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Baela had lived her life free. Willful and defiant, they said of her, as if it were a condition of the blood. And perhaps it was. Her mother was Laena Velaryon, rider of Vhagar, who had claimed the greatest dragon in the world as a girl and died as she lived—unbent. Her father was the Rogue Prince, Daemon Targaryen, a name that made maesters ink their smallclothes and lords check their door bolts. She was, according to her stepmother with a sight both fond and weary, the very image of both: all their fire, all their pride, and a temper that could flash-quick as summer lightning.
But a swift temper did not make a slow mind. She had a cunning in her, a lord’s cast of thought, something her cousin and beloved betrothed, Jacaerys, had hammered into her with his endless games of war. He would name her lady of some phantom keep, then march on her with hosts drawn from parchment and imagination. She was ever combative in the game, as she was in all things. Combat was her nature, the song her blood sang.
The rules were simple. They would draw lots – scraps of parchment scribbled with numbers of men, the temper of the weather, the lie of the land. Attacker. Defender. Sometimes the fluttering scrap granted her Moondancer, and the sky would be hers to command. Sometimes it did not. She despised those draws. To be grounded was to be gelded; to have the sky torn from her left a phantom limb that throbbed worse than any true wound. But she learned. A dragonless war was still a war. Wars were won in the mud and the blood, with more than just flame.
When Jace kept Vermax, she devised ways to bring the beast down. She would stud the ramparts of her imaginary fastnesses with scorpions, each bolt a promise. She would poison the carcasses meant for a dragon’s feast, dreaming of emerald scales turning black. She would throw waves of men at the beast, a grim arithmetic where a hundred lives might buy the time to loose one killing shot. Once, the draw had besieged her in a wretched shit-hole called Blackhaven, a dismal, dripping pile of Stormlands stone. The land was worthless, a boggy misery, but it had one redoubt: in that game, she held Viserys as a hostage in her lap, chewing on the very parchment that declared him hers.
The game had halted there, unfinished. Jace had his princely sums and histories, and she was called away to Driftmark, to attend her grandmother. But through one long, rain-lashed night at High Tide, listening to the sea rage like a beaten beast against the cliffs, she crafted her plan. She plotted the sortie, the feint, the hidden pits and the ballistae disguised as storm-wreckage, all to shatter his siege and send Vermax shrieking from the sky, a bolt in its eye or its belly torn open. The King died before they could meet again and resume, before she could boast to Jace of how she would have taken Vermax down while his host withered at her gates.
Jace did not know it yet. He might laugh years later, in that way he had, when his own hot blood had cooled to embers and the past had softened into a tale told over spiced wine. He would scold her then, and play the grumbling, annoying twat he could so easily be.. But his game was the reason the cold knot in her belly now felt like fear. And being afraid, her mother had once told her, as she’d buckled her first practice sword, is the only time you can ever truly be brave. It was why her hand was steady as she shed the hood from her face, her eyes fixed on the approaching sprawl of King’s Landing as the ship cut through the blackwater.
She was clad in her riding leathers, black and supple as a shadow, tight to her form. The trousers and knee-high boots were meant for hawking and hunting, for sneaking and stealthing about. The hooded cloak was a layered thing of boiled leather and dark wool. In it, she felt less a princess and more a specter, a girl of no particular face, like the phantoms they whispered of in the fog-shrouded alleys of Braavos. A faceless man, she mused, or I suppose, a faceless woman. Baela snorted softly into the wool.
“Are you certain of this, my lady?” Addam of Hull asked. His voice was thin, worn to a thread by wariness.
“Better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” she said, the old saw feeling sharp in her mouth. She bit the strap of her glove to pull it taut against her wrist.
He made a face, all twisted doubt. “Aye,” he muttered, more to the mist and the distant city lights than to her. “That’s a bad idea.”
A handful of men—six—had gathered on the deck, distant and wary as half-tamed dogs. Crossbows were slung across their backs, but they stood still as stones, speaking not a word.
“The plan is simple,” she told them, her voice cutting through the damp air. “We move as one. Once the deed is done, we scatter like leaves in a gale. Run into the city’s bowels or out to the countryside, it matters not. The war will be tipped in the Queen’s favor by then, and each of you will have your gold.”
“What of the One-Eye?” one dared to ask. Baela knew him from the taverns of Hull, a place she’d sneak off to when the weight of High Tide grew too great. He had a brother, a bastard half-brother he dragged everywhere like a lucky charm. The boy was nowhere to be seen now, but she knew the man’s need; gold for a family that had none.
“In the dead of night?” she shot back, pointing a gloved finger at the starless sky. “He’s nothing without his dragon, and a dragon is a mindless beast without its rider.”
She then softened her tone, adopting the measured, reasonable cadence she’d heard Jace use a hundred times. “If any of us should not survive this—and that is a possibility…”
Addam shifted uneasily beside her. Baela ignored him.
“…your names have been given to my maid. With my words, your families will take the gold in your name. In my honor as a Targaryen. In my honor as a Velaryon. That, I promise you.”
She paused, her violet eyes scanning their hard, weathered faces in the gloom. “Are you with me?”
For a heartbeat, there was only the lap of water against the hull. Then, as one, they raised their crossbows and their swords. A rough, low cheer went up. They called her name. They called for Rhaenyra. They called for her father, the Rogue Prince. And finally, for luck or for loyalty, they called the name of the ship that bore them toward their madness: “The Dauntless!”
They came ashore in two skiffs, creeping through the ink-black water like thieves. Baela’s boots sank into the cold, sucking mud of the shallows as she climbed out, the wet cling of it a vulgar kiss against her leathers. Her heart was a war drum in her chest, but her hands were steady as she took inventory in the dark. Two daggers, one on each hip. A compact crossbow slung over one shoulder, its stock cool against her back. A shortsword hung opposite it, the straps crossing over her chest like a beggar’s bindle. Father would mock me raw for this, she thought, a grim smile touching her lips. An invitation for every strap to snag, he’d say. But what he did not see, he did not need to know. In the top of her boot rested a blade slim as a finger, and a handful of quarrels were thrust through her belt for a swift draw.
