Moved by the girl’s tears, Queen Alysanne could do no more than promise to take the matter up with her mother. When Rhaena next emerged from her chambers to take a meal, however, she rejected the notion out of hand. “You have everything and I have nothing. Now you would take my daughter too. Well, you shall not have her. You have my throne, content yourself with that.” That same night Rhaena summoned Princess Aerea to her chambers to berate her, and the sounds of mother and daughter shouting at one another rang through the Stone Drum. The princess refused to speak to Queen Alysanne after that. Stymied at every turn, Her Grace finally returned to King’s Landing, to the arms of King Jaehaerys and the merry laughter of her own daughter, Princess Daenerys.

As the Year of the Stranger neared its end, work on the Dragonpit was all but complete. The great dome in place at last, the massive bronze gates hung, the cavernous edifice dominated the city from the crown of Rhaenys’s Hill, second only to the Red Keep upon Aegon’s High Hill. To mark its completion and celebrate the arrival of the new Hand, Lord Redwyne proposed to the king that they stage a great tourney, the largest and grandest the realm had seen since the Golden Wedding. “Let us put our sorrows behind us and begin the new year with pagaentry and celebration,” Redwyne argued. The autumn harvests had been good, Lord Rego’s taxes were bringing in a steady stream of coin, trade was on the increase; paying for the tourney would not be a concern, and the event would bring thousands of visitors, and their purses, to King’s Landing. The rest of the council was all in favor of the proposal, and King Jaehaerys allowed that a tourney might indeed give the smallfolk something to cheer, “and help us forget our woes.”

   All such preparations were thrown into disarray by the sudden and unexpected arrival of Rhaena Targaryen from Dragonstone. “It may well be that dragons somehow sense, and echo, the moods of their riders,” Septon Barth wrote, “for Dreamfyre came down out of the clouds like a raging storm that day, and Vermithor and Silverwing rose up and roared at her coming, suchwise that all of us who saw and heard were fearful that the dragons were about to fly at one another with flame and claw, and tear each other apart as Balerion once did to Quicksilver by the Gods Eye.”

The dragons did not, in the end, fight, though there was much hissing and snapping as Rhaena flung herself off Dreamfyre and stormed into Maegor’s Holdfast, shouting for her brother and her sister. The source of her fury was soon known. Princess Aerea was gone. She had fled Dragonstone as dawn broke, stealing into the yards and claiming a dragon for her own. And not just any dragon. “Balerion!” Rhaena exclaimed. “She took Balerion, the mad child. No hatchling for her, no, not her, she had to have the Black Dread. Maegor’s dragon, the beast that slew her father. Why him, if not to pain me? What did I give birth to? What kind of beast? I ask you, what did I give birth to?”

“A little girl,” Queen Alysanne said, “she is just an angry little girl.” But Septon Barth and Grand Maester Benifer tell us that Rhaena did not seem to hear her. She was desperate to know where her “mad child” might have fled. Her first thought had been King’s Landing, Aerea had been so eager to return to court…but if she was not here, where?

“We will learn that soon enough, I suspect,” King Jaehaerys said, as calm as ever. “Balerion is too big to hide or pass unnoticed. And he has a fearsome appetite.” He turned to Grand Maester Benifer then, and commanded that ravens be sent forth to every castle in the Seven Kingdoms. “If any man in Westeros should so much as glimpse Balerion or my niece, I want to know at once.”

The ravens flew, but there was no word of Princess Aerea that day, or the day after, or the day after that. Rhaena remained at the Red Keep all the while, sometimes raging, sometimes shaking, drinking sweetwine to sleep. Princess Daenerys was so frightened by her aunt that she cried whenever she came into her presence. After seven days Rhaena declared that she could no longer sit here idle. “I need to find her. If I cannot find her, at least I can look.” So saying, she mounted Dreamfyre and was gone.

   Neither mother nor daughter was seen or heard from again during what little remained of that cruel year.

      * Rogar Baratheon never wed again.

The accomplishments of King Jaehaerys I Targaryen are almost too many to enumerate. Chief amongst them, in the view of most students of history, are the long periods of peace and prosperity that marked his time upon the Iron Throne. It cannot be said Jaehaerys avoided conflict entirely, for that would be beyond the power of any earthly king, but such wars as he fought were short, victorious, and contested largely at sea or on distant soil. “It is a poor king who wages battle against his own lords and leaves his own kingdom burned, bloody, and strewn with corpses,” Septon Barth would write. “His Grace was a wiser man than that.”

Archmaesters can and do quibble about the numbers, but most agree that the population of Westeros north of Dorne doubled during the Conciliator’s reign, whilst the population of King’s Landing increased fourfold. Lannisport, Gulltown, Duskendale, and White Harbor grew as well, though not to the same extent.

With fewer men marching off to war, more remained to work the land. Grain prices fell steadily throughout his reign, as more acres came under the plough. Fish became notably cheaper, even for common men, as the fishing villages along the coasts grew more prosperous and more boats put to sea. New orchards were planted everywhere from the Reach to the Neck. Lamb and mutton became more plentiful and wool finer as shepherds increased the size of their flocks. Trade increased tenfold, despite the vicissitudes of wind, weather, and wars and the disruptions they caused from time to time. The crafts flourished as well; farriers and blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters, millers, tanners, weavers, felters, dyers, brewers, vintners, goldsmiths and silversmiths, bakers, butchers, and cheesemakers all enjoyed a prosperity hitherto unknown west of the narrow sea.

   There were, to be sure, good years and bad years, but it was rightly said that under Jaehaerys and his queen the good years were twice as good as the bad years were bad. Storms there were, and ill winds, and bitter winters, but when men look back today upon the Conciliator’s reign it is easy to mistake it for one long green and gentle summer.

Little of this would have been apparent to Jaehaerys himself as the bells of King’s Landing rang to usher in the 55th year since Aegon’s Conquest. The wounds left by the cruel year that had gone before, the Year of the Stranger, were as yet too raw…and king, queen, and council alike feared what might lie ahead, with the Princess Aerea and Balerion still vanished from human ken, and Queen Rhaena gone in search of them.

Having taken leave of her brother’s court, Rhaena Targaryen flew to Oldtown first, in the hopes that her wayward daughter might have sought out her twin sister. Lord Donnel and the High Septon each received her courteously, but neither had any help to offer. The queen was able to visit for a time with her daughter Rhaella, so like and yet so unlike her twin, and it can be hoped that she found some balm for her pain there. When Rhaena expressed regret that she had not been a better mother, the novice Rhaella embraced her and said, “I have had the best mother any child could wish for, the Mother Above, and you are to thank for her.”