The Dance of the Dragons

The Dance of the Dragons is the name the singers gave a war that had nothing of dancing in it. It was a succession dispute settled with fire, and its lesson is written across the whole of the century that followed: a family may quarrel and survive, but a family that fights its quarrels from the backs of dragons does not.

Greens and blacks

1. The seeds of the quarrel

   The Dance was thirty years in the sowing. When the Old King Jaehaerys outlived his sons, a Great Council was summoned to Harrenhal in the year 101, and the assembled lords chose Viserys — the male line — over Rhaenys and her son, by a margin the singers put at twenty to one. That verdict made a precedent: on the Iron Throne, males came before females. A generation later half the realm would find it convenient to forget the council had ever spoken.

   For King Viserys the First loved peace above all things, and resolved his quarrels by declining to resolve them. He named his daughter Rhaenyra his heir and had his lords swear to her; then he wed Alicent Hightower and got four more children, and never troubled to reconcile the one act with the other, because reconciling it would have spoiled the harmony of his court. The lords divided quietly into greens and blacks over the colors worn at a tourney, and everyone smiled, and everyone armed. Viserys died at last in his sleep, having kept the peace by refusing to look at the war he was leaving his children.

2. Two crowns in a fortnight

   The king’s body was scarcely cold before his council acted. They hid his death, crowned his son Aegon in secret haste before the smallfolk in the Dragonpit, and sent men with knives to the doors of any who might dissent. Ser Criston Cole set the Conqueror’s own crown on Aegon’s head and earned the name Kingmaker; the greens had their king before the blacks knew there was a throne to contest.

   On Dragonstone, Rhaenyra learned in a single hour that her father was dead, her birthright stolen, and her half-brother crowned. Heavy with grief and with child, she donned her father’s own slender band of gold and was proclaimed queen in answer. Now there were two monarchs, two crowns, and — the whole catastrophe in miniature — dragons enough for both. The lords chose sides; so did their dragons. A civil war between men is a grief. A civil war between dragonriders is an extinction, and the house was about to prove it upon itself.

3. Blood and Cheese

   The first great crime of the war was not a battle. When Rhaenyra’s son Lucerys was killed in the skies over Storm’s End, Prince Daemon answered not the killer but the killer’s house. Two hired men — a former gold cloak called Blood and a rat-catcher of the Red Keep called Cheese — went into the castle by the vermin’s runs and found Queen Helaena and her children in the dark.

   “A son for a son,” they told her, and made a mother choose which of her boys would die. They took the head of six-year-old Prince Jaehaerys while she watched, and Helaena, gentlest of all the greens, was never whole again after. A maester who has read the whole bloody ledger of the Dance will tell you that no battle in it did more damage than this one small murder in a bedchamber. After Blood and Cheese there could be no peace between the two courts — only victory, or graves, and in the end a great many of both.

4. Rook’s Rest and the dying of dragons

   At Rook’s Rest the war began spending the coin it could not replace. Rhaenys Targaryen — the Queen Who Never Was, passed over at the Great Council, wife to the Sea Snake — flew her old red dragon Meleys into a trap laid by Aegon and his brother Aemond, who waited with two dragons of their own. She might have fled; she had the sky and the speed for it. She turned Meleys into the fire instead and died as dragonlords once died, fighting.

   She did not die alone. Aegon the Second was burned so badly that he spent the better part of a year abed, and Sunfyre’s wing was ruined past mending. The blacks lost a queen and a dragon; the greens gained a maimed king and a crippled beast. This was the true arithmetic of the Dance, plain from Rook’s Rest onward: every clash in the sky killed something irreplaceable, and the Targaryens had only so many dragons to feed into the ledger before the account came due.

5. The Gullet

   While dragons dueled overhead, the war was also fought upon the water, and there it was bloodiest of all. Ninety warships of the Triarchy of the Free Cities fell upon the blacks’ sea lanes at the mouth of Blackwater Bay, and Rhaenyra’s eldest son and heir, Prince Jacaerys, came against them on his dragon Vermax.

