Even less loved, if that be possible, was the man Her Grace chose as her lord treasurer and master of coin: her longtime supporter Bartimos Celtigar, Lord of Claw Isle. Lord Celtigar seemed well suited for the office: staunch and unwavering in his support of the queen, he was unrelenting, incorruptible, and ingenious, all agreed, and very wealthy in the bargain. Rhaenyra had dire need of such a man, for she found herself in desperate need of coin. Though the Crown had been flush with gold upon the passing of King Viserys, Aegon II had seized the treasury along with the crown, and his master of coin, Tyland Lannister, had shipped off three-quarters of the late king’s wealth “for safekeeping.” King Aegon had spent every penny of the portion kept in King’s Landing, leaving only empty vaults for his half-sister when she took the city. The rest of Viserys’s treasure had been entrusted to the Hightowers of Oldtown, the Lannisters of Casterly Rock, and the Iron Bank of Braavos, and was beyond the queen’s grasp.

Lord Celtigar set out at once to redress the problem; to do so, he restored the selfsame taxes that his ancestor Lord Edwell had once enacted during the regency of Jaehaerys I and piled on many a new levy besides. Taxes on wine and ale were doubled, port fees tripled. Every shopkeeper within the city walls was assessed a fee for the right to keep his doors open. Innkeeps were required to pay one silver stag for each bed in their inns. The entry and exit fees that the Lord of Air had once assessed were brought back and tripled. A tax on property was decreed; rich merchants in their manses or beggars in hovels, all must pay, depending on how much land they took up. “Not even whores are safe,” the smallfolk told each other. “The cunt tax will be next, and then the tail tax. The rats must pay their share.”

In truth the weight of Lord Celtigar’s exactions fell heaviest on merchants and traders. When the Velaryon fleet had closed the Gullet, a great many ships found themselves trapped at King’s Landing. The queen’s new master of coin now assessed heavy fees on all such before he would allow them to sail. Some captains protested that they had already paid the required duties, taxes, and tariffs, and even produced papers as proof, but Lord Celtigar dismissed their claims. “Paying coin to the usurper is proof of naught but treason,” he said. “It does not decrease the duties owed to our gracious queen.” Those who refused to pay, or lacked the means, had their ships and cargoes seized and sold.

Even executions became a source of coin. Henceforth, Celtigar decreed, traitors, rebels, and murderers would be beheaded within the Dragonpit, and their corpses fed to the queen’s dragons. All were welcome to bear witness to the fate that awaited evil men, but each must pay three pennies at the gates to be admitted.

Thus did Queen Rhaenyra replenish her coffers, at grievous cost. Neither Aegon nor his brother, Aemond, had ever been much loved by the people of the city, and many Kingslanders had welcomed the queen’s return…but love and hate are two faces of the same coin, as fresh heads began appearing daily upon the spikes above the city gates, accompanied by ever more exacting taxes, the coin turned. The girl that they once cheered as the Realm’s Delight had grown into a grasping and vindictive woman, men said, a queen as cruel as any king before her. One wit named Rhaenyra “King Maegor with teats,” and for a hundred years thereafter “Maegor’s Teats” was a common curse amongst Kingslanders.

With the city, castle, and throne in her possession, defended by no fewer than six dragons, Rhaenyra felt secure enough to send for her sons. A dozen ships set sail from Dragonstone, carrying the queen’s ladies, her “beloved fool” Mushroom, and her son Aegon the Younger. Rhaenyra made the boy her cupbearer, so he might never be far from her side. Another fleet set out from Gulltown with Prince Joffrey, the last of the queen’s three sons by Laenor Velaryon, together with his dragon Tyraxes. (Prince Daemon’s daughter Rhaena remained in the Vale as a ward of Lady Arryn, whilst her twin, the dragonrider Baela, divided her days between Driftmark and Dragonstone.) Her Grace began to make plans for a lavish celebration to mark Joffrey’s formal installation as Prince of Dragonstone and heir to the Iron Throne.