“I should have gotten a beer,” she muttered to the damp air.
From the gloom, Addam’s voice came, dry as dust. “You mean to say you’re not drunk?”
“Here.” The voice belonged to a boy near her own age, a smallfolk lad from Hull if she remembered right. His name was Arron, with straw-colored hair, skin kissed brown by the sun, dark dull eyes, and a nose that had been broken more than once. He held out a waterskin. She took it, sipped, and felt a grim smile touch her lips. Black ale. The cheap, sharp stuff that tasted of hearth-smoke and desperation. “When this is done, Arron,” she said, handing it back, “we’ll drink the Queen’s own vintage.” Or I’ll have to break into the cellars behind Rhaenyra’s back. If she survived this. When she survived this. Her grandmother would have her grounded until the end of days. She’d likely still be confined to her chambers even after she was crowned as Jace’s queen.
The boy offered a shy, fleeting smile before melting back into the gloom.
The city walls loomed tall, their great stone faces half-hidden by the gloom and the city’s own greasy, smog-choked breath. Along the ramparts, the flicker of distant torchlight betrayed the slow, bored patrols of the City Watch. The gates, naturally, were shut fast at this hour, iron and oak barred against the night.
They kept their distance, skirting the wall's shadow like rats along a foundation. The stink of the city found them anyway—a thick, pervasive reek of sewage, rotting refuse, and despair that no sea breeze could quite scour away. One of the men, a younger one, let out a stifled gag.
"Gods," he huffed, pulling his hood tighter over his nose.
A older, gruffer voice answered from the dark. "This is King's Landing. What did you expect? Rosewater and incense?" The muttered complaint died into the squelch of mud under their boots.
They slipped past the outer wall, past the reach of its torches, moving through the city's wretched outskirts. After what felt an age of picking their way through the tangled woods, they saw them: Dragonkeepers, their distinctive woolen robes dull in the gloom, moving silently among pens of bleating, panicked sheep.
Baela paused. A clenched fist rose, halting her men as she dropped into a crouch. She squinted at the figures in the murky half-light. They were young. Beardless, or nearly so. That meant they were new. If King's Landing followed the same harsh logic as Dragonstone, the green boys were given the shit-work—tending sheep, mucking pens, hauling off entrails—long before they earned the right to handle a whip near the greater beasts, or stand guard over the cradled eggs.
“Should we ask for directions?” someone whispered. It was Edd, a landless knight, his voice hopeful and utterly foolish.
“Absolutely not,” Addam hissed, the words sharp.
Baela rose to her feet, dusting her knees. “Absolutely yes. Watch my back.”
She walked toward them, using the bulk of her cloak to obscure the weapons that crossed her body. “Hello.”
The three men paused in their work, their faces turning toward the shadow that had spoken. Baela grinned at them, a shallow, mirthless stretch of her lips. The hood still shrouded her hair, and she knew her face was in deep shadow. Not that they’d recognize her; the last time she’d come to King’s Landing, she’d arrived by sea.
“What do you want here?” one of them asked, his voice sharp with the authority granted by his scaled cloak, even if his face was still soft with youth.
“My party and I came to the city,” Baela said, letting a touch of weary frustration seep into her tone. “But the gates were shut for the night. We didn’t know what to do, or where to go.”
“They’ll open at dawn,” another keeper said, not unkindly. “Best you wait. And you should stay clear of this place.”
“Why?” Baela asked, tilting her head as if merely curious.
The youngest of the three nodded toward the deeper darkness beyond the pens, where the earth seemed to rise into a great, black hill. His voice dropped to a reverent hush. “Because Vhagar is laying just over there.”
“Can we still hunt here?” Baela asked, feigning a weary pragmatism. “We are hungry, and the woods are full of game.”
“Aye, you can,” the older one grunted. “So long as you stay clear of the dragon. She will not stir unless you give her cause.”
Baela offered a thin grin. “Good.”
Then she walked past them, not toward the woods, but straight for the treeline where they claimed the great beast lay. They moved to stop her, hands reaching out. “Hold, you can’t—”
A soft thwip cut the night. An arrow took the older keeper in the throat, the fletching sprouting from his neck like a dark flower. He fell, choking on his own blood. Another bolt struck the second man in the chest before he could scream. The last one standing—the youngest—froze, his eyes wide with shock.
Before he could bolt or cry out, Baela was upon him. She clamped a gloved hand over his mouth, her other arm hooking around his neck. He was all sharp bones and terrified tremors.
“Hush now,” she whispered, her voice cool as a grave-mist against his ear. “Tears won’t help you. Fear won’t save you. Let’s go.” She gave him a firm shove toward the looming darkness. “Let’s go feed my mother’s dragon.”
He stumbled forward, his breath coming in ragged, stifled sobs. He looked back at her, with dawning, horrified recognition, tears carving clean lines through the grime on his cheeks.
“Wh-what would you have me do?”
“I want you to take the sheep and feed Vhagar.”
“I’ve… I’ve never done that. My—they’re the ones who…”
“Then today is the day you learn.”
“B-but…”
Her voice hardened, the whisper turning to iron. “You are a Dragonkeeper. I am a Princess of the Blood. You do as I command. Do you hear me?”
He nodded, a quick, jerky motion of utter submission. They moved into the clearing, and there she lay.
Vhagar. Her great head rested upon the earth like a moss-covered hill, her scales dark as a starless midnight. Her eyes were closed—the same eyes that had seen the Conquest, that had closed the day her mother died, before Aemond and that cursed ship had reached their island to steal her from Rhaena. The beast’s breath rumbled through the clearing, a deep seismic sigh that stirred the leaves.
