Aegor "Bittersteel" Rivers — bastard half-brother to Daemon Blackfyre and the man who carried the fallen pretender's sword out of Redgrass Field — raised the company in 212 AC from the wreckage of the First Blackfyre Rebellion: sons and grandsons of the defeated, denied any home the Seven Kingdoms would still offer them. What began as an army of grudge-holders became, over the following decades, the most disciplined and best-paid free company in Essos, its war elephants and its refusal to abandon a contract, however poor the odds, both a matter of professional pride.
The company fought on through the Third and Fourth Blackfyre Rebellions and, a generation later, backed the Band of Nine's doomed war on the Seven Kingdoms — a defeat that cost it dearly and, by the chronicle's account, taught its captains the value of choosing paymasters rather than causes. Under captain-generals such as Myles "Blackheart" Toyne it settled into a long and profitable exile, the foremost of the sellsword companies without ever again risking a war of its own.
That restraint ended when the company broke its contract with Myr and boarded ships west — the first time in a century it has turned its elephants and its ten thousand spears toward Westeros. Homeless Harry Strickland holds the office of captain-general in name; this chronicle notes, with the caution the published record demands, that the venture's true architect is a man Westeros wrote off as dead or vanished a generation ago, riding at the side of a young claimant who names himself Aegon, sixth of his name — and said, by the same careful record, to be concealing an affliction of his own that he has told no one about.