The blood drained from the queen’s cheeks when she beheld the bodies, but young Prince Aegon was the first to realize what they meant. “Mother, flee,” he shouted, but too late.

Ser Alfred’s men fell upon the queen’s protectors. An axe split Ser Harrold Darke’s head before his sword could clear its scabbard, and Ser Adrian Redfort was stabbed through the back with a spear. Only Ser Loreth Lansdale moved quickly enough to strike a blow in the queen’s defense, cutting down the first two men who came at him before being slain himself. With him died the last of the Queensguard. When Prince Aegon snatched up Ser Harrold’s sword, Ser Alfred knocked the blade aside contemptuously.

The boy, the queen, and her ladies were marched at spearpoint through the gates of Dragonstone to the castle ward. There (as Mushroom put it so memorably many years later) they found themselves face-to-face with “a dead man and a dying dragon.”

Sunfyre’s scales still shone like beaten gold in the sunlight, but as he sprawled across the fused black Valyrian stone of the yard, it was plain to see he was a broken thing, he who had been the most magnificent dragon ever to fly the skies of Westeros. The wing all but torn from his body by Meleys jutted at an awkward angle, whilst fresh scars along his back still smoked and bled when he moved. Sunfyre was coiled in a ball when the queen and her party first beheld him. As he stirred and raised his head, huge wounds were visible along his neck, where another dragon had torn chunks from his flesh. On his belly were places where scabs had replaced scales, and where his right eye should have been was only an empty hole, crusted with black blood.

One must ask, as Rhaenyra surely did, how this had come to pass.

We now know much and more that the queen did not. For that we must be grateful to Grand Maester Munkun, for it was his True Telling, based in large part on the account of Grand Maester Orwyle, that revealed how Aegon II came to Dragonstone.

It was Lord Larys Strong the Clubfoot, who spirited the king and his children out of the city when the queen’s dragons first appeared in the skies above King’s Landing. So as not to pass through any of the city gates, where they might be seen and remembered, Lord Larys led them out through some secret passage of Maegor the Cruel, of which only he had knowledge.

It was Lord Larys who decreed the fugitives should part company as well, so that even if one were taken, the others might win free. Ser Rickard Thorne was commanded to deliver two-year-old Prince Maelor to Lord Hightower. Princess Jaehaera, a sweet and simple girl of six, was put in the charge of Ser Willis Fell, who swore to bring her safely to Storm’s End. Neither knew where the other was bound, so neither could betray the other if captured.

And only Larys himself knew that the king, stripped of his finery and clad in a salt-stained fisherman’s cloak, had been concealed amongst a load of codfish on a fishing skiff in the care of a bastard knight with kin on Dragonstone. Once she learned the king was gone, the Clubfoot reasoned, Rhaenyra was sure to send men hunting after him…but a boat leaves no trail upon the waves, and few hunters would ever think to look for Aegon on his sister’s own island, in the very shadow of her stronghold. All this Grand Maester Orwyle had from Lord Strong’s own lips, Munkun tells us.

And there Aegon might have remained, hidden yet harmless, dulling his pain with wine and hiding his burn scars beneath a heavy cloak, had Sunfyre not made his way to Dragonstone. We may ask what drew him back to the Dragonmont, for many have. Was the wounded dragon, with his half-healed broken wing, driven by some primal instinct to return to his birthplace, the smoking mountain where he had emerged from his egg? Or did he somehow sense the presence of King Aegon on the island, across long leagues and stormy seas, and fly there to rejoin his rider? Septon Eustace goes so far as to suggest that Sunfyre sensed Aegon’s desperate need. But who can presume to know the heart of a dragon?