Baela’s men melted into a loose, wary circle behind the tree line, weapons half-drawn. She kept a firm grip on the boy, holding him still for a long moment as she surveyed the scene. In the distance, she could make out the vague shapes of guards, half-hearted sentinels sulking at their posts. No one, it seemed, took guarding the great she-dragon seriously. They were there in the cases to protect the One-Eye until he reached his mount, or perhaps to guard the Dragonkeepers and their sheep from hungry smallfolk. The idea of keeping a true watch on Vhagar herself was a duty none of them had considered.
Fools, she thought. A dragon is only as safe as its rider is vigilant.
The Dragonkeeper beside her trembled. In broken, hesitant High Valyrian, he whispered toward the colossal form, his voice thin as a reed. “Līve Vhagar… mazverdagon…” Wake up, Vhagar… eat…
A low rumble, deeper than before, vibrated through the clearing. One great, slit-pupiled eye, the size of a shield, flickered open. It did not focus on the trembling keeper, but slid past him, fixing instead on the smaller, stiller figure wrapped in shadow and leather. The eye held the color of molten bronze, and in its depths slept centuries of wrath.
She held the dragon’s gaze, her heart hammering a war drum against her ribs.
“Now,” she said, her voice quiet and clear in the rumbling silence. “Feed her.”
She melted back into the shadows with her men, the boiled leather and dark wool swallowing her form. The keeper, propelled more by terror than obedience, began to push a bleating sheep toward the colossal head.
Vhagar’s eye, a great pool of molten bronze, followed the movement. It opened wider, the vertical slit narrowing with a hunter’s interest.
Thwip.
The sound was sharp, petty, absurd against the furnace-draught of the dragon’s breath. It was not Baela’s bolt; she was still fumbling a quarrel from her thigh sheath, her fingers gone clumsy as sausages with the rush of blood. But someone’s arrow found its mark. It struck the very heart of that vast, luminous eye with a wet, punching sound.
For a heartbeat, there was only a profound, silent shock. She held her breath.
Then the world unmade itself.
A roar tore from Vhagar that like the shrieking end of all things. The very ground convulsed, hurling men into the air like dolls. The great head, which had rested like a mossy hillock, snapped upward, the arrow’s shaft a grotesque stalk sprouting from the ruined orb. Blood, black as pitch in the firelight, poured in a steaming torrent down her scaled cheek. The sheep turned to ash and bone-smoke by a sudden, roaring gout of flame that licked out, consuming everything before it. The heat of it kissed Baela’s face, a searing, dry promise of death.
As Baela and her men scattered like ants before a kicked hill, she saw Arron, frozen for a fatal second, trying to nock another arrow. Vhagar’s head swung, blind but deadly accurate in its rage, and a torrent of flame, white-hot and roaring, vomited toward him. He threw his crossbow aside and fled, the fire licking at his heels, before he was swallowed by the inferno.
Guards came shouting from the perimeter, saw the living cataclysm before them, and fled just as quickly. It was almost like morning—a false, hellish dawn as flames leapt from tree to tree, eating the night, painting the clearing in stark, dancing shadows of orange and black. The heat was a physical wall. It felt like standing in one of the Dragonstone hatchery pits, beneath the breath of a thousand eggs.
Night became a hideous, blazing day. Flames raced up trees, turning them into screaming, skeletal torches. The very air caught fire, roaring skyward in a furious column. The heat, the chaos, the primal roar—it was like being plunged into the deepest, most furious of the Dragonmont’s pits. Baela fled, tripping over roots, her fear a white noise that drowned all thought. She used her woolen shawl to cover her mouth, but the acrid smoke clawed at her throat and lungs regardless.
She threw her back against the blistering bark of a half-charred tree, trying to spot her men through the hellish glare. She saw nothing but shifting shadows and fire. Gritting her teeth, she fumbled with her crossbow, the heat making the metal almost too hot to hold. She aimed at the colossal, thrashing shadow that was Vhagar and loosed. The bolt struck the dragon’s back, vanishing against the ancient scales like a pin dropped on a mountainside. Vhagar did not even flinch.
“Gods be damned,” Baela cursed, the words a raw scrape in her throat.
She snatched another quarrel, nocked it, and looked around. The world was fire. Vhagar was drunk on her own fury, thrashing in a circle of annihilation. It would be only moments before the One-Eye heard the cataclysm and came riding hard with his men, perhaps even with his drunken king of a brother. Time was a currency she had just spent.
Blinding one of Vhagar's eyes was not enough. Aemond had but one eye and was still an annoying cunt, but he was a gnat next to the monster he rode. No. Baela would finish the dragon. The same way she had plotted to defend the shithole called Blackhaven against Vermax. She would defend her family against the kinslayer. She would end it, here and for all.
She aimed again, and the bolt flew wide, vanishing into the inferno. With a snarl, she threw the crossbow down. She heard Addam shouting for her, his voice thin and desperate through the roar, but she was beyond reason now, beyond fear. There was only the plan, polished to a hard, cold point in her mind.
She ran toward the swirling storm of scale and flame. She ran as the ground shook, as burning branches rained around her, and with a final, reckless leap, she flung herself onto the dragon’s massive, thrashing hind leg. The scales were slick with hot blood and soot, but she found a purchase, hooking her leg and hauling herself up like a climber on some hellish mountain. She slid, caught herself, and scrambled higher, over the great sweep of the wing joint, onto the broad plateau of the beast’s back.
Her mother’s saddle—the fine silver filigree, the proud seahorse of Velaryon—was gone. In its place was Aemond’s, a thing of dull, functional leather, as uninspired as the man himself. She did not pause. From the saddle, she flung herself forward along the neck, the world narrowing to a silent, rushing tunnel in her mind. The roar of fire, the screams of men, it all fell away. There was only the climb.
She swept down, holding fast to one of the great, bony horns at the base of Vhagar’s skull. With one hand clinging for her life, she reached down with the other, fingers scrambling past her boot-top until they closed on the hilt of the slim, sharp dagger hidden there. She wrenched it free.
Then, bracing her feet against the rough scales, she half-slid, half-swung around, turning to face the source of the dragon’s remaining wrath.
