Blood of Dragons

A rare sight, that of pious, gentle Queen Naerys leaving the confines of the Red Keep; but so Her Grace did, sojourning with Princes Daeron and Baelor, and Prince Aemon as their leal guard, to Hayford to attend the games thrown in honour of Lord Hayford’s daughter.

First, a Tower of Love, blighted by rain and mud but no less appealing to the eye as ladies, headed by the Hayford maiden, were cooped up high in a wooden mock-holdfast, while eager knights sought their favour with sweets, coins and pretty -or lusty- words. When at last the women lowered ropes, the field erupted in melee, laughing or cursing hopefuls battling, with toy arms, their way to the climb, and victory. It was the favoured royal master-at-arms, the brash and ever-proud Fireball, who dominated. The stands rang with his half-boast, half-challenge: “Are there no true knights among you?”

And the challenge was met, especially by Hayford’s own. The young Robyn bravely clashed with Fireball aloft, and when offered a duel and knighthood, should he win, did not hesitate. It was a mere slip that let Ball ring his bell, and miserly deny him spurs. But the victorious Ser Quentyn’s oversight was corrected: Prince Daeron later knighted the lad himself. Lord Cargyll, suspected of kinslaying, titled brows too, with his presence; even more so did the rumour he swore his innocence before the queen in Hayford’s sept, that night.

Next came the tourney, a field of forty-odd men, all with their mettle but unable to halt a Quentyn Ball most buoyed by the prior day’s win. Downing many, he seemed quite sure of victory, but confidence turned bitter. Another great lance of the Reach, Ser Joffrey the Handsome, heir to Bitterbridge, jousted him thrice with great endurance, almost stealing the day. He didn’t, and Ball, once safely the champion, elected to crown Caswell’s one wife, the lady Elyse, Queen of Love and Beauty, for all her protestations. Those with long memories might say the king’s lively princely days were his favorite’s inspiration. Thereafter, the court returned to the royal city, where the taming of a horse of Lord Bracken’s drew no few knights. Nine men did the red hellion throw off, under the despairing gaze of Ser Morgil Hastwyck, the Master of Horse, until Caswell broke it. And the Red Keep settled into a rhythm. Until it was, duly, jolted awake.

For it is only just now known to King’s Landing, marked by the ringing of the bells of the royal sept and, in the end, other septs in the city (even a lonely bell from the far-from-finished great sept rising slowly, slowly upon Visenya’s Hill), that the Princess Elaena has given birth. The infant, by all accounts equipped with robust lungs and his mother’s fine pale hair, is the posthumous child of the late Lord Ossifer Plumm who managed, happily, to conceive the child on the wedding night only to expire from the brave effort. When asked what the child should be named, she is said to have looked upon the boy with a gaze of wearied triumph, declaring him Viserys, in honor of her late uncle. Yet even as the babe’s first cries mingled with the peal of bells, they served as cold clarity to those who had circled the Plumm inheritance.

The Princess, her hand now steady upon the cradle, had already earlier moved in the moons leading up to the birth to secure her child’s legacy. Having elevated the tenacious Ser Alfryn to the castellanship of the family seat, and binding his kin to her at court, the fact that her child is a male heir puts paid to any last lingering hopes to convince the king to grant the lordship to another. Though some highborn kinsmen still mutter into their cups regarding the convenient timing of Lord Ossifer’s final, fatal exertion, the presence of this small, silver-haired heir—shielded by the King’s favor and the loyalty of the newly-reconciled Plumm ranks—renders such slanders a dangerous indulgence. It’s said King Aegon plans to throw a feast in honor of Little Lord Viserys, as he did not for the birth of his granddaughter.

Besides, the ill-wiled need account not only those bound to Elaena by blood or marriage, but also folk tied by oath, or simple loyalty. Lady Buckwell, once before a royal servant when the Princess was a girl and she a maid of Tully, kin to the Master of Coin and (most tellingly for the cynical enough, mayhaps) a regent herself for two years, has with little pomp been named the Princess’s mistress of keys.

The day after the royal birth, the city was much as it always was, for in the end a new little lord did not matter very much to the denizens of the city who labored, and prayed, and made merry. So ships came and went from throughout the realm and even beyond… and among them one bore a curious visitor: a fair-haired youth dressed well but not richly, the accent of Dorne in his voice. He would later appear at the gates of the Red Keep, seeking Ser Aidan Dayne, captain of the guard for Princess Mariah, and some might have recalled the rumor of the events in Dorne when a pretender to being the Lady of Starfall’s long lost son had been rejected and turned away despite the backing of House Hightower. And that this was the same youth, the alleged Lyonel Dayne, appears to be true, for Ser Aidan was seen to embrace him and accept him as his sister’s son despite Lady Alia having denied him before the Prince of Dorne and all his splendid court.