When word reached the Red Keep, Jaehaerys Targaryen himself rode forth to claim the body, surrounded by his Kingsguard. So wroth was His Grace at what he saw that Ser Joffrey Doggett would say afterward, “When I looked upon his face, for a moment it was as if I were looking at his uncle.” The street was full of the curious, come out to see their king or gaze upon the bloody corpse of the Pentoshi moneychanger. Jaehaerys wheeled his horse about and shouted at them. “I would have the name of the men who did this. Speak now, and you will be well rewarded. Hold your tongues, and you will lose them.” Many of the watchers slunk away, but one barefoot girl came forward, squeaking out a name.

   The king thanked her, and commanded her to show his knights where this man might be found. She led the Kingsguard to a wine sink where the villain was discovered with a whore in his lap and three of Lord Rego’s rings on his fingers. Under torture, he soon gave up the names of the other attackers, and they were taken one and all. One of their number claimed to have been a Poor Fellow, and cried out that he wished to take the black. “No,” Jaehaerys told him. “The Night’s Watch are men of honor, and you are lower than rats.” Such men as these were unworthy of a clean death by sword or axe, he ruled. Instead they were hung from the walls of the Red Keep, disemboweled, and left to twist until they died, their entrails swinging loose down to their knees.

The girl who had led the king to the killers had a kinder fate. Taken in hand by Queen Alysanne, she was plunged into a tub of hot water for a scrubbing. Her clothes were burned, her head was shaved, and she was fed hot bread and bacon. “There is a place for you in the castle, if you want it,” Alysanne told her when her belly was full. “In the kitchens or the stables, as you wish. Do you have a father?” The girl gave a shy nod and admitted that she did. “He was one o’ them bellies you cut open. The poxy one, wi’ the stye.” Then she told Her Grace that she wanted to work in the kitchens. “That’s where they keeps the bread.”

The old year ended and a new year began, but there were few celebrations anywhere in Westeros to mark the coming of the 60th year since Aegon’s Conquest. A year before great bonfires had been lit in public squares and men and women had danced around them, drinking and laughing, whilst bells rang in the new year. One year later the fires were consuming corpses, and the bells were tolling out the dead. The streets of King’s Landing were empty, especially by night, the alleyways were deep in snow, and icicles hung down from the rooftops, long as spears.

   Atop Aegon’s High Hill, King Jaehaerys ordered the gates of the Red Keep closed and barred, and doubled the watch on the castle walls. He and his queen and their children attended sunset services at the castle sept, repaired to Maegor’s Holdfast for a modest meal, and then retired to bed.

It was the hour of the owl when Queen Alysanne was awoken by her daughter shaking her gently by the arm. “Mother,” Princess Daenerys said, “I’m cold.”

There is no need to dwell on all that followed. Daenerys Targaryen was the darling of the realm, and all that could be done for any man was done for her. There were prayers and poultices, hot soups and scalding baths, blankets and furs and hot stones, nettle tea. The princess was six, and years past being weaned, but a wet nurse was summoned, for there were some who believed that mother’s milk could cure the Shivers. Maesters came and went, septons and septas prayed, the king commanded that a hundred new ratcatchers be hired at once, and offered a silver stag for every dead rat, grey or black. Daenerys wanted her kitten, and her kitten was brought to her, though as her shivering grew more violent it squirmed from her grasp and scratched her hand. Near dawn, Jaehaerys bolted to his feet shouting that a dragon was needed, that his daughter must have a dragon, and ravens took wing for Dragonstone, instructing the Dragonkeepers there to bring a hatchling to the Red Keep at once.

None of it mattered. A day and a half after she had woken her mother from sleep complaining of feeling cold, the little princess was dead. The queen collapsed in the king’s arms, shaking so violently that some feared she had the Shivers too. Jaehaerys had her taken back to her own chambers and given milk of the poppy to help her sleep. Though near exhaustion, he went next to the yard and loosed Vermithor, then flew to Dragonstone to tell them there was no need for the hatchling after all. On his return to King’s Landing, he drank a cup of dreamwine and sent for Septon Barth. “How could this happen?” he demanded. “What sin did she commit? Why would the gods take her? How could this happen?” But even Barth, that wise man, had no answers for him.

The king and queen were not the only parents to lose a child to the Shivers; thousands of others, highborn and low, knew the same pain that winter. For Jaehaerys and Alysanne, however, the death of their beloved daughter must have seemed especially cruel, for it struck at the very heart of the Doctrine of Exceptionalism. Princess Daenerys had been Targaryen on both sides, with the blood of Old Valyria running pure through her veins, and those of Valyrian descent were not like other men. Targaryens had purple eyes and hair of gold and silver, they ruled the sky on dragons, the doctrines of the Faith and the prohibitions against incest did not apply to them…and they did not get sick.

   Since Aenar the Exile first staked his claim to Dragonstone, that had been known. Targaryens did not die of pox or the bloody flux, they were not afflicted with redspots or brownleg or the shaking sickness, they would not succumb to wormbone or clotted lung or sourgut or any of the myriad pestilences and contagions that the gods, for reasons of their own, see fit to loose on mortal men and women. There was fire in the blood of the dragon, it was reasoned, a purifying fire that burned out all such plagues. It was unthinkable that a pureborn princess should die shivering, as if she were some common child.

And yet she had.

Even as they mourned for her and the sweet soul she had been, Jaehaerys and Alysanne must also have been confronting that awful realization. Mayhaps the Targaryens were not so close to gods as they had believed. Mayhaps, in the end, they too were only men.

When the Shivers finally ran its course, King Jaehaerys went back to his labors with a sadder heart. His first task was a grim one: replacing all the friends and councillors he had lost. Lord Manfryd Redwyne’s eldest son, Ser Robert, was named to command the City Watch. Ser Gyles Morrigen brought forth two good knights to join the Kingsguard, and His Grace duly presented Ser Ryam Redwyne and Ser Robin Shaw with white cloaks. The able Albin Massey, his bent-backed justiciar, was not so easily replaced. To fill his seat, the king reached out to the Vale of Arryn and summoned Rodrik Arryn, the erudite young Lord of the Eyrie, who he and the queen first met as a boy of ten.

The Citadel had already sent him Benifer’s successor, the sharp-tongued Grand Maester Elysar. Twenty years younger than the man whose chain he donned, Elysar had never had a thought he didn’t feel the need to share. Some claimed that the Conclave had sent him to King’s Landing to be rid of him.

   Jaehaerys hesitated longest when it came to selecting his new lord treasurer and master of coin. Rego Draz, however despised, had been a man of great ability. “I am tempted to say you do not find such men lying about in the streets, but if truth be told, we are more like to find one there than sitting in some castle,” the king told his council. The Lord of Air had never married, but he did have three bastard sons who had learned his business at his knee. Much as the king was tempted to reach out to one of them, he knew the realm would never accept another Pentoshi. “It must needs be a lord,” he concluded gloomily. Familiar names were bandied once again: Lannister, Velaryon, Hightower, houses built on gold as much as steel. “They are all too proud,” Jaehaerys said.