None of his tricks availed him against a foe who could hunt him from above, however. Legend claimed the Vulture King had an impregnable mountain fastness, hidden in the clouds. Jaehaerys found no secret lair, only a dozen rude camps scattered here and there. One by one, Vermithor flamed them all, leaving the Vulture only ashes to return to. Lord Rogar’s column, winding their way into the heights, were soon forced to abandon their horses and proceed on foot along goat tracks, up steep slopes, and through caves, whilst hidden foes rolled stones down about their heads. Yet still they came on, undaunted. As the stormlanders proceeded from the east, Simon Dondarrion, Lord of Blackhaven, led a small host of marcher knights into the mountains from the west, to seal off escape from that side. Whilst the hunters crept toward one another, Jaehaerys watched them from the sky, moving them about as once he had moved toy armies in the Chamber of the Painted Table.

   In the end, they found their foes. Borys Baratheon did not know the mountain’s hidden ways as the Dornish did, so he was the first to be cornered. Lord Rogar’s men made short work of his own, but as the brothers came face-to-face, King Jaehaerys descended from the sky. “I would not have you named a kinslayer, my lord,” His Grace told his former Hand. “The traitor is mine.”

Ser Borys laughed to hear it. “Rather name me a kingslayer than him a kinslayer!” he shouted, as he rushed the king. But Jaehaerys had Blackfyre in hand, and he had not forgotten the lessons he had learned in the yard on Dragonstone. Borys Baratheon died at the king’s feet, from a cut to his neck that near took his head off.

The Vulture King’s turn came the new full moon. Brought to bay in a burned lair where he had hoped to find refuge, he resisted to the end, showering the king’s men with spears and arrows. “This one is mine,” Rogar Baratheon told His Grace when the mountain king was led before them in fetters. At his command, the outlaw’s chains were struck off and he was given a spear and shield. Lord Rogar faced him with his axe. “If he kills me, let him go free.”

   The Vulture proved sadly unequal to that task. Wasted and weak and wracked with pain as he was, Rogar Baratheon turned the Dornishman’s attacks aside contemptuously, then clove him from shoulder to navel.

When it was done, Lord Rogar seemed weary. “It seems I will not die with axe in hand after all,” he told the king sadly. Nor did he. Rogar Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End and one-time Hand of the King and Lord Protector of the Realm, died at Storm’s End half a year later, in the presence of his maester, his septon, his brother Ser Garon, and his son and heir, Boremund.

Lord Rogar’s War had lasted less than half a year, begun and won entirely in 61 AC. With the Vulture King eliminated, raiding fell off sharply along the Dornish Marches for a time. As accounts of the campaign spread through the Seven Kingdoms, even the most martial of lords gained a new respect for their young king. Any lingering doubts had been dispelled; Jaehaerys Targaryen was not his father, Aenys. For the king himself, the war was healing. “Against the Shivers I was helpless,” he confessed to Septon Barth. “Against the Vulture, I was a king again.”

In 62 AC, the lords of the Seven Kingdoms rejoiced when King Jaehaerys conferred upon his eldest the title Prince of Dragonstone, making him the acknowledged heir to the Iron Throne.

Prince Aemon was seven years of age, a boy as tall and handsome as he was modest. He still trained every morning in the yard with Prince Baelon; the two brothers were fast friends, and evenly matched. Aemon was taller and stronger, Baelon quicker and fiercer. Their contests were so spirited that they oft drew crowds of onlookers. Serving men and washerwomen, household knights and squires, maesters and septons and stableboys, they would gather in the yard to cheer on one prince or the other. One of those who came to watch was Jocelyn Baratheon, the late Queen Alyssa’s dark-haired daughter, who grew taller and more beautiful with every passing day. At the feast that followed Aemon’s investiture as Prince of Dragonstone, the queen sat Lady Jocelyn next to him, and the two young people were observed talking and laughing together through the evening, to the exclusion of all others.

   That same year, the gods blessed Jaehaerys and Alysanne with yet another child, a daughter they named Maegelle. A gentle, selfless, and sweet-natured girl, and exceedingly bright, she soon attached herself to her sister Alyssa in much the same way that Prince Baelon had attached himself to Prince Aemon, though not entirely as happily. Now it was Alyssa’s turn to bristle at having “the baby” clinging to her skirts. She evaded her as best she could, and Baelon laughed at her fury.

We have already touched upon several of Jaehaerys’s achievements. As 62 AC drew near its end, the king looked ahead to the year dawning, and all the years beyond, and began to make plans for a project that would transform the Seven Kingdoms. He had given King’s Landing cobblestones, cisterns, and fountains. Now he lifted his eyes beyond the city walls, to the fields and hills and bogs that stretched from the Dornish Marches to the Gift.

“My lords,” he told the council, “when the queen and I go forth on our progresses, we go on Vermithor and Silverwing. When we look down from the clouds, we see cities and castles, hills and swamps, rivers and streams and lakes. We see market towns and fishing villages, old forests, mountains, moors, and meadows, flocks of sheep and fields of grain, old battlefields, ruined towers, lichyards and septs. There is much and more to see in these Seven Kingdoms of ours. Do you know what I do not see?” The king slapped the table hard. “Roads, my lord. I do not see roads. I see some ruts, if I fly low enough. I see some game trails, and here and there a footpath by a stream. But I do not see any proper roads. My lords, I will have roads!”

The building of so many leagues of road would continue throughout the rest of Jaehaerys’s reign and into the reign of his successor, but it started that day in the council chambers of the Red Keep. Let it not be thought that there were no roads in Westeros before his reign; hundreds of roads crisscrossed the land, many dating back thousands of years to the days of the First Men. Even the children of the forest had paths they followed, when they moved from place to place beneath their trees.

   Yet the roads as they existed were abysmal. Narrow, muddy, rutted, crooked, they wandered through hills and woods and over streams without plan or purpose. Only a handful of those streams were bridged. River fords were often guarded by men-at-arms who demanded coin or kind for the right to cross. Some of the lords whose lands the roads passed through maintained them after a fashion, but many more did not. A rainstorm would wash them out. Robber knights and broken men preyed upon the travelers who used them. Before Maegor, the Poor Fellows would provide a certain amount of protection to common folk upon the roads (when they were not robbing them themselves). After the destruction of the Stars, the realm’s byways became more dangerous than ever. Even great lords traveled with an escort.

To correct all these ills in a single reign would have been impossible, but Jaehaerys was determined to make a start. King’s Landing, it must be remembered, was very young as cities go. Before Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters had come ashore from Dragonstone, only a modest fishing village stood on the three hills where the Blackwater Rush flowed into Blackwater Bay. Not surprisingly, few roads of any note begin or end in modest fishing villages. The city had grown quickly in the sixty-two years since Aegon’s Conquest, and a few rude roads had sprung up with it, narrow dusty tracks that followed the shore up to Stokeworth, Rosby, and Duskendale, or cut through the hills to Maidenpool. Aside from that, there was nothing. No roads connected the king’s seat with the great castles and cities of the land. King’s Landing was a port, far more accessible by sea than land.