On the seventh day of the seventh moon of the 131st year after Aegon’s Conquest, a date deemed sacred to the gods, the High Septon of Oldtown pronounced the marriage vows as Prince Aegon the Younger, eldest son of Queen Rhaenrya by her uncle Prince Daemon, wed Princess Jaehaera, the daughter of Queen Helaena by her brother King Aegon II, thereby uniting the two rival branches of House Targaryen and ending two years of treachery and carnage.

   The Dance of the Dragons was done, and the melancholy reign of King Aegon III Targaryen had begun.

      * As the gods would have it, seven days later at Storm’s End his lady wife gave birth to the son and heir that Lord Borros had so long desired. His lordship had left instructions that the babe was to be named Aegon if a boy, in honor of the king. But upon learning of her lord’s death in battle, Lady Baratheon named the child Olyver, after her own father.

The smallfolk of the Seven Kingdoms speak of King Aegon III Targaryen as Aegon the Unlucky, Aegon the Unhappy, and (most often) the Dragonbane, when they remember him at all. All these names are apt. Grand Maester Munkun, who served him for a good part of his reign, calls him the Broken King, which fits him even better. Of all the men ever to sit the Iron Throne, he remains perhaps the most enigmatic: a shadowy monarch who said little and did less, and lived a life steeped in grief and melancholy.

The fourthborn son of Rhaenyra Targaryen, and her eldest by her uncle and second husband, Prince Daemon Targaryen, Aegon came to the Iron Throne in 131 AC and reigned for twenty-six years, until his death of consumption in 157 AC. He took two wives and fathered five children (two sons and three daughters), yet seemed to find little joy in either marriage or fatherhood. In truth, he was a singularly joyless man. He did not hunt or hawk, rode only for travel, drank no wine, and was so disinterested in food that he often had to be reminded to eat. Though he permitted tourneys, he took no part in them, either as competitor or spectator. As a man grown, he dressed simply, most oft in black, and was known to wear a hair shirt under the velvets and satins required of a king.

   That was many years later, however, after Aegon III had come of age and taken the rule of the Seven Kingdoms into his own hand. In 131 AC, as his reign began, he was a boy of ten; tall for his age, it was said, with “silver hair so pale that it was almost white, and purple eyes so dark that they were almost black.” Even as a lad, Aegon smiled seldom and laughed less, says Mushroom, and though he could be graceful and courtly at need, there was a darkness within him that never went away.

The circumstances under which the boy king began his reign were far from auspicious. The riverlords who had broken Aegon II’s last army at the Battle of the Kingsroad marched to King’s Landing prepared for battle. Instead Lord Corlys Velaryon and Prince Aegon rode forth to meet them under a peace banner. “The king is dead, long live the king,” Lord Corlys said, as he yielded up the city to their mercy.

Then as now, the riverlords were a fractious, quarrelsome lot. Kermit Tully, Lord of Riverrun, was their liege lord, and nominally commander of their host…but it must be remembered that his lordship was but nineteen years of age, and “green as summer grass,” as the northmen might say. His brother Oscar, who had slain three men during the Muddy Mess and been knighted on the battlefield afterward, was still greener, and cursed with the sort of prickly pride so common in second sons.

House Tully was unique amongst the great houses of Westeros. Aegon the Conqueror had made them the Lords Paramount of the Trident, yet in many ways they continued to be overshadowed by many of their own bannermen. The Brackens, the Blackwoods, and the Vances all ruled wider domains and could field much larger armies, as could the upstart Freys of the Twins. The Mallisters of Seagard had a prouder lineage, the Mootons of Maidenpool were far wealthier, and Harrenhal, even cursed and blasted and in ruins, remained a more formidable castle than Riverrun, and ten times the size besides. The undistinguished history of House Tully had only been exacerbated by the character of its last two lords…but now the gods had brought a younger generation of Tullys to the fore, a pair of proud young men determined to prove themselves, Lord Kermit as a ruler and Ser Oscar as a warrior.

Riding beside them, from the banks of the Trident to the gates of King’s Landing, was an even younger man: Benjicot Blackwood, Lord of Raventree. Bloody Ben, as his men had taken to calling him, was only thirteen, an age at which most highborn boys are still squires, grooming their master’s horses and scouring the rust from their mail. Lordship had fallen to him early, when his father Lord Samwell Blackwood had been slain by Ser Amos Bracken at the Battle of the Burning Mill. Despite his youth, the boy lord had refused to delegate authority to older men. At the Fishfeed he had famously wept at the sight of so many dead, yet he did not flinch from battle afterward, but rather sought it out. His men had helped to drive Criston Cole from Harrenhal by hunting down his foragers, he had commanded the center at Second Tumbleton, and during the Muddy Mess he had led the flank attack from the woods that had broken Lord Baratheon’s stormlanders and won the day. Clad for court, it was said, Lord Benjicot was very much a boy, tall for his age but slight of build, with a sensitive face and a shy, self-effacing manner; clad in mail-and-plate, Bloody Ben was an altogether different man, and one who had seen more of the battlefield at thirteen than most men do in their entire lives.

   There were, to be sure, other lords and famous knights amongst the host that Corlys Velaryon confronted outside the Gate of the Gods that day in 131 AC, all of them older and some of them wiser than Bloody Ben Blackwood and the brothers Tully, yet somehow the three youths had emerged from the Muddy Mess as the undoubted leaders. Bound by battle, the three had become so inseparable that their men began referring to them collectively as “the Lads.”

Amongst their supporters were two extraordinary women: Alysanne Blackwood, called Black Aly, a sister to the late Lord Samwell Blackwood, and thus aunt to Bloody Ben, and Sabitha Frey, the Lady of the Twins, the widow of Lord Forrest Frey and mother of his heir, a “sharp-featured, sharp-tongued harridan of House Vypren, who would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women,” according to Mushroom.

The Lads knew Lord Corlys Velaryon only by reputation, but that reputation was formidable. Having arrived at King’s Landing with the expectation that they would need to besiege the city or take it by storm, they were delighted (if surprised) to have it presented to them as on a gilded platter…and to learn that Aegon II was dead (though Benjicot Blackwood and his aunt both expressed disquiet about the manner of his death, for poison was regarded as a coward’s weapon, and lacking in honor). Glad cries rang down the field as word of the king’s death spread, and one by one the Lord of the Trident and their allies came forward to bend their knees before Prince Aegon and hail him as their king.

   As the riverlords rode through the city, smallfolk cheered them from rooftops and balconies, and pretty girls scampered forward to shower their saviors with kisses (like mummers in a farce, says Mushroom, suggesting all this had been devised by Larys Strong). The gold cloaks lined the streets, lowering their spears as the Lads rode by. Within the Red Keep, the Lads found the dead king’s body laid out upon a bier beneath the Iron Throne, with his mother, Queen Alicent, weeping beside it. What remained of Aegon’s court had gathered in the hall, amongst them Lord Larys Strong the Clubfoot, Grand Maester Orwyle, Ser Perkin the Flea, Mushroom, Septon Eustace, Ser Gyles Belgrave and four other Kingsguard, and sundry lesser lords and household knights. Orwyle spoke for them, hailing the riverlords as deliverers.