The matter came to a head in 73 AC. Prince Vaegon was ten years old and Princess Daella nine when one of the queen’s companions, new to the Red Keep, teasingly asked the two of them when they would be married. Vaegon reacted as if he had been slapped. “I would never marry her,” the boy said, in front of half the court. “She can barely read. She should find some lord in need of stupid children, for that’s the only sort he will ever have of her.”

Princess Daella, as might be expected, burst into tears and fled the hall, with her mother, the queen, rushing after her. It fell to her sister Alyssa, at thirteen three years Vaegon’s elder, to pour a flagon of wine over his head. Even that did not make the prince repent. “You are wasting Arbor gold,” was all he said before stalking from the hall to change his clothing.

Plainly, the king and queen concluded afterward, some other bride must needs be found for Vaegon. Briefly, they considered their younger daughters. Princess Saera was six years old in 73 AC, Princess Viserra only two. “Vaegon has never looked twice at either one of them,” Alysanne told the king. “I am not sure he is aware that they exist. Perhaps if some maester wrote about them in a book…”

“I shall tell Grand Maester Elysar to commence tomorrow,” the king japed. Then he said, “He is only ten. He does not see girls, no more than they see him, but that will change soon. He is comely enough, and a prince of Westeros, third in line to the Iron Throne. In a few more years maidens will be fluttering around him like butterflies and blushing if he deigns to look their way.”

   The queen was unconvinced. Comely was perhaps too generous a word for Prince Vaegon, who had the silver-gold hair and purple eyes of the Targaryens, but was long of face and round of shoulder even at ten, with a pinched sour cast to his mouth that made men suspect he had recently been sucking on a lemon. As his mother, Her Grace was mayhaps blind to these flaws, but not to his nature. “I fear for any butterfly that comes fluttering round Vaegon. He is like to squash it flat beneath a book.”

“He spends too much time in the library,” Jaehaerys said. “Let me speak to Baelon. We will get him out into the yard, put a sword in his hand and a shield on his arm, that will set him right.”

Grand Maester Elysar tells me that His Grace did indeed speak to Prince Baelon, who dutifully took his brother under his wing, marched him out into the yard, put a sword into his hand and a shield upon his arm. It did not set him right. Vaegon hated it. He was a miserable fighter, and he had a gift for making everyone around him miserable as well, even Baelon the Brave.

Baelon persisted for a year, at the king’s insistence. “The more he drills, the worse he looks,” the Spring Prince confessed. One day, mayhaps in an attempt to spur Vaegon into making more of an effort, he brought his sister Alyssa to the yard, shining in man’s mail. The princess had not forgotten the incident of the Arbor gold. Laughing and shouting mockery, she danced around her little brother and humiliated him half a hundred times, whilst Princess Daella looked down from a window. Shamed beyond endurance, Vaegon threw down his sword and ran from the yard, never to return.

We shall return to Prince Vaegon, and his sister Daella, in due course, but let us turn now to a joyful event. In 74 AC, King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne were blessed again by the gods when Prince Aemon’s wife, the Lady Jocelyn, presented them with their first grandchild. Princess Rhaenys was born on the seventh day of the seventh moon of the year, which the septons judged to be highly auspicious. Large and fierce, she had the black hair of her Baratheon mother and the pale violet eyes of her Targaryen father. As the firstborn child of the Prince of Dragonstone, many hailed her as next in line for the Iron Throne after her father. When Queen Alysanne held her in her arms for the first time, she was heard to call the little girl “our queen to be.”

   In breeding, as in so much else, Baelon the Brave was not far behind his brother Aemon. In 75 AC, the Red Keep was the site of another splendid wedding, as the Spring Prince took to bride the eldest of his sisters, Princess Alyssa. The bride was fifteen, the groom eighteen. Unlike their father and mother, Baelon and Alyssa did not wait to consummate their union; the bedding that followed their wedding feast was the source of much ribald humor in the days that followed, for the young bride’s sounds of pleasure could be heard all the way to Duskendale, men said. A shyer maid might have been abashed by that, but Alyssa Targaryen was as bawdy a wench as any barmaid in King’s Landing, as she herself was fond of boasting. “I mounted him and took him for a ride,” she declared the morning after the bedding, “and I mean to do the same tonight. I love to ride.”

Nor was her brave prince the only mount the princess was to claim that year. Like her brothers before her, Alyssa Targaryen meant to be a dragonrider, and sooner rather than later. Aemon had flown at seventeen, Baelon at sixteen. Alyssa meant to do it at fifteen. According to the tales set down by the Dragonkeepers, it was all that they could do to persuade her not to claim Balerion. “He is old and slow, Princess,” they had to tell her. “Surely you want a swifter mount.” In the end they prevailed, and Princess Alyssa ascended into the sky upon Meleys, a splendid scarlet she-dragon, never before ridden. “Red maidens, the two of us,” the princess boasted, laughing, “but now we’ve both been mounted.”

The princess was seldom long away from the Dragonpit after that day. Flying was the second sweetest thing in the world, she would oft say, and the very sweetest thing could not be mentioned in the company of ladies. The Dragonkeepers had not been wrong; Meleys was as swift a dragon as Westeros had ever seen, easily outpacing Caraxes and Vhagar when she and her brothers flew together.

Meanwhile, the problem of their brother Vaegon persisted, to the queen’s frustration. The king had not been entirely wrong about the butterflies. As the years passed and Vaegon matured, young ladies at the court began to pay him some attention. Age, and some uncomfortable discussions with his father and his brothers, had taught the prince the rudiments of courtesy, and he did not squash any of the girls, to the queen’s relief. But he took no special notice of any of them either. Books remained his only passion: history, cartography, mathematics, languages. Grand Maester Elysar, never a slave to propriety, confessed to having given the prince a volume of erotic drawings, thinking mayhaps that pictures of naked maidens comporting with men and beasts and one another might kindle Vaegon’s interest in the charms of women. The prince kept the book, but showed no change in behavior.

   It was on Prince Vaegon’s fifteenth nameday in 78 AC, a year short of his manhood, that Jaehaerys and Alysanne broached the obvious solution to the Grand Maester. “Do you think mayhaps Vaegon might have the makings of a maester?”

“No,” Elysar replied bluntly. “Can you see him instructing some lord’s children how to read and write and do simple sums? Does he keep a raven in his chamber, or any sort of bird? Can you imagine him removing a man’s crushed leg, or delivering a baby? All these are required of a maester.” The Grand Maester paused, then said, “Vaegon is no maester…but he could well have the makings of an archmaester in him. The Citadel is the greatest repository of knowledge in the known world. Send him there. Mayhaps he will find himself in the library. That, or he’ll get so lost amongst the books that you never need to concern yourselves with him again.”