She came eye to eye with Vhagar.
One great, blazing orb of molten bronze, mad with pain and ancient fury, fixed on the small, clinging creature on her neck. The heat of the dragon’s breath was a physical blow. In that eye, Baela saw the Conquest, saw her mother’s smile, saw the doom of her house.
She adjusted her grip on the dagger, its point aimed.
“For my family,” she whispered. And then she drove the blade down with all her strength.
The dagger sank deep into the remaining eye, and the blood that erupted was not blood at all, but liquid fire. It sprayed across Baela’s face, a searing kiss that stole her breath and blurred her vision with instant, white-hot agony. Vhagar’s shriek tore the sky apart at the seams. It was a roar so profound, so full of primordial rage, that Baela thought Jace might have heard it in Winterfell.
Her grip weakened, fingers slipping on the slick, burning horn. Vhagar reared her head back, a mountain coming unmoored, and slammed it down with earth-shattering force. The impact flung Baela upward, a rag doll tossed by a god. She swung wildly, one hand latching onto a horn, the other scrambling for purchase on the rough scales. Half-climbing, half-hauling herself through sheer will, she dragged her body up the slope of the dragon’s thrashing skull.
Once atop Vhagar’s head, the great beast tried to shake her loose, her movements growing more violent, more desperate. A blind, sweeping torrent of fire erupted from her jaws at the shapes of guards now rushing into the clearing, turning them into shrieking, running torches.
Baela slid down the neck, boots skidding, half-running, half-falling to avoid the lashing, tree-snapping fury of the tail. Vhagar beat her wings once, twice—great gusts that flattened flaming foliage and sent men sprawling—and then, with a groan of ancient tendons and a hurricane of displaced air, the dragon began to rise from the ground. Blind, mad, and weak, she was taking flight.
Baela scanned the ground below. There was no safe place to leap. Everything was on fire. The burn on her face screamed, a constant, brutal reminder of the dragon’s wrath. They were tears in her eyes that blinded her momentarily. There was no choice.
She leapt away from the ascending beast. She tumbled through scorching air and landed hard in a patch of flaming grass, the impact driving the breath from her lungs. Before the fire could claim her, a hand seized the back of her hood with brutal strength and yanked. She was dragged backward through dirt, ash, and embers, her burnt cheek scraping against the ground in a fresh torment, the world reduced to a terrifying smear of pain and roaring sound.
Then she was hauled upright and thrown unceremoniously over a shoulder. Her vision swam—a dizzying view of boot heels churning mud and fleeing shadows. She fumbled for a dagger, her head bouncing with each jarring stride as the man ran. They slid down a sudden, steep slope, and she was dumped onto cold, wet earth at the bottom.
“You brut..”
It was one of her men, Edd, his face pale as milk beneath the soot, eyes darting like a hunted animal. “We thought you’d burned! We must go, now!”
Baela pushed herself up, wincing as the motion tugged at the raw, seared flesh of her face. Beyond the rim of the ditch, her party waited—two to a mount, clinging to the backs of stolen horses whose tack still bore the badges and buckles of the City Watch. The guards who had ridden them were now ash in the great pyre. The beasts stamped and shied, eyes rolling white at the inferno that lit the sky behind them.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” she rasped.
Her words were punctuated by a deafening crash that shook the very earth. Vhagar, blind and mad with pain, had taken a short, desperate flight only to slam down before the city gates like a falling mountain.
Addam hauled her up behind him onto his horse. She locked her arms around his waist, her body trembling not with fear, but with a bone-deep exhaustion that felt like the aftermath of a storm. They wheeled and spurred their stolen mounts away from the chaos, galloping hard into the welcoming darkness on the other side of the hill, putting distance between them and the useless titan with every pounding hoofbeat.
“The dragon has bought us time!” one of the men yelled into the wind, his voice raw with adrenaline and disbelief. He threw back his head and laughed, a wild, reckless sound. “We are rich!”
Baela found her own laughter bubbling up, sharp and bright and edged with hysteria. It spilled from her, louder and louder, a release of all the terror and fury and savage triumph. She whipped a hand toward the bloody, fire-streaked sky, her voice a defiant cry against the night.
“We are victorious! Drunk on me tonight!”
From the distance, she saw Sunfyre. The golden dragon was a gleaming, agitated crescent against the smoke-choked sky, circling the thrashing, roaring shadow that was Vhagar. A pained smile touched Baela’s blistered lips. She was thankful, then, for Vhagar’s blind, world-ending fury. The great she-dragon was throwing her death-throes right outside the city walls, a disaster that would hold Sunfyre’s attention, and likely that of every soul in the Red Keep. It would stop the golden dragon from quartering the fields for the culprits. It would drown out any coherent account a surviving guard might try to give to their cunt of a king.
The trees swallowed the dreadful spectacle as they rode farther and farther, until the salt smell of the shore overpowered the stench of smoke. They leapt from their stolen horses, abandoning the trembling beasts, and dragged their skiffs from their hiding places into the black, chill water. Baela, who usually oversaw such labor, took Arron’s place without a word, throwing her weight against the wood, her shoulders screaming in protest. She heaved with the others, the saltwater stinging the raw flesh of her face.
With a final, grating shove, the skiff took the water. She hauled herself aboard and collapsed, half-lying against the gunwale to stare up at the sky. It was no longer a true night sky; it was stained, licked by the distant, hungry glow of the fire she had birthed in the woods—a fire so great it would need a god’s own rain to put it down.
She turned her head, her cheek resting against the rough wood, and looked back toward the city. Even from the water, she could still make out the shapes: Sunfyre, dancing with wary, golden agitation around the larger, darker form of Vhagar, who periodically bathed the air in front of her with torrents of blind, useless fire. They became smaller and smaller, a child’s terrible toys left behind on a receding shelf.
