Robert’s Rebellion

Robert’s Rebellion — the War of the Usurper, if you asked the losing side — is the hinge on which the whole of the present age turns. Every reader of the chronicle who wonders why the realm stands as it does will find the answer here, in a handful of years when the dragon’s three-century dynasty fell in blood and fire and one final swing of a hammer.

1. Prelude: the Defiance of Duskendale

   King Aerys the Second began his reign glittering and generous, with Tywin Lannister for a Hand and a decade of plenty that men mistook for a golden age. The cracks showed first at Duskendale. Against his Hand’s counsel the king rode to that small town to settle a matter of taxes, and its lord, Denys Darklyn, seized him and held him captive within his own walls for the better part of a year.

   Tywin Lannister mustered to storm the town, king inside it or no — a coldness Aerys never forgave and never forgot. In the end it was Barristan Selmy, called the Bold, who went over the wall alone by night and brought the king out alive. But the man who came out was not the man who had gone in. House Darklyn was extinguished root and branch, and Aerys, who now saw a knife in every shadow, would not cut his hair or his nails again, and began the long slide from suspicion into madness that would cost his house its throne.

2. Prelude: the tourney at Harrenhal

   In the year of the false spring, the greatest tourney of the age gathered every name in the realm beneath Harrenhal’s melted towers. There Prince Rhaegar Targaryen unhorsed the finest lances in Westeros — and then, riding past his own wife, Princess Elia of Dorne, laid the crown of the victor, a wreath of blue winter roses, in the lap of Lyanna Stark of Winterfell, a girl betrothed to another man.

   A maester has recorded the fall of kingdoms with less consequence than that single wordless act. The same tourney saw Aerys, coaxed from the Red Keep by rumors of plots against him, name Jaime Lannister to his Kingsguard — a stroke aimed to spite Tywin by stealing away his heir. A mystery knight bearing a laughing weirwood shield rode, won, and vanished, and the king saw treason in the very laughter. Every thread of the war to come was already on that field. No one there could yet read the pattern, but the loom was strung.

3. The spark: a prince, a lady, and a pyre

   What passed between Rhaegar and Lyanna the chronicle cannot honestly say — abduction, the realm cried; something else, some have whispered since. What is certain is that Lyanna Stark vanished with the prince, and that her brother Brandon rode to King’s Landing in a fury, shouting for Rhaegar to come out and die. Aerys answered not with the prince but with fire.

   The king seized Brandon, and summoned his father Lord Rickard Stark to answer for him. Rickard demanded trial by combat, as was his right; Aerys named fire his champion and roasted the Lord of Winterfell alive in his own armor while his son Brandon strangled himself striving to reach a sword to save him. Then the king demanded two more heads — Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon, wards of Lord Jon Arryn of the Vale. The Eyrie’s answer was not obedience but banners. A realm that had murmured now marched.

4. The Battle of the Bells

   The rebellion’s first true crisis found Robert Baratheon wounded and hunted, hiding in the town of Stoney Sept while Jon Connington, the new Hand, tore the place apart house by house to find him. Connington had the war in his grasp; a captured Robert would likely have ended it before it truly began.

   But the townsfolk hid the outlaw lord, and when the alarm was raised it was raised by every bell in the sept, ringing the rebels’ approach. Robert lived; Connington, having fought with honor and burned nothing, was routed and driven into exile — for Aerys did not forgive failure any more gently than treason. Men would call it the Battle of the Bells, and Connington would say for the rest of his ruined life that he had lost the war in that town by declining to put it to the torch. The town remembers the bells, and not the king who lost by them.

5. The Trident: rubies in the river

   For most of the war Rhaegar was absent, gone south with Lyanna, while lesser men lost his father’s battles. At the last the prince came north with the crown’s great host, forty thousand strong, and met the rebels at a ford of the Trident where the fate of the dynasty would be decided in an afternoon.

   There Robert Baratheon and Rhaegar Targaryen found one another in the thick of the fighting, and Robert’s warhammer ended three hundred years of dragon kings. The prince died in the water, and the rubies of his breastplate scattered and sank in the current; men dive for them yet at the place they now call the Ruby Ford. Rhaegar died, the tale runs, with a woman’s name upon his lips — and the realm has argued ever since about the name. With the prince fell the last hope of the Targaryen cause. What remained was not war but reckoning.

6. The Sack of King’s Landing

   Tywin Lannister had sat out the whole war behind the walls of Casterly Rock, waiting to see which way the wind blew. When it blew to Robert, he brought his host to the gates of King’s Landing professing loyalty to the crown, and the trusting, half-mad king ordered the gates opened to him. The lions sacked the city.

   In the horror that followed, Ser Gregor Clegane murdered Princess Elia of Dorne and her two small children in the Red Keep — a crime Dorne has not forgiven to this day. And in the throne room Ser Jaime Lannister, sworn shield of the king, opened Aerys’s throat before the Mad King could give his last command. For Aerys had cached wildfire beneath the whole of King’s Landing, and meant to burn half a million of his own people rather than yield. Jaime saved the city and won for it the name Kingslayer and a lifetime of being judged for the wrong deed. Tywin presented the murdered children’s bodies to Robert wrapped in crimson cloaks, so that the blood would not show. It showed.

7. The Tower of Joy

   One matter remained unfinished, far to the south in the Red Mountains of Dorne. There Eddard Stark, riding to find his lost sister at war’s end, came upon a lonely tower held by three of the finest knights of the Kingsguard — Ser Gerold Hightower, Ser Oswell Whent, and Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning himself.

   Why the white knights stood guard at a nameless tower rather than beside their fallen king or the queen on Dragonstone, the chronicle cannot say, though the guessing has not wanted for enthusiasm. Ned came with six companions; when it was done, only he and Howland Reed of the crannogs still stood, and inside the tower Lyanna lay dying in a bed of blood. She made her brother a promise before she died — what promise, he has carried in silence all his life. Ned pulled the tower down for cairns and rode home with his sister’s bones and, men noted, a baseborn son he never explained.

8. The stag crowned; the dragons scattered

   Robert Baratheon took the Iron Throne by right of his warhammer and a grandmother’s Targaryen blood, and the realm, weary of fire, mostly agreed to call it right. He wed Cersei Lannister to bind the great western house to his cause, and kept Jon Arryn, who had raised him, as his Hand. On Dragonstone, in the worst storm of a hard year, Queen Rhaella died giving birth to a daughter, Daenerys, even as Robert’s fleet came on.

   Loyal men spirited the newborn girl and her brother Viserys across the narrow sea before the island fell — the last dragons of a fallen house, set to wandering Essos from one patron to the next, selling off the jewels of their mother’s crown. Robert kept the skulls of the old dragons in a cellar of the Red Keep, and his hatred of dragonspawn on open display, and called it peace. It was a peace of a kind, and it lasted the better part of fifteen years. But the debts of a rebellion are patient creditors, and every one of them, in time, came due.

The peace, and its price

Robert Baratheon won a throne he had never much wanted and spent the next fifteen years discovering he did not want it still. He kept the dragons’ skulls in a cellar and his hatred of the last two Targaryens on open display, while across the narrow sea a beggar prince and a storm-born girl wandered from patron to patron, selling their mother’s jewels. The realm called it peace, and for a while it was. But a rebellion is a loan against the future, and the debts of this one — the murdered Dornish princess, the exiled children, the mad king’s cache of wildfire still lying beneath the city — would all, in their season, come due.