Even the White Worm came to court; the Lysene harlot Mysaria emerged from the shadows to take up residence in the Red Keep. Though never officially seated with the queen’s small council, the woman now known as Lady Misery became the mistress of whisperers in all but name, with eyes and ears in every brothel, alehouse, and pot shop in King’s Landing, and in the halls and bedchambers of the mighty as well. Though the years had thickened the body that had been so lithe and lissome, Prince Daemon remained in her thrall, and called upon her every evening…with Queen Rhaenyra’s apparent blessing. “Let Daemon slake his hungers where he will,” she is reported to have said, “and we shall do the same.” (Septon Eustace suggests somewhat waspishly that Her Grace’s own hungers were slaked largely with sweetmeats, cakes, and lamprey pie, as Rhaenyra grew ever more stout during her days in King’s Landing.)

In the fullness of her victory, Rhaenyra Targaryen did not suspect how few days remained to her. Yet every time she sat the Iron Throne, its cruel blades drew fresh blood from her hands and arms and legs, a sign that all could read. Septon Eustace claims the queen’s fall began at an inn called the Hogs Head in the town of Bitterbridge on the north bank of the Mander, near the foot of the old stone bridge that gave the town its name.

With Ormund Hightower besieging Longtable some thirty leagues to the southwest, Bitterbridge was crowded with men and women fleeing before his advancing host. The widowed Lady Caswell, whose lord husband had been beheaded by Aegon II at King’s Landing when he refused to renounce the queen, had closed her castle gates, turning away even anointed knights and lords when they came to her seeking refuge. South of the river the cookfires of the broken men could be seen through the trees by night, whilst the town sept sheltered hundreds of wounded. Every inn was full, even the Hogs Head, a dismal sty of a hostelry. So when a man appeared from the north with a staff in one hand and a small boy on his back, the innkeep had no room for him…until the traveler pulled a silver stag from his purse. Then the innkeep allowed that he and his son might bed down in his stables, provided he first mucked them out. The traveler agreed, setting aside his pack and cloak as he went to work with spade and rake amidst the horses.

The avarice of innkeeps, landlords, and their ilk is well-known. The proprietor of the Hogs Head, a scoundrel who went by the name Ben Buttercakes, wondered if there might be more silver stags where there had been one. As the traveler worked up a sweat, Buttercakes offered to slake his thirst with a tankard of ale. The man accepted and accompanied the innkeep into the Hogs Head’s common room, little suspecting that his host had instructed his stableboy, known to us only as Sly, to search his pack for silver. Sly found no coin within, but what he did find was far more precious…a heavy cloak of fine white wool bordered in snowy satin, wrapped about a dragon’s egg, pale green with sworls of silver. For the traveler’s “son” was Maelor Targaryen, the younger son of King Aegon II, and the traveler was Ser Rickard Thorne of the Kingsguard, his sworn shield and protector.

Ben Buttercakes got no joy from his deceit. When Sly burst into the common room with cloak and egg in hand, shouting of his discovery, the traveler threw the dregs of his tankard into the innkeep’s face, ripped his longsword from its sheath, and opened Buttercakes from neck to groin. A few of the other drinkers drew swords and daggers of their own, but none were knights, and Ser Rickard cut his way through them. Abandoning the stolen treasures, he scooped up his “son,” fled to the stables, stole a horse, and burst from the inn, hell-bent for the old stone bridge and the south side of the Mander. He had come so far, and surely knew that safety lay only thirty leagues farther on, where Lord Hightower sat encamped beneath the walls of Longtable.

Thirty leagues had as well been thirty thousand, alas, for the road across the Mander was closed, and Bitterbridge belonged to Queen Rhaenyra. A hue and cry went up. Other men took horse in pursuit of Rickard Thorne, shouting, “Murder, treason, murder.”

Hearing the shouts, the guards at the foot of the bridge bade Ser Rickard halt. Instead he tried to ride them down. When one man grasped his horse’s bridle, Thorne took his arm off at the shoulder and rode on. But there were guards on the south bank too, and they formed a wall against him. From both sides men closed in, red-faced and shouting, brandishing swords and axes and thrusting with long spears, as Thorne turned this way and that, wheeling his stolen mount in circles, seeking some way through their ranks. Prince Maelor clung to him, shrieking.

It was the crossbows that finally brought him down. One bolt took him in the arm, the next through the throat. Ser Rickard tumbled from the saddle and died upon the bridge, with blood bubbling from his lips and drowning his last words. To the end he clung to the boy he had sworn to defend, until a washerwoman called Willow Pound-Stone tore the weeping prince from his arms.