Then they were at The Dauntless, scrambling up the ropes, the ship already coming alive around them. The sails snapped taut, catching a wind that seemed to have been waiting for them. As the ship heeled over and began its desperate run back to Dragonstone, Baela finally allowed her body to slump against the rail. The fight was gone, and in its place, a sudden, hollow sadness flooded in.
Vhagar had been her mother’s dragon. Laena’s pride, her freedom, her fury given wings. And she had just blinded the great beast, perhaps killed her. She had murdered a piece of her own history, a living memory of her mother’s laugh. She stared at her gloved hand, the leather stiff and blackened with dried dragon’s blood. The heat of it had seared through to her skin. With stiff fingers, she peeled the ruined glove off and threw it over the rail. It was swallowed by the churning wake, a tiny, dark offering to the sea.
They drank that night, as she had promised. In a low, smoky tavern on the Dragonstone docks, they toasted to Arron, his name spoken into cups of sour ale. The men toasted to their paid debts, to their place in the songs that would surely be sung. They pooled their coins, a clattering heap of silver and bronze, and dragged a reluctant old bonesetter from his corner, demanding he tend to their burns and gashes right there at the sticky table they commanded.
Baela promised the healer she would pay the rest herself. The man, who did not seem to recognize the soot-stained, blistered girl before him, began to protest, his words thin with weariness and doubt. He fell silent when every soul in the tavern—dockworkers, sailors, her own hardened men—growled at him of who she was and what she had just done. The healer’s eyes widened. He fetched his bag from upstairs and returned, smoothing a foul-smelling green mud over the angry burns on Baela’s face with fingers that trembled only slightly.
“To Baela the Dauntless!” a man roared, his voice thick with drink and a newfound awe.
“The Dauntless,” Baela repeated, raising her own cup. A faint, weary smile touched her cracked lips beneath the drying poultice. She let the title hang in the ale-thick air, testing its weight. It tasted of salt, smoke, and triumph. “Oh,” she said. “Now that is a title.”
They celebrated. She chanted a snatch of a rowing song as the guardsman escorted her out, her voice slightly slurred but loud, the words bouncing off the stone corridor walls. Behind her, the roar of the tavern followed—men drumming on tables, a bawdy chorus rising to the smoke-stained rafters, the whole place shaking with the visceral joy of those who have stared into a dragon’s maw and lived to get royally, blindingly drunk.
“Princess.” Ser Broom found her at the entrance to the keep, his face a mask of pinched disapproval. “This is… most unseemly.”
He was the one, she knew, who had sent men to fish her from the revelry. Baela hated his guts. But she nudged him with her shoulder anyway, a gesture both familiar and insolent. “Pay for everything. For everyone.” It was not a request. Before he could muster a protest, she shrugged off the helping hand of the guardsman and walked away on her own, out into the courtyard.
The night air was fresh and cold, a slap after the tavern’s fug. More guards waited there, a silent, armored escort. Part of the household thought her still at High Tide, others whispered she’d flown off on some mad whim. None knew for certain where she had been.
She began to climb the steep, winding steps toward the Stone Drum, her voice rising again in the quiet night, “And with a dagger in hand and fire in her eyes, The Dauntless calls, ‘Come on, come on, you old bitch!’”
“What in the seven hells, Baela?”
Baela turned to see Rhaena standing in an arched doorway, a shawl clutched tight around her shoulders. The sight of her sister’s face—pale, weary, etched with a grief Baela had been drowning in ale to avoid—struck her like a physical blow. Her heart, so full of fierce joy moments before, suddenly cracked. A cold, sobering fear flooded in. How could she possibly tell her?
“Luke is dead,” Rhaena said, her voice trembling with a pain that was still raw, still bleeding. “Father is in a black rage. There is war outside our very door. Rhaenyra shutters herself in her chambers, and you… you are what? Drunk? Singing? Jolly?”
“I’m sorry,” Baela whispered, the words ash in her mouth.
Rhaena’s eyes, usually so soft, flashed with a fury born of deep hurt. “I loved him. Luke… didn’t he mean anything to you? To just…”
“No. No, it’s not that.” Baela shook her head, the world tilting. She was too drunk, too sad, the weight of the night crashing down all at once. She stumbled forward, her legs giving way, and caught herself by throwing her arms around Rhaena, crushing her sister in a desperate, clumsy hug. She buried her face in Rhaena’s shoulder, the green poultice on her cheek smearing against the wool. “I… I blinded Vhagar.”
Rhaena stiffened in her arms.
Baela braced herself, thinking, Not so dauntless after all. The truth tumbled out, a hoarse confession in the dark stairwell. “I sailed to King’s Landing. And I did it. The plan I told you I would use against Jace at Blackhaven… I used it on Vhagar.”
Rhaena did not push her away. For a long moment, she did not move at all. The only sound was the distant, fading echo of the tavern song and the harsh rhythm of Baela’s own breath.
Then, Rhaena’s hands came up to grip Baela’s shoulders, her fingers digging into the boiled leather with a strength that belied her slender frame. She pushed Baela back just far enough to see her face—the blistered skin, the wild eyes, the smell of smoke and blood and sour ale.
“You did what?” The words were not a shout, but a low, disbelieving rasp. Her gaze searched her sister’s face, looking for the lie, finding only the terrifying truth. The fury drained from her expression, replaced by something colder, more profound. A dawning horror.
“Vhagar…” Rhaena’s voice broke on the name. The dragon was a ghost that haunted them both—the mount their mother loved, the beast stolen by the man who had become their enemy, the winged shadow that had taken Lucerys from the sky. “Is she…?”
“Blind,” Baela confirmed, the word a brutal finality. “Dying, maybe. I drove a dagger into her last eye. She was thrashing… burning everything…” The drunken triumph was gone, leaving only the hollow, sickening reality.
Rhaena’s grip tightened. Her eyes, wide and gleaming in the torchlight, held a storm of emotions—horror, yes, but beneath it, a flicker of something fierce and vengeful that mirrored the fire Baela had just escaped. It was the look of their father. It was the look of their house.
“Good,” she said. The word was a small, hard stone dropped into the silence between them.