   The prince and his dragon were both lost in the smoke above the waves — the heir to the black cause dead in an afternoon, and the Velaryon blockade held only by the narrowest margin. The histories name the Battle of the Gullet the bloodiest sea fight ever recorded in Westeros; the Gullet ran with wreckage and drowned men for weeks after. The singers made no songs of it, there being no one left afloat to pay for them, and no way to make a slaughter on the water sound like a triumph.

6. The fall of King’s Landing

   Rhaenyra took her father’s city without a battle and lost it to a sermon. The capital opened its gates to her, but her reign there was short and pinched by taxes, fear, and the slow poison of a city that had not chosen her. When Queen Helaena flung herself from Maegor’s Holdfast, a one-handed prophet the smallfolk called the Shepherd took the grief of the streets and gave it a target: the dragons were the sin, he preached, and the sin must be put down.

   So the mob stormed the Dragonpit. It cost thousands of lives and, worse for the house, five dragons — beasts butchered in their chains by men with spears and torches and a madness that no fire could answer fast enough. Rhaenyra fled the city her ancestor Aegon had raised on three muddy hills, hunted now in her own realm. The Iron Throne, men said afterward, had been cutting her hands from the first day she sat it. The realm had begun to learn a lesson the Targaryens never quite did: that a people may love dragons only so long, and then all at once decide they are done.

7. The turncloaks of Tumbleton

   Desperate for dragonriders after the losses in the sky, Rhaenyra had called for men of dragonseed blood — baseborn Targaryen bastards — to claim the riderless dragons of Dragonstone. Two answered: Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White, brutes of no name who found themselves suddenly astride monsters. At Tumbleton the black host met the green, and at the decisive hour the two dragonseeds turned their beasts upon the cause that had raised them, selling the battle for a better offer.

   The town was given a burning it never recovered from. There is a bleak justice in the coda: both betrayers were murdered soon after by their own new allies, there being, even in that year of horrors, some faint standards among cutthroats. Tumbleton smolders in every honest account of why the smallfolk of the realm came at last to curse both colors equally. When dragons dance, the histories say, the ground beneath them is the realm — and by Tumbleton the ground was ash from the Reach to the Blackwater.

8. The half-year queen

   Driven from her capital, Rhaenyra fled to Dragonstone, the seat of her childhood, only to find her half-brother there before her. Aegon the Second had crept back to the island with the ruined Sunfyre, and her own garrison, bought or broken, gave her up to him.

   He fed her to his dragon while her son watched. Aegon the Younger, a boy of ten, was made to stand and see his mother devoured by Sunfyre’s fire beneath the walls where she was born. The greens had their victory, and a maester notes without pleasure that it would keep about as long as her crown had — some half a year. Rhaenyra Targaryen had reigned scarcely six months over a realm that was mostly on fire, and died the death her house reserved, it seems, for its own.

9. Poison ends the Dance

   The victory did the victor no good. With the blacks’ armies converging on the capital and no dragons left worth the name to defend it, Aegon the Second’s own counsellors weighed surrender against a corpse and chose, as counsellors do, the practical thing. They poisoned his wine. He was four-and-twenty.

   The war died with him, and was settled the way such wars are: by a wedding. Rhaenyra’s surviving son was married to Aegon’s daughter and crowned Aegon the Third — a boy who had watched a dragon eat his mother, now king of a house that had spent nearly all its dragons upon itself. Some two-and-thirty had lived at the Dance’s beginning; a handful, sickly and dwindling, survived it, and within a generation the last of them would die in a cellar. The Targaryens kept the throne. They lost the thing that had made them more than a family with striking hair, and they never got it back.

What the Dance cost

The Targaryens kept the Iron Throne and lost the thing that had held it for them. Of the two-and-thirty dragons living when the Dance began, only a sickly handful survived it, and within a generation the last of them died small and stunted in a cellar of the Dragonpit. The realm that emerged was ruled by a boy who had watched a dragon eat his mother, advised by the lords who had poisoned the last king. The dragons would never truly come again — and a house that had ruled by wonder was left to rule, like any other, by men and marriages and debt.