King Aegon II would soon stand naked before his enemies, all of the king’s men knew. Bloody Ben Blackwood, Kermit Tully, Sabitha Frey, and their brothers-in-victory were preparing to resume their advance upon the city, and only a few days behind them came Lord Cregan Stark and his northmen. The Braavosi fleet carrying the Arryn host had departed Gulltown and was sailing toward the Gullet, where only young Alyn Velaryon stood in its way…and the loyalty of Driftmark could not be relied upon.

“Your Grace,” the Sea Snake said, when the rump of the once proud green council had assembled, “you must surrender. The city cannot endure another sack. Save your people and save yourself. If you abdicate in favor of Prince Aegon, he will allow you to take the black and live out your life with honor on the Wall.”

“Will he?” King Aegon said. Munkun tells us he sounded hopeful.

His mother entertained no such hope. “You fed his mother to your dragon,” she reminded her son. “The boy saw it all.”

The king turned to her desperately. “What would you have me do?”

“You have hostages,” the Queen Dowager replied. “Cut off one of the boy’s ears and send it to Lord Tully. Warn them he will lose another part for every mile they advance.”

“Yes,” Aegon II said. “Good. It shall be done.” He summoned Ser Alfred Broome, who had served him so well on Dragonstone. “Go and see to it, ser.” As the knight took his leave, the king turned to Corlys Velaryon. “Tell your bastard to fight bravely, my lord. If he fails me, if any of these Braavosi pass the Gullet, your precious Lady Baela shall lose some parts as well.”

The Sea Snake did not plead, or curse, or threaten. He nodded stiffly, rose, and took his leave. Mushroom says he exchanged a look with the Clubfoot as he went, but Mushroom was not present, and it seems most unlikely that a man as seasoned as Corlys Velaryon would act so clumsily at such a moment.

   For Aegon’s day was done, though he had yet to grasp it. The turncloaks in his midst had put their plans in motion the moment they learned of Lord Baratheon’s defeat upon the kingsroad.

As Ser Alfred Broome crossed the drawbridge to Maegor’s Holdfast, where Prince Aegon was being held, he found Ser Perkin the Flea and six of his gutter knights barring his way. “Move aside, in the king’s name,” Broome demanded.

“We have a new king now,” answered Ser Perkin. He put a hand upon Ser Alfred’s shoulder…then shoved him hard, sending him staggering off the drawbridge onto the iron spikes below, where he writhed and twisted for two days as he died.

In that same hour, Lady Baela Targaryen was being spirited away to safety by agents of Lord Larys the Clubfoot. Tom Tangletongue was surprised in the castle yards as he was leaving the stables, and beheaded forthwith. “He died as he had lived, stammering,” says Mushroom. His father Tom Tanglebeard was absent from the castle, but they found him in a tavern on Eel Alley. When he protested that he was “just a simple fisherman, come to have an ale,” his captors drowned him in a cask of same.

All this was done so neatly, swiftly, and quietly that the people of King’s Landing had little or no inkling of what was happening behind the walls of the Red Keep. Even within the castle itself, no alarum went up. Those who had been marked down for death were killed, whilst the rest of the court went about their business, undisturbed and unawares. Septon Eustace tells us that twenty-four men were killed, whilst Munkun’s True Telling says twenty-one. Mushroom claims to have witnessed the murder of the king’s food taster, a grossly fat man named Ummet, and asserts that he was forced to hide in a barrel of flour to escape the same fate, emerging the next night “floured from head to heels, so white the first serving girl to see me took me for Mushroom’s ghost.” (This smells of story. Why would the plotters wish to kill a fool?)

Queen Alicent was arrested on the serpentine steps as she made her way back to her chambers. Her captors wore the seahorse of House Velaryon upon their doublets, and though they slew the two men guarding her, they did no harm to the Dowager Queen herself, nor to her ladies. The Queen in Chains was chained again and taken to the dungeons, there to await the pleasure of the new king. By then the last of her sons was already dead.

   After the council meeting, King Aegon II was carried down to the yard by two strong squires. There he found his litter waiting, as was customary; his withered leg made steps too difficult for him, even with a crutch. Ser Gyles Belgrave, the Kingsguard knight commanding his escort, testified afterward that His Grace seemed unusually fatigued as he was helped into the litter, his face “grey and ashen, sagging,” yet instead of asking to be carried back to his chambers, he told Ser Gyles to take him to the castle sept. “Perhaps he sensed his end was near,” Septon Eustace wrote, “and wished to pray for forgiveness for his sins.”

A cold wind was blowing. As the litter set off, the king closed the curtains against the chill. Inside, as always, was a flagon of sweet Arbor red, Aegon’s favorite wine. The king availed himself of a small cup as the litter crossed the yard.

Ser Gyles and the litter bearers had no notion aught was amiss until they reached the sept, and the curtains did not open. “We are here, Your Grace,” the knight said. No answer came, but only silence. When a second query and a third produced the same, Ser Gyles Belgrave threw back the curtains, and found the king dead upon his cushions. “There was blood upon his lips,” the knight said. “Elsewise he might have been sleeping.”

Maesters and common men alike still debate which poison was used, and who might have put it in the king’s wine. (Some argue that only Ser Gyles himself could have done so, but it would be unthinkable for a knight of the Kingsguard to take the life of the king he had sworn to protect. Ummet, the king’s food taster whose murder Mushroom claims to have seen, seems a more likely candidate.) Yet whilst the hand that poisoned the Arbor red will never be known, we can have no doubt that it was done at the behest of Larys Strong.

Thus perished Aegon of House Targaryen, the Second of His Name, firstborn son of King Viserys I Targaryen and Queen Alicent of House Hightower, whose reign proved as brief as it was bitter. He had lived four-and-twenty years and reigned for two.

   When the vanguard of Lord Tully’s host appeared before the walls of King’s Landing two days later, Corlys Velaryon rode out to greet them with Prince Aegon somber at his side. “The king is dead,” the Sea Snake announced gravely, “long live the king.”

And across Blackwater Bay, in the Gullet, Lord Leowyn Corbray stood at the prow of a Braavosi cog and watched a line of Velaryon warships haul down the golden dragon of the second Aegon and raise in its place the red dragon of the first, the banner that all the Targaryen kings had flown until the Dance began.

The war was over (though the peace that followed would soon prove to be far from peaceful).