Then, regaining her own footing, Rhaena gave Baela a sharp shake. “You fool. You glorious, reckless fool.”
Baela, unsteady and unmoored, only giggled, a wet, breathy sound that was halfway to a sob.
Rhaena’s hand came up again, but this time her touch was surprisingly gentle. She brushed a flake of dried mud and poultice from Baela’s blistered cheek. “Come,” she said, her voice firm. The grieving sister was gone; the practical princess was here. “You stink of a battlefield and a brewhouse. You need to be clean. You need to be sober.” She linked her arm through Baela’s, providing a steadiness the ale and adrenaline had stolen. “And then you will tell me everything. And we will decide what to tell the rest.”
Rhaena did not summon a maid. In the privacy of Baela’s chambers, she ordered the hot water herself, barking at the servants until a great copper tub was filled with steaming, herb-scented water. Baela sank into it, naked and tired to her bones, as her sister knelt beside it. Rhaena bathed her herself, using her own precious, fragrant oils—jasmine and sandalwood—to wash away the stink of dragon and death. And as the water grew murky, Baela told the story, her eyes closed against the sting of the steam and the weight of the memory.
Rhaena listened, her hands working methodically, scrubbing blood from under nails, soot from behind ears. And every time the tale took a turn that chilled her—the arrow in the eye, the climb up the thrashing leg, the leap into the burning grass—her fingers would tighten unconsciously in Baela’s wet hair, a sharp, wordless pull that said you are mad.
By the time Baela, scrubbed raw and swaddled in one of her own soft sleeping shifts, sank into the familiar embrace of her bed, the world had begun to wobble on a different axis. The ale had faded to a dull throb behind her eyes, leaving the stark, brilliant clarity of what she had done.
Maester Gerardys was summoned, his chain clinking softly as he bent to examine the angry burns on her face and hands in the candlelight. He tutted, mixing a fresh batch of the same foul-smelling green mud. As he began to apply the cool, pungent paste, the door to her chamber burst open.
Her father stood in the doorway. Daemon Targaryen filled the space, not with his size, but with a presence as sharp as Dark Sister. He took in the scene.
Baela looked up at him, and she grinned defiantly, cracking the drying poultice at the corner of her mouth.
Her father ate the distance between them in seven long strides. He did not pause at the bedside, but sank onto it and pulled her into a fierce, crushing hug, heedless of the Maester’s surprised noise or the fresh poultice.
“Ouch, kepa,” she yelped, a muffled laugh caught in her throat. “Gods, my face!”
He pulled back, holding her at arm’s length. On the fine black wool of his tunic was pressed a perfect, green, foul-smelling imprint of her face, from brow to chin. He glanced down at it, then back up at her, one eyebrow arched.
“Rhaenys,” he said, his voice a dry rumble, “is going to kill you.”
“Baela Targaryen!”
Her grandmother’s voice, sharp as a whip-crack, echoed down the stone corridor. It was followed by the quicker, trying-to-soothe tones of Rhaenyra, equally panicked but straining for calm. “She is here, we know she is here, let us just—”
“Where is that girl?” Rhaenys’s demand cut through the placating words.
The door, which Daemon had left ajar, was flung wide open. Joffrey, the little traitor, stood in the doorway, his eyes wide with the thrilling drama of it all. “She’s here! In Rhaena’s chamber!”
“You little shite,” Baela muttered.
Rhaenys stormed in, in her sleeping shift. Joffrey yelped and scrambled out of her path, pressing himself flat against the wall. She did not even glance at Daemon, or the green smear on his tunic. Her wrath had a single, fixed target.
“You,” she began, her voice low and terrible, each word a stone dropped into a still pool. “You reckless, foolhardy, suicidal girl.” She advanced on the bed, her gaze sweeping over Baela’s poulticed face, the exhaustion in her limbs, seeing not an injured child but the architect of a calamity. “Do you have any conception of what you have done? You think this is one of your games? This is not Blackhaven, you are not playing at war with Jacaerys! You almost died. I almost lost you to your own stupidity.”
“Better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” Baela mumbled, the old saw feeling childish and thin in the face of her grandmother’s wrath. Under that baleful glare, the title ‘Dauntless’ felt like a borrowed cloak, now snatched away. She looked down at her own lap, the fight leaching out of her.
Rhaenyra finally managed to enter, shutting the door firmly after ushering a wide-eyed Joffrey out. The Queen took in the scene, and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, gods.”
Baela looked up at her grandmother. The shame curdled, burned away by a sudden, stubborn heat. “You want me to regret it? No. I will not regret it. I regret that I have saddened you. I am not sorry for defending you. For defending our family.”
They stared at her, the silence heavy. And in that silence, the dam broke. The heat behind her eyes turned to a sudden, sharp pressure. A tear escaped, carving a clean line through the green muck on her cheek. She sniffed, the sound terribly loud in the quiet chamber.
“My mother’s dragon,” she whispered, the words cracking.
The thought cut through the haze of ale and exhaustion, sharp and clear as a shard of glass. She was not that sober yet, she realized, because the logic was only now arriving. Blinding Vhagar was a victory. A brutal, necessary strike. It should not feel like a crack in her own ribs. She was Baela Targaryen, daughter of the Rogue Prince, not some maudlin poet to weep over a beast of war, however ancient.
But the tears came anyway, hot and insistent, betraying her. They were not for the dragon, not truly. They were for the ghost in the saddle. They were for the stories she would never hear again, told in her mother’s voice, of the wind over the Narrow Sea as seen from a thousand feet in the air. She had not just blinded a monster. She had closed the last living eye that had seen Laena Velaryon smile.
Rhaenyra sank onto the other side of the bed. She reached for Baela’s hands, then paused, her own fingers hovering over the raw, angry burns on the hand that had driven the dagger home. Without a word, she gestured to Maester Gerardys. He handed her the pot of green mud, and Rhaenyra began to smear the pungent salve onto Baela’s blistered skin herself, her touch firm yet careful.
