Everything was far from fine, however. Childbed fever set in soon after birth. Though Princess Daella desperately wished to nurse her child, she had no milk, and a wet nurse was sent for. As her fever rose, the maester decreed that she might not even hold her babe, which set the princess to weeping. She wept until she fell asleep, but in her sleep she kicked wildly and tossed and turned, her fever rising ever higher. By morning she was gone. She was eighteen years of age.

Lord Rodrik wept as well, and begged the queen’s permission to bury his precious princess in the Vale, but Alysanne refused. “She was the blood of the dragon. She will be burned, and her ashes interred on Dragonstone beside her sister Daenerys.”

Daella’s death tore the heart out of the queen, but as we look back, it is plain to see that it was also the first hint of the rift that would open between her and her king. The gods hold us all in their hands, and life and death are theirs to give and take away, but men in their pride look for others to blame. Alysanne Targaryen, in her grief, blamed herself and Lord Arryn and the Eyrie’s maester for their parts in her daughter’s demise…but most of all, she blamed Jaehaerys. If he had not insisted that Daella wed, that she pick someone before year’s end…what harm would it have done for her to stay a little girl for another year or two or ten? “She was not old enough or strong enough to bear a child,” she told His Grace back at King’s Landing. “We ought never have pushed her into marriage.”

It is not recorded how the king replied.

The 83rd year after Aegon’s Conquest is remembered as the year of the Fourth Dornish War…better known amongst the smallfolk as Prince Morion’s Madness, or the War of the Hundred Candles. The old Prince of Dorne had died, and his son, Morion Martell, had succeeded him in Sunspear. A rash and foolish young man, Prince Morion had long bristled at his father’s cowardice during Lord Rogar’s War, when knights of the Seven Kingdoms had marched into the Red Mountains unmolested whilst the Dornish armies stayed at home and left the Vulture King to his fate. Determined to avenge this stain on Dornish honor, the prince planned his own invasion of the Seven Kingdoms.

   Though he knew Dorne could not hope to prevail against the might that the Iron Throne could muster against him, Prince Morion thought that he might take King Jaehaerys unawares, and conquer the stormlands as far as Storm’s End, or at very least Cape Wrath. Rather than attack by way of the Prince’s Pass, he planned to come by sea. He would assemble his hosts at Ghost Hill and the Tor, load them on ships, and sail them across the Sea of Dorne to take the stormlanders by surprise. If he was defeated or driven back, so be it…but before he went, he swore to burn a hundred towns and raze a hundred castles, so the stormlanders might know that they could never again march into the Red Mountains with impunity. (The madness of this plan can be seen in the fact that there are neither a hundred towns nor a hundred castles on Cape Wrath, nor even a third that number.)

Dorne had not boasted any strength at sea since Nymeria burned her ten thousand ships, but Prince Morion did have gold, and he found willing allies in the pirates of the Stepstones, the sellsails of Myr, and the corsairs of the Pepper Coast. Though it took him the best part of a year, eventually the ships came straggling in, and the prince and his spearmen were loaded aboard. Morion had been weaned on the tales of past Dornish glory, and like many young Dornish lords he had seen the sun-mottled bones of the dragon Meraxes at the Hellholt. Every ship in his fleet was therefore manned with crossbowmen and equipped with massive scorpions of the sort that had felled Meraxes. If the Targaryens dared to send dragons against him, he would fill the air with bolts and kill them all.

The folly of Prince Morion’s plans cannot be overstated. His hopes of taking the Iron Throne unawares were laughable, for a start. Not only did Jaehaerys have spies in Morion’s own court, and friends amongst the shrewder Dornish lords, but the pirates of the Stepstones, the sellsails of Myr, and the corsairs of the Pepper Coast are none of them famed for their discretion. A few coins changing hands was all it took. By the time Morion set sail, the king had known of his attack for half a year.

Boremund Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End, had been made aware as well, and was waiting on Cape Wrath to give the Dornishmen a red welcome when they came ashore. He would never have the chance. Jaehaerys Targaryen and his sons Aemon and Baelon had been waiting as well, and as Morion’s fleet beat its way across the Sea of Dorne, the dragons Vermithor, Caraxes, and Vhagar fell on them from out of the clouds. Shouts rang out, and the Dornish filled the air with scorpion bolts, but firing at a dragon is one thing, and killing it quite another. A few bolts glanced off the scales of the dragons, and one punched through Vhagar’s wing, but none of them found any vulnerable spots as the dragons swooped and banked and loosed great blasts of fire. One by one the ships went up in gouts of flame. They were still burning when the sun went down, “like a hundred candles floating on the sea.” Burned bodies would wash up on the shores of Cape Wrath for half a year, but not a single living Dornishman set foot upon the stormlands.

   The Fourth Dornish War was fought and won in a single day. The pirates of the Stepstones, the sellsails of Myr, and the corsairs of the Pepper Coast became less troublesome for a time, and Mara Martell became the Princess of Dorne. Back in King’s Landing, King Jaehaerys and his sons received a riotous welcome. Even Aegon the Conqueror had never won a war without losing a man.

Prince Baelon had another cause for celebration as well. His wife, Alyssa, was again with child. This time, he told his brother Aemon, he was praying for a girl.

Princess Alyssa was brought to bed again in 84 AC. After a long and difficult labor, she gave Prince Baelon a third son, a boy they named Aegon, after the Conqueror. “They call me Baelon the Brave,” the prince told his wife at her bedside, “but you are far braver than me. I would sooner fight a dozen battles than do what you’ve just done.” Alyssa laughed at him. “You were made for battles, and I was made for this. Viserys and Daemon and Aegon, that’s three. As soon as I am well, let’s make another. I want to give you twenty sons. An army of your own!”

It was not to be. Alyssa Targaryen had a warrior’s heart in a woman’s body, and her strength failed her. She never fully recovered from Aegon’s birth, and died within the year at only four-and-twenty. Nor did Prince Aegon long survive her. He perished half a year later, still shy of his first nameday. Though shattered by his loss, Baelon took solace in the two strong sons that she had left him, Viserys and Daemon, and never ceased to honor the memory of his sweet lady with the broken nose and mismatched eyes.

   And now, I fear, we must turn our attention to one of the most troubling and distasteful chapters in the long reign of King Jaehaerys and Queen Alysanne: the matter of their ninthborn child, the Princess Saera.

Born in 67 AC, three years after Daella, Saera had all the courage that her sister lacked, along with a voracious hunger…for milk, for food, for affection, for praise. As a babe she did not so much cry as scream, and her ear-piercing wails became the terror of every maid in the Red Keep. “She wants what she wants and she wants it now,” Grand Maester Elysar wrote of the princess in 69 AC, when she was only two. “Seven save us all when she is older. The Dragonkeepers had best lock up the dragons.” He had no notion how prophetic those words would be.