After Lord Walys Mooton’s ill-fated attack drove him from the field of ash and bone outside Rook’s Rest, history loses sight of Sunfyre for more than half a year (certain tales told in the halls of the Crabbs and Brunes suggest the dragon might have taken refuge in the dark piney woods and caves of Crackclaw Point for some of that time). Though his torn wing had mended enough for him to fly, it had healed at an ugly angle, and it remained weak. Sunfyre could no longer soar, nor remain in the air for long, but must needs struggle to fly even short distances. The fool Mushroom, cruelly, says that whereas most dragons moved through the sky like eagles, Sunfyre had become no more than “a great golden fire-breathing chicken, hopping and fluttering from hill to hill.”

Yet this “fire-breathing chicken” crossed the waters of Blackwater Bay…for it was Sunfyre that the sailors on the Nessaria had seen attacking Grey Ghost. Ser Robert Quince had blamed the Cannibal…but Tom Tangletongue, a stammerer who heard more than he said, had plied the Volantenes with ale, making note of all the times they mentioned the attacker’s golden scales. The Cannibal, as he knew well, was black as coal. And so the Two Toms and their “cousins” (a half-truth, as only Ser Marston shared their blood, being the bastard son of Tom Tanglebeard’s sister by the knight who took her maidenhead) set sail in their small boat to seek out Grey Ghost’s killer.

The burned king and the maimed dragon each found new purpose in the other. From a hidden lair on the desolate eastern slopes of the Dragonmont, Aegon ventured forth each day at dawn, taking to the sky again for the first time since Rook’s Rest, whilst the Two Toms and their cousin Marston Waters returned to the other side of the island to seek out men willing to help them take the castle. Even on Dragonstone, long Queen Rhaenyra’s seat and stronghold, they found many who misliked the queen for reasons both good and ill. Some grieved for brothers, sons, and fathers slain during the Sowing or during the Battle of the Gullet, some hoped for plunder or advancement, whilst others believed a son must come before a daughter, giving Aegon the better claim.

The queen had taken her best men with her to King’s Landing. On its island, protected by the Sea Snake’s ships and its high Valyrian walls, Dragonstone seemed unassailable, so the garrison Her Grace left to defend it was small, made up largely of men judged to be of little other use: greybeards and green boys, the halt and slow and crippled, men recovering from wounds, men of doubtful loyalty, men suspected of cowardice. Over them Rhaenyra placed Ser Robert Quince, an able man grown old and fat.

Quince was a steadfast supporter of the queen, all agree, but some of the men under him were less leal, harboring certain resentments and grudges for old wrongs, real or imagined. Prominent amongst them was Ser Alfred Broome. Broome proved more than willing to betray his queen in return for a promise of lordship, lands, and gold should Aegon II regain the throne. His long service with the garrison allowed him to advise the king’s men on Dragonstone’s strengths and weaknesses, which guards could be bribed or won over, and which must needs be killed or imprisoned.

When it came, the fall of Dragonstone took less than an hour. Men traduced by Broome opened a postern gate during the hour of ghosts to allow Ser Marston Waters, Tom Tangletongue, and their men to slip into the castle unobserved. While one band seized the armory and another took Dragonstone’s leal guardsmen and master-at-arms into custody, Ser Marston surprised Grand Maester Gerardys in his rookery, so no word of the attack might escape by raven. Ser Alfred himself led the men who burst into the castellan’s chambers to surprise Ser Robert Quince. As Quince struggled to rise from his bed, Broome drove a spear into his huge pale belly. Mushroom, who knew both men well, says Ser Alfred misliked and resented Ser Robert. This may well be believed, for the thrust was delivered with such force that the spear went out Ser Robert’s back, through the featherbed and straw mattress, and into the floor beneath.

Only in one respect did the plan go awry. As Tom Tangletongue and his ruffians smashed down the door of Lady Baela’s bedchamber to take her prisoner, the girl slipped out her window, scrambling across rooftops and down walls until she reached the yard. The king’s men had taken care to send guards to secure the stable where the castle dragons had been kept, but Baela had grown up in Dragonstone, and knew ways in and out that they did not. By the time her pursuers caught up with her, she had already loosed Moondancer’s chains and strapped a saddle onto her.