“You have given me something I could never repay,” her stepmother said, her voice soft as a whisper meant only for the two of them.
Baela, her face still wet, sniffed and managed a wobbly, pragmatic shrug. “Actually, you can start by paying for everyone’s drink at the tavern. Also, I promised a hundred gold dragons to each man who came with me, and fifty to the sailors who sneaked us out. One of the men died. The gold should go to his family.”
Rhaenyra’s hands stilled for a moment. “Consider it paid.” She glanced toward Daemon, who still watched from the foot of the bed, his expression inscrutable. “All of it.”
“Also,” Baela added, pressing her fleeting advantage with the doggedness of the truly exhausted, “I don’t want to be grounded.”
Her grandmother cut in, her voice like iron. “Absolutely not.”
“Nice try,” came Joffrey’s voice, muffled but clear, from the other side of the door where he undoubtedly had his ear pressed firmly against the wood.
“How long would you have her confined?”
Rhaenys did not hesitate. “Until her hair turns as silver as mine. Or until she gains the sense the gods gave a goat, whichever comes first.”
Rhaenyra nodded slowly, as if considering the sentence. Then she met Baela’s swollen eyes. “I shall commute the sentence. You will be confined to Dragonstone for one moon’s turn. No sailing. No flying, unless by my express command. You will attend every council of war, and you will listen, and you will learn and you will heal.” She met her grandmother’s fierce gaze, her own softening with apology and unyielding resolve. “I am sorry to pull rank in this… situation. But the commander of this… expedition… answers to the Crown. And the Crown,” she added, her fingers giving Baela’s salved hand a slight, meaningful squeeze, “has need of its Dauntless.”
Her grandmother sighed, a sound of weary surrender to the inexorable tides. Rhaenyra leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Baela’s forehead, uncaring of the green muck that smeared on her own lips. Then she rose, a queen again, and left her stepdaughter in the formidable care of Rhaenys.
Daemon followed his wife out, pausing only to snag Joffrey by the ear as he tried to scramble away from the door. “Eavesdropping is a vice for spiders and little boys who wish to lose their privileges,” Daemon said, his voice deceptively light as he pulled his stepson, wincing, down the corridor.
Joffrey’s complaint echoed back, tinged with genuine outrage. “Had it been me who snuck out, I’d never hear the end of it!”
The door swung shut, leaving Baela alone with her grandmother. The older woman stood by the bed, looking down at her, the anger banked but not extinguished, replaced by a profound, tired proudness.
“Well,” Rhaenys said finally, her voice quiet in the sudden quiet of the room. “Let us see what is to be done with you, Baela the Dauntless.”
Jace found her in the courtyard two days later, in the morning, where the crisp sea air did little to clear the lingering scent of smoke from the stones. He had half-walked, half-run from his mother’s chambers, having just flown in on Vermax. She had been sleeping when he arrived, but word had roused her—the Prince is here, and he is looking for you.
They met in the middle, near the gargoyle that had always been their secret meeting spot as children. Baela threw her arms around his neck without hesitation, uncaring of the poultice still smeared on her cheek or the way her raw hands protested the grip. He’d grown taller, broader in the shoulder, and handsomer, if such a thing were even possible. For a moment, he just held her, his own arms tight around her, his face buried in the crook of her neck. Then he pulled back, his hands on her shoulders, his dark eyes searching her face.
He took her all in, his expression a storm of worry, anger, and sheer, staggering relief. Then he crushed her back against him in another fierce hug, his voice a low, ragged mumble into her shoulder where he’d bent his head. “Have you lost your mind?!”
Baela laughed.. She pulled back just enough to grin up at him, the gesture tugging at her tender skin. “I owe Joffrey thirty dragons. He said those would be the first words you’d say to me.”
Jace huffed in disbelief, the sound half a laugh, half a groan. “This is not a laughing matter.”
“Do you know it was my plan? The one to defeat you at Blackhaven.”
“So I have heard. No one will shut up about it. Not even as I argued the sheer, suicidal impossibility of your stupid, witless plan.”
“A plan,” she countered, her grin unwavering, “that put Aemond One-Eye in his place. A plan that considered if it worked against that cunt, it would certainly work against you.”
“I would never leave Vermax unattended,” Jace shot back, his own stubbornness rising to meet hers. “And my guards know better.”
“I’ll wager that’s what Aemond thought. And look at him now: Aemond One-Eye, rider of Vhagar No-Eyes.”
Jace smiled in spite of himself, a quick, unwilling flash of teeth. “You know what? I will not even fight you on that.” His expression softened then, the worry and frustration melting into something warmer, more intimate. His face came closer to hers, slowly at first, giving her every chance to pull away.
She didn’t. She tilted her head up, meeting him halfway.
Their lips met, a gentle press that quickly deepened, a silent language of relief and reckless pride that needed no words. They kissed, oblivious to the gulls crying overhead, the distant clang of the smithy, and most pointedly, to Ser Broom’s scandalized sputtering from across the courtyard, undoubtedly, having an apoplexy at the unseemly display.
Only a sharp, stinging pain made Baela break the kiss with a soft moan. She pulled back, her fingers flying to her still-tender, burnt lips.
“Ow,” she whispered, though her eyes were still laughing.
Jace rested his forehead gently against hers, his own smile rueful. “A small price,” he murmured, “for the chaos you’ve wrought.” His thumb brushed her cheek, carefully avoiding the salved skin. “And for coming back alive.”
Lady Misery, the newly appointed mistress of whispers, told them that Vhagar was dead. Blind and mad with agony, had turned her wrath upon the very city she was meant to defend, smashing against the walls and gates until the stones wept dust. In the end, it was said, Otto Hightower himself gave the command to the City Watch. A rain of scorpion bolts had finally stilled the thrashing mountain. The report said the One-Eye had flown into a rage fit to match his dragon’s, and when the Usurper King Aegon had laughed at the spectacle—a high, hysterical sound—Aemond had slammed his brother to the floor before the entire court. It had taken three knights of the Kingsguard to pull him off.
