half of the towers along its walls.

   In the early days after the queen’s flight, the Shepherd was by far the most powerful of the city’s three “kings,” but as the nights passed, the number of his followers continued to dwindle. “The smallfolk of the city woke as if from a bad dream,” Septon Eustace wrote, “and like sinners waking cold and sober after a night of drunken debauchery and revel, they turned away in shame, hiding their faces from one another and hoping to forget.” Though the dragons were dead and the queen fled, such was the power of the Iron Throne that the commons still looked to the Red Keep when hungry or afraid. So as the power of the Shepherd waned on the Hill of Rhaenys, the power of King Trystane Truefyre (as he now styled himself) waxed atop Aegon’s High Hill.

Much and more was happening at Tumbleton as well, and it is there we must next turn our gaze. As word of the unrest at King’s Landing reached Prince Daeron’s host, many younger lords grew anxious to advance upon the city at once. Chief amongst them were Ser Jon Roxton, Ser Roger Corne, and Lord Unwin Peake…but Ser Hobert Hightower counseled caution, and the Two Betrayers refused to join any attack unless their own demands were met. Ulf White, it will be recalled, wished to be granted the great castle of Highgarden with all its lands and incomes, whilst Hard Hugh Hammer desired nothing less than a crown for himself.

These conflicts came to a boil when Tumbleton learned belatedly of Aemond Targaryen’s death at Harrenhal. King Aegon II had not been seen nor heard from since the fall of King’s Landing to his half-sister Rhaenyra, and there were many who feared that the queen had put him secretly to death, concealing the corpse so as not to be condemned as a kinslayer. With his brother Aemond slain as well, the greens found themselves kingless and leaderless. Prince Daeron stood next in the line of succession. Lord Peake declared that the boy should be proclaimed as Prince of Dragonstone at once; others, believing Aegon II dead, wished to crown him king.