“What do you think?” she asked, seated on the edge of the cliff, her legs dangling over the drop to the surging sea below. Jace sat beside her, his gaze fixed on the grey horizon where sky met water.
“Aegon has always been cruel,” Jace said, his voice flat. “It was hard to notice when we were young and not the target of his mockery. His favorite punchline has always been Aemond.” He was silent for a long moment, pensive. “They’re afraid. Both of them. They know what is coming now. And they hurt each other for it, because it’s the only pain they feel they can still control.”
She watched his profile, the setting sun casting his handsome face in bronze and shadow. She was so caught in the line of his jaw, the way the sea-wind ruffled his dark hair, that she almost missed his next words.
His voice was low, stripped of any triumph, holding only a weary certainty. “I would not be surprised,” he said, his eyes still on the horizon, “if they ended up killing one another.”
They did not, in fact, end up killing one another. Her first battle from dragonback was a chaos of smoke, screams, and searing light. She watched as Aegon tried to flee, only for Meleys to wash Sunfyre in a torrent of crimson flame. From the other side, Daemon and Caraxes fell like a blood-red wyrm, tearing a golden wing apart.
Jace’s voice crackled through the din, sharp with warning. “Baela, watch out!” Vermax banked hard, diving toward the walls.
She followed his gaze and spotted him. Aemond on the ramparts. He shoved a guardsman away from a massive scorpion, his movements frantic with purpose. He hooked a bolt the size of a man’s leg, muscles straining, and swung the weapon not toward the kings and the three dragons tearing his brother apart, but toward her.
Jace swept a line of dragonfire along the battlements as Aemond loosed. The bolt came hissing through the smoky air. Baela wrenched Moondancer into a desperate dive, the massive missile passing so close she felt the wind of it tear at her cloak. She was not quite fast enough. A sickening, wet thunk shuddered through her dragon, followed by Moondancer’s shriek of pain. The bolt had torn through the very end of her wing, shearing through the delicate trailing membranes.
Jace reached the wall then. Vermax’s fire swamped the section in green-gold flame, swallowing Aemond and his scorpion. Baela fought Moondancer’s lurching, unbAddamced dive, banking hard as the stones below glowed with heat. Through the smoke and shimmer, a figure stumbled forward—alive, breathing, his fine clothes half-burned away, his silver hair singed to the scalp, but a sword now gleaming in his grip.
Gritting her teeth against Moondancer’s pained shudders, Baela urged her lower. The dragon’s talons scraped stone as she landed awkwardly on the ravaged battlement, the damaged wing dragging. Her own blood sang with a fury colder and sharper than his. Aemond turned, his one eye finding hers, blazing with a hatred so pure it was almost holy.
“You bitch,” he spat, the words raw and venomous.
“One-eye.”
Then, from behind him, a giant of a man in the gold cloak of the City Watch moved with shocking speed. Ser Luthor, she recognized him in an instant. His face was grim as he brought the weighted pommel of his own sword down on the back of Aemond’s head with a sickening crunch.
The One-Eye’s sword clattered to the stones, and he collapsed like a sack of grain.
Sunfyre fell, a dying sun extinguished by the sea, and her father’s dragon tore its neck with a final, brutal twist. From the chaos below, Ser Luthor’s voice boomed, “Open the gates! For the Queen!”
But the order sowed fresh confusion. His own loyalists turned on the green-loyal City Watch, and on the ramparts it became hard to tell friend from foe in the bloody scrum. Baela busied herself with the more immediate task, gritting her teeth as she wrenched the heavy scorpion bolt from Moondancer’s torn wing. The dragon whimpered, a high, pained sound, and Baela smothered her snout with kisses and murmured Valyrian endearments. “Hush, my heart, my brave girl. It’s done.”
Jace landed Vermax beside her in a swirl of dust and displaced air. He did not climb down, leaning over from the saddle. “Is everything alright?”
“Aye, she’ll be fine,” Baela grunted, finally pulling the bloody bolt free and tossing it aside with a clatter. She nodded toward the slumped form a few yards away. “Look what we have here.”
Jace’s face turned stormy as he recognized his uncle. “Kinslayer. I saw him leap from the fire. I thought he’d run like a rat.”
“Well,” Baela said, wiping her hands on her trousers. “Here he is.”
Below, men from the Sea Snake’s fleet were pouring onto the shores, a tide of silver and blue. High above, Rhaenyra on Syrax circled the Red Keep. Jace looked from the advancing army to the unconscious Aemond, and a hard, decisive glint came into his eyes.
“Well,” he said, his voice cold. “We can’t leave the One-Eye behind, can we?” He nudged Vermax with his heel and gave a low command. The green dragon stretched out a foreleg, its talons closing with careless, formidable gentleness around Aemond’s torso, plucking him from the stones like a hawk taking a rabbit.
Baela snorted, darkly amused. She gave Moondancer’s neck a pat, then hauled herself back into the saddle, wincing at the fresh protest from her dragon’s injured wing. With a cry and a beat of strong, if lopsided, wings, she followed Jace and his limp, captive prize into the smoke-stained sky.
In the trampled garden where Syrax had settled like a great golden hill, Vermax opened his talons. Aemond Targaryen fell the last few feet to the churned earth, landing in a heap of singed velvet and limp limbs.
Alicent Hightower stood nearby, her arms bound tightly behind her back. At the sight of her son dumped like refuse, she let out a thin, piercing scream that seemed to shred the very air before crumbling into silent, trembling horror. Helaena, standing rigid beside her looked stricken.
Vermax landed beside his mother with a ground-shaking thud. A moment later, with a pained but defiant beat of her wings, Moondancer followed, touching down more awkwardly, her injured wing held at a careful angle. Baela slid from the saddle, her boots sinking into the soft soil of what had once been a pleasure garden. She stood beside her dragon, one hand resting on the warm scales of Moondancer’s neck